American Studies on the World Wide Web

The quantity of information of various kinds available on the World Wide Web is increasing at a rapid rate as more and more material is converted into digital format and made accessible through web browsers. Anyone who spends an hour or two looking through these resources will discover that there are vast amounts of information on the WWW: so much, indeed, that most students will discover within it some useful sources.

For students of American Studies, the WWW offers opportunities to locate documents, photographs, scholarly papers, discussions, bibliographies and other resources. In some cases, particularly where more contemporary topics are concerned, web sites can compensate to some degree for limitations in the quantity or availability of published sources. Many newspapers, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, now publish electronic editions. Anyone interested in current affairs will find plenty of up-to-date information on the web.

It should be emphasized, however, that users will also find a good deal of up-to-date (and obsolete) disinformation (not to mention non-information) on the web. This should come as no surprise. For one thing, while the academic world occupies a considerable part of the WWW, the latter also contains a great deal of non-scholarly material. Those putting data onto the web range from governmental and non-governmental agencies to political parties and single-issue groups, from lobbyists to professional organizations, from businesses to private (though self-publicizing) individuals. Even sites with academic claims can be aimed at audiences other than those in the educational field.

In addition, the sort of filtering procedures that control the output and distribution of material in conventional book and journal publishing do not apply in quite the same way on the web. This means that scholarly, informed, objective, reliable, well-documented and professionally-presented materials share webspace with partisan, impassioned, unreliable, poorly-documented - and yet still professionally-presented - materials. A good deal of the material on the web is designed for exhortation rather than illumination; to elicit support or justify belief more than to aid critical thought.

Regardless of its quality (and there is a lot of very useful material available), the sheer quantity and variety of the material on the web makes for another problem: the number of web sites, home pages, links and browser tools can turn the search for information into a very time-consuming exercise. It is quite possible, for example, to find oneself moving from unrewarding site to promising signpost to unrewarding site, often going round in never-decreasing cyberspatial circles. For the moment, at least, there appear to be fewer substantive destinations on the web than ways to get (or to help you get) to them. In order to minimize wasted websurfing, ASCA's web site provides links to useful places to begin.

For further information about all aspects of the World Wide Web - from searching and publishing on it to the legal status of web documents - consult the World Wide Web Frequently Asked Questions.

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Accessing the World Wide Web

Netscape is the most common means of gaining access to the World Wide Web. While Netscape's default home page is in English, it can also be accessed in Danish.

Once you have Netscape, then the following Danish language web services/search engines Opasia and Jubii are both good places to start accessing the web.

The University of Aarhus's own Department of Information and Media Science has produced a useful Danish language guide to using the web.

There are a number of general English language search engines (such as MetaCrawler, Yahoo, and Alta Vista, for example) which enable users to use key words to locate potential sources of information. These search engines include guidelines as to how to make most effective use of them, in particular how to narrow down one's search in order to maximize the proportion of useful sites identified during any search. A couple of good links which give access to over a dozen different search engines are Starting Point and Netscape's Search home page.

From these links you can carry out general searches for keywords and then access sites through many different search engines.

You can use these links on the Netscape browser to search out additional information. The information available varies widely. There may be bibliographies of additional texts, speeches, photographs or other primary documents, basic historical data, chronologies, or academic, journalistic and partisan papers. Many of the sites listed will contain links to other related sites, which means you can use the links as points of entry to any number of sites.

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