Methodology

The Methodology of American Yawp is quite hard to identify. the purpose of a methodology page is to share the methods and the tools use to get information when putting together the DH textbook.

 As far as assembling the textbooks, the main editor Joseph Locke began the process of acquiring a single or a team of editors who are already in the profession of a history major. They began to merge the traditional way of making a textbook into their own styles. The only difference that was used in this textbook was the editors of various narratives and innovative subfields added to the selected theme. For the first 30 chapters, they had contributors. They did things such as “ 50 words on the election of 1860” and “ 300 words on the music and art of the Civil War“. This worked as an attention grabber to expand their pool of contributors.

After the written chapters, the editors had to network with scholars to fat check the history books. Joseph himself said,” we targeted scholars to write on these things….we ended up with over 300 historians writing for the project“. This digital humanities textbook received lots of contributions and all the assembling was done online. Though the editors don’t explicitly have a methodology page featured, they do have a comment press. This allows anyone to comment on any given chapters of history. The comments will then go to a team of editors. One could argue that this is a method in itself and many will argue against. Though the question still remains, the answers depends on the audience’s views.

Cited quote from Inside Higher Ed, Free American History by Scott McLemee

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