Part 2 - Documenting the South Archive

The Documenting the South Archive (DSA) is an attempt to document 'Southern perspectives on American history and culture'¹.  The Archive offers six major areas of specialty.  In this sense it is more broad than the University of Southern Mississippi Civil Rights Archive (USMCRA), which attempts to cover a particular moment in time with three main methods of presentation.  The Documenting the South Archive tries to focus on six key areas of Southern American history and presents them as an archive of sources on those six main areas.

How does the Archive attempt to enhance access to primary source material and how successful is it?

The DSA Archive is similar to the USMCRA in that it is primarily a digital transferral of traditional paper documents onto the internet.  This is particularly striking when entire travel diaries are placed on the internet with not a single link in the text.  The transferral from paper into electronic format is nowhere more apparent, and there has been no consideration of how hypertext could enhance the way the documents are presented.  The scanned images of various parts of the actual book, including the spine, the front cover, and the title page do not particularly enhance the researching of the history or the literature of the time, nor does this reproduction exploit the electronic medium either.  By producing full electronic text versions of various pieces of historical sources, the Documenting the South website does provide avenues for professional literary scholars and historians to carefully sift sources without having to travel to the University of North Carolina to read the sources.

However, in terms of contextualising the sources, four of the six key areas has an introductory essay written by a University of North Carolina academic.  These form the contextualising basis and preliminary background required in order to study the sources critically.  For instance, Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp writes an introductory essay on the church and the Southern Black community which gives a broad narrative of the history of the African-American church.  The essay, however, does not have any external links of its own and hence is still very much compartmentalized within the site itself.  However, as a context for the sources, it does a fine job and enhances the primary sources.  Indeed the essay is enhanced by the presentation of visual sources on the right hand side of the page next to the paragraph containing a reference to the source.  For example, in the essay, one paragraph mentions the role of Daniel Payne, while providing a picture right next to the text.  Clicking on the picture (which is a hypertextual link) allows one to see the original photo digitally transferred and scanned onto the internet but clicking on the picture takes one away from the context in which the photo might have been.  The Archive, therefore, attempts to use the ability of hypertext to highlight and contextualise various sources, but the Archive fails to provide a fully integrated website.  Clicking on the photo of Daniel Payne sends one to the page frontispiece of the book that Payne wrote, but this is all it provides.  Once clicked, the link of Daniel Payne does not allow us to return to the introductory essay from whence some may have come; this is a weakness of the website that has not been addressed.  It is difficult for amateur historians who may just be clicking through the website for information on a relatively broad scale to return to the essay that they might have been reading just as access to the sources has been made easier for these non-academic historians.

The essay that is written by Maffly-Kipp on the church and the Southern Black community, due to the lack of hypertextual links within the actual text, does not give the reader much opportunity to construct a meaning.  The meaning that one can derive is marked out by the author already.  As a purely contextual essay, this is probably a good thing, however, the noticeable lack of hypertext within the essay that links with sources or historical opinions outside the website means that the Archive remains very much an Archive and not a chance to present a historical meaning through a secondary source, that is, an essay, but rather the emphasis is on the researcher deriving a meaning from the sources themselves, which have been placed on the internet in a digitally enhanced "slab" with slight guidance from an academic authority.The Archive is, therefore, an attempt to exploit hypertext both in an archival sense and as a contextualising site for the primary sources located on the site.
 

^{1 Documenting the South Archive, published by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, viewed 16 June 2002.}
 
 
 
 

 Introduction - An overview of what is to be done in this analysis
Part 1 - An analysis of the University of Southern Mississippi Civil Rights Archive
Part 3 - How do the archives as a whole represent new ways of researching and presenting history?
Part 4- Conclusion