How Horus Selected Sites: Bricolage (from the Horus web site)

Horus' purpose in collecting these sites is to introduce the diversity of educational and research resources available on the web not ordinarily consulted by historians and history students. Such sites include antique and decorator catalogues, real estate ads for historical properties, post cards, genealogy resources, local historical societies, museums outside the U.S., travel agency and tourism information, and nonprofessional and avocational historical organizations.

Horus' purpose supplements, but does not displace, disciplinary historical research. Disciplinary historians direct research by specific hypotheses toward identified resources. The World Wide Web component of the Internet is - at least at the moment - not organized compatibly with historians' disciplinary requirements. The Web is created from the bottom up by tens of thousands of netizens all over the world listing whatever historical resources they prize. These sites often do not have the documentation or informational detail and do not conform to the style preferred by the historical profession.

The hypertext protocol decentralizes the Web conceived as a connected database, because it permits netizens' linking of sites by free association. This style of organization (some would say disorganization) is ideal for exploration through browsing, even as it is ill-suited for hypothesis testing. As a milieu for discovery, the Web is more like an attic in a very old house than an SPSS database in a computer lab. Horus believes the Web perfectly fits the purposes of general historical education - the kind of education given to secondary and college students and offered through continuing education courses.

Trying to teach the general student about a historical event, such as the Paris commune of 1871, the teacher tells the student, "Go take a look at some photographs about the commune. What do they tell us about it? " Browsing enchained links may lead the student to letters, brief biographies of politicians, statues of heros in provincial towns, photos of old houses for sale, postcards from British tourists to relatives, department of health statistics on cholera, genealogical snippets of French immigrants to America, and family photos of heirloom silver. None of this information would probably test any professional hypothesis about the cause and course of the Paris Commune, but it will teach the student a great deal about the event, about its rippling effects through history, and its memorialization in everyday artifacts that help shape the way people view the past. In other words, the World Wide Web is one of the most wonderful teaching resources ever invented.

Horus suggests that teachers might approach the Web as an instructional resource with a new set of metaphors. Researchers tend to look for "pathways" (or better - paved highways) through the forest of historical resources. Educators will look for "gateways" to explore the forest. Teachers will utilize the Web as a setting for a "conversation" about history. (See how Horus sets up conversations with Web conference boards.) Unlike discussions conducted through email lists, Web conversations have, through hypertext links, a world's wealth of reference information to draw upon.