The Camelot Project
URL: http://rodent.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cphome.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Bremser
Dedicated to Arthurian culture (King Arthur and his crew to those in the know), this site is a growing repository of mostly text and images about the subject. It¹s pretty vast right now but could stand a little aesthetic improvement. This site shares a problem that many text repositories have ‹ the dreaded gray background. The images are nifty enough, many over 150 years old, so go here to get free clip art for any Arthurian projects you might have.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

Everything Postmodern
URL: http://helios.augustana.edu/~gmb/postmodern/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
Guzzle that fifth cappuccino, grab another pack of Gitanes and dive into this amazingly comprehensive resource of all things PoMo. The trendiest of French Intellectuals are represented here ‹ Baudrillard, Foucault, etc. ‹ with plenty of links to keep even the most critical critical theorist occupied for years. (There is *plenty* of postmodern verbiage being spewed throughout the net--on Web sites, FAQs, zines, academic journals, and the requisite alt.postmodern newsgroup.) Be ready for some serious deconstructions when launching off from this Web construction. Bring yer hard hat!
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

Alexander Palace Time Machine
URL: http://www.travelogix.com/emp/batchison/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: Yes
Author: Shel Kimen
In the fashion that follows all royal history from Czars to kings, Alexander¹s palace is a fine example of soap opera a la hypertext with valuable historical insight. The site was originally constructed as a monument to the palace that Catherine the Great commissioned for her grandson Alexander Pavlovich in the late 1700¹s. But in the process of explaining all the rooms with maps and photographs, and digital images of the treasures that lied within the stucco and brick masterpiece, comes an outstanding historical tour through the lives of Russian Royalty from 1800 to the Second World War. The site creator, Bob Atchison says he became obsessed with the palace when he read about Anastasia in the second grade. The site, miles thick in every direction, is concrete proof of this obsession. Visitors will find themselves transported through the lives of everyone who dwelled in the palace ‹ servants and royalty, guests and war commanders. He is almost obnoxiously descriptive as he tells us about ³golden strands² in Rasputin¹s beard and Anastasia¹s ³blue eyes, light brown hair and a fine thin nose like her mother's.² At times there is an overall kitchiness feel, like that of an online role playing game; ³Do you want to go inside the palace?² or ³If you look up to the right you¹ll see a frame laced in gold.² But it seems to work well here in creating a mood and has a general effectiveness which is compelling enough to keep visitors ³in the palace² clicking and learning away. While the site is not without fault ‹ numerous typos, a few poor HTML editing skills and even a some grammar errors that make some of the reading a bit choppy ‹ given the breadth of content covered (in a well organized fashion I might add!) it¹s very well done. It is certainly one of the most sincerest of HTML efforts I¹ve seen from a part time page creator. As a matter of fact, this project is Mr. Atchison¹s first HTML creation, and he¹s managed to make fine use of Tables and images; it¹s readable and has several well constructed out pages. Russian history buffs should definitely take note of this one.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

Welcome to Critical Mass
URL: http://fas.sfu.ca/comm/c-mass/c-mass.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
Critical Mass calls itself a ³Webzine of communications issues,² and it delivers. The communications issue it focuses on is the Internet, so if you want help talking to your children, this isn¹t really the place to go. It¹s published monthly during the academic year, and the issues seem to be generally theme-based. For example, issue two of volume two dealt with government on the Internet. It should be noted that this is a Canadian publication and has that great, white north slant.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

Manchester Institute for Popular Culture Website
URL: http://darion.mmu.ac.uk/h&ss/mipc/index.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
Manchester could very well be the prototype for twenty-first century urban life. It exemplifies the regeneration of a derelict industrial city for post-industrial urban use. In the 1980s, British youth found its deserted warehouses the perfect places to host raves. While it¹s easy enough to dismiss raves as ³all-night dance parties,² the fact that the phrase ³rave community² exists suggests that there was some minor social revolution going on. What better location for a think tank devoted to the study of popular culture? So, the existence of the Manchester Institute of Popular Culture (MIPC), based at the Manchester Metropolitan University, is no surprise. And, with the entry of the Web into the lexicon of popular culture, the MIPC would just have to have a Web site to have any kind of credibility as an authority on popular culture. According to Dan Hill, a research graduate at the MIPC, the medium of the Web amplifies the positive aspects of popular culture. Mr. Hill says the Web allows ³artists to distribute their work via the net, bypassing the cultural industry infrastructure and the power structures of the art world.² The technocracy of the Internet is a lot easier to negotiate with than the art buyers, gallery owners, and critics of the art world. One agenda of the MIPC, and of many cultural theorists worldwide, is the promotion of democracy. This does not refer to the political structure, but to the notion of every member of society having a voice. So, MIPC is working to ensure "that the new digital popular culture is not limited to the privileged minority who currently have access.² But the MIPC Web site is not just a forum for studying culture; it's a part of that culture. The funky design of the logo is more suggestive of modern graphic design than the title of a stodgy academic paper. One purpose of the site is to disseminate information on conferences sponsored by the MIPC. A recent one was titled ³Fanatics! Football and Popular Culture in Europe,² which is scheduled to coincide with the 1996 European Football Championship. A further example of the eroding delineation between critical studies and subject matter.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

I-Channel Ellis Island
URL: http://www.i-channel.com/ellis/index.shtml
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Shel Kimen
Ellis Island: the gateway to America¹s gold-paved streets of opportunity. Ack. Ack. Now all those discombobulated immigrants have some online evidence to show for their tedious waits in line, sometimes 10,000 hungry, sea-sick people thick. The Ellis Island pages in fact offer a very informative and interesting perspective of arrivals to the ³New World.² There are plenty of pictures, historical accounts and general facts to pique interest and awareness, and it¹s all organized fairly well.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

Diotima Women & Gender in the Ancient World
URL: http://www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/Classics/gender.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Shel Kimen
Complete with essays, bibliographies, and miles of links and images, this is an extraordinary collection of resources that should educate the Internet community about women in ancient times. There is as much local content as off-site pointers, so Diotima serves as both a source and database. Layout is well-executed, especially considering the amazing amount of content. From Semonides to Sappho, there¹s a lot of info here.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

Life on the Prairie
URL: http://www.gps.com/life/life.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
"Well, I was 21 and had no prospects of doing anything. The land was there so I took it." That's how Nora Pfundheller-King-Lenartz, pictured standing neck-deep in a field of wheat, explained her decision to homestead on the North Dakota frontier. Life on the Prairie celebrates pioneers like Nora and Eva Popp, who could "shoot the head off a rattlesnake at 100 feet." All beautifully presented in photo essays and book excerpts, a hard-scrabble existence never looked so good.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

ArchNet
URL: http://www.lib.uconn.edu/ArchNet/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: Yes
Author: Patrick Joseph
A branch of the vast WWW Virtual Library project, ArchNet is a simple, elegant resource page for archaeologists, housed at the University of Connecticut. An exceptionally well-presented page, the content is accessible in a number of formats: in text only, with Frames, or in any of several European languages. Similarly, the material can be viewed by topic, geographical region, or in the table of contents. All this makes for a degree of customization rare to the Web, and for researchers, students, and casual visitors alike, the experience is sure to be enhanced. Like any good library, ArchNet has resources for everyone, from the curious child, to the student interested in a career in archaeology, to the professional archaeologist. ArchNet has a software archive for researchers; programs available include statistical applications, mapping software, even a program for analyzing arrowheads. Educators will find excellent links to course materials from the University of Connecticut, plus online tutorials, and information on college archaeology programs. The less focused visitor will doubtless find plenty of mind broadening diversions here, as well. While, visually, the ArchNet interface may not be anything to brag about, the site is still better than most of its counterparts in the humanities and reference categories. It transcends the default gray, at least, and boasts an icon-driven table of contents. But the real measure of the designs success is its functionality. There¹s a wealth of information here, to be sure, and navigating in Frames makes it very manageable, more like the ³real² library experience, i.e., as if everything were really under one roof. The ArchNet database can be easily searched with *Excite!* Search results are may be grouped by confidence or subject and are assigned values accordingly. Like most resources on the Web, this project is growing daily; as such, regular visitors will want to check in with the News and Information Systems segment periodically. New sites are listed there as well as news about the project. By policy the site does not include links to commercial endeavors, and all sites are reviewed for the quality of their content. All told, this is a commendable effort on the Web and simply should not be missed.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

The Museum of the City of San Francisco
URL: http://www.sfmuseum.org/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Patrick Joseph
Even if you¹ve never stepped foot in California, I guarantee you¹ll find something worthwhile in these pages devoted to the City of Saint Francis. I, for one, spent far too long in the section called The Chronology of San Francisco Rock, following links from there to all corners of the Web. But that¹s just one small part of this impressive electronic exhibit. The site features both original materials (from the museum staff and archives) as well as links to resources all over the Web. The contents are organized by date or subject, covering a broad spectrum of the city¹s illustrious past. So whether you¹re just out for some idle surfing or some Bay Area history, this one comes highly recommended.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

American Museum of Natural History
URL: http://www.amnh.org/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: Yes
Author: Patrick Joseph
A tour of this site is an educational experience from the splash page onward, especially if you are as dim as I am. There¹s no use in denying it anymore; I scored just under fifty percent on the Sci-Q Quiz in the Museum¹s Education segment. I¹d like to claim that the questions were all tricks and that I¹d been duped, but what good would it do me? Time to face facts: when it comes to the sciences, I¹m just plain ignorant. As such, this resource did me a world of good, packed as it is with fascinating information, all beautifully presented. At the home page be sure to move your mouse along the row of colorful icons in the heading. You¹ll get concise definitions of the various disciplines which the icons represent and which fall under the Museum¹s purview. It¹s a quick, graceful way to get a sense for the breadth of the subject before venturing further. For the accursed Sci-Q Quiz click on Education. As of this writing, it¹s the only feature in the section, but they promise to include more ³activities and resources for children, teachers, and parents² soon. Under Research, the curious will find information about the Museum¹s various projects, facilities, and expeditions, featuring an intriguing aside on paleontologists at work in the Gobi desert. The About the Museum bit is primarily for New Yorkers or lucky folks planning a visit to the actual Museum, located in Central Park West. Transportation information, schedules, and a searchable exhibition calendar are all available. Which brings us to the heart and soul of any museum: the exhibits. The pages devoted to amber in the exhibition, *Amber: A Window to the Past*, are riveting. Amber is a tree resin renowned for its use in making jewelry and other cultural artifacts, which is important to scientists as an astonishing natural preservative of small organisms such as insects. Of course, you can¹t mention the Museum of Natural History without also mentioning dinosaurs. You¹ll find them here in *Fossil Halls*, an exhibit which traces the development and family relationships of vertebrates. Frames-capable browsers will yield a clickable, expanding hierarchy here which leads visitors through an excellent, if rather involved, tutorial on everything from dinosaur mandibles to prehensile forefeet; you could spend hours here alone. In fact, the list of interesting features just goes on and on from sidebars like, ³Personalities in Paleontology,² to mainstays like ³Treasures from 125 Years of Discovery,² where you can browse some of the more notable fixtures from the permanent collection. Be on the lookout for interactive elements in any and all of the displays, like the timeline that spans the rings of an ancient sequoia trunk. It¹s an entertaining diversion, which will doubtless help increase your knowledge. Come to think of it, you should probably look around a while, *then* take the quiz. But, of course, that won¹t leave you with any excuses.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

Letters from an Iowa Soldier in the Civil War
URL: http://www.ucsc.edu/civil-war-letters/home.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1296
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Daniel Alarcon
One Civil War soldier, who wanted nothing more than to return home and marry his hometown sweetheart, tells us his story at this fantastic site. This site is a piece of American history, a look into our deadliest war from the perspective of an average participant. Each letter is dated and footnoted with pertinent hot links to maps, names, and photos, making tasteful use of the medium without obscuring the significance of the written word. The vernacular of the era is fascinating in and of itself, but combined with the unraveling story of one soldier's experience through our nation's darkest hour, the letters make for great reading. This site is a gem. Don¹t miss it.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 18

SPEED
URL: http://www.arts.ucsb.edu:80/~speed/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
SPEED is an online ¹zine which, in its own words, ³Šprovides a forum for the critical investigation of technology, media, and society.² That¹s a tall order, but SPEED seems to be up to it. The young publication combines the critical writing of an academic journal with the hit-and-run graphic style of Wired, giving both immediate appeal to the eye and delayed gratification for the brain. As of February, they only had two issues up, so stay tuned. But how long can they keep this up? Better visit now before everyone there gets burned out.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Media History Project
URL: http://spot.colorado.edu/~rossk/history/histhome.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Marshall McLuhan alerted Americans to the intricacies of the media, and watching the watchmen has since become a popular sport. The Media History Project is a great place to learn the basic histories of the telephone, T.V., music, comics, and other methods humans have developed to get the word out. Colorful icons and sharp writing egg you on to further discovery, but some links are sadly broken, and the multicolored text is hard to read on some monitors. Teachers will wet themselves over the included syllabi, anal retentives will dig the site¹s organization, and all will be edified.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Black Panther Coloring Book
URL: http://www.cybergate.com:80/~jonco/bpcb.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Bremser
Despite what some say, there are a few good Web sites that take print content and just scan it in, simple and clean. No typing. No code. This coloring book from the Black Panthers is one such example, offering an activity and good insight into the philosophy of the group. A Frames version of the site makes it easy to navigate through the site, and you could always download the images if you feel like coloring...
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Labyrinth
URL: http://www.georgetown.edu:80/labyrinth/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
Georgetown coughs up some deep history with this one, specifically notes from the Medieval annals. This is a well-designed guide to electronic Medieval studies resources from around the globe. Follow the links to Medieval art exhibits, academic journals, and raw texts available online for study. There¹s even a magical thread to help you find your way back from the depths of the Labyrinth. Heaven for a Medieval Studies scholar, or a Dungeons and Dragons geek.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

The Birdhouse
URL: http://www.birdhouse.org/users/shacker/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
The Birdhouse is a loose collective of Dadaists, Surrealists, Situationists, and almost any other kind of avant-garde ³ist² you can think of. A virtual literary/art magazine of sorts, the Birdhouse is a collaborative gallery of fringe art, text and meldings of all media presented in the spirit of Duchamp, Dali and Breton. Expose the world to the twisted musings of your subconscious via the Conspiracy of Sleepers Deus Ex Machina Dream Input Device. Fragment your linear lives with cut-ups and collage. Surreal splendor through Java, Frames, and freaks! What an insanely beautiful combination.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

The Ancient World Web
URL: http://atlantic.evsc.virginia.edu/julia/AncientWorld.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
There¹s no reason academic studies have to be dry and daunting. If you have a good guide, the world opens up to you. In this case, the world in question is the ancient one, and your guide is Julia Hayden, a masters¹ student at the University of Virginia. She knows her stuff: Every entry is sorted, classified, and annotated, and weekly (ha!) updates keep the place fresh. The home page includes archaeology news of interest, though some ³news² is outdated. No matter: The quantity of links and the commentary makes this a must-see stop for Ancient World tourists.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Perseus Project
URL: http://medusa.perseus.tufts.edu/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Many of us know about the Gutenberg Project, which mostly focuses on putting seminal Western texts of the last 200 years into electronic form. The Perseus Project is similar, but with a more esoteric bent: it¹s interested in the texts and images of archaic and classical Greece. Managed by a Tufts University professor, the site has heavy-duty corporate support and it shows: Its depth of study is amazing, and it¹s tied together with various search engines. The entire site is also being released as a four-CD set (!) by Yale University Press next year. That¹s a lot of stuff!
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

The Metaphysics Research Lab Home Page
URL: http://mally.stanford.edu/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
The name alone evokes so much, it¹s either a complete parody or a lair of serious strangeness. The ³stanford.edu² in the address indicates the latter, but it turns out not to be all that strange. This site exists to promote a paper called ³Principia Metaphysica,² which is based on the ideas of an Austrian philosopher named Ernst Mally. The gist of it is defining abstract objects as encoding properties, as distinct from concrete objects displaying properties. Had enough? If not, head for the address above.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Objectivism - The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
URL: http://www.rpi.edu/~pier1/phil/objectivism.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
This site is a perfect example of an informational forum for an active philosophy. While references to and homage for Ayn Rand permeate the site, the focus is on the philosophy of Objectivism she defined. Not sure what Objectivism is, or if it¹s right for you? Read the FAQ located on this site. Linked resources include a newsgroup for the active discussion and debate of Objectivism. Curiously, the creator of the page has divided it into ³good² and ³evil² sections (other philosophies come under ³evil²), which suggests a reading of Nietschze is in order.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Cultronix
URL: http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/cultronix/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Shel Kimen
While this could just as easily fit into the media category, as it features articles, graphics, audio and video clips (as any high ranking e-zine might ), its focus is almost exclusively within the lofty realm of humanities: philosophy, arts, and, of course, culture studies. With multi-syllable paper titles ‹ ³Wallowing in the Quagmire of Language² and ³Delusional Circuitry² ‹ Cultronix is sure to win the hearts of intellectuals worldwide. Load up this page in your local cybercafe, and you¹re sure to be a hit.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Special Collections: The Siege and Commune of Paris
URL: http://www.library.nwu.edu/spec/siege/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Shel Kimen
A revolutionary¹s dream come true. View 1,200 images ‹ landscapes, portraits, political caricatures and architecture ‹ from the siege and commune of Paris, 1870 to 1871. The site is heavily armed with an accurate search engine, but is also ³browsable² for those who aren¹t so certain of what they hope to find. It¹s a wonderful collection for any curious historian. The overall layout is dry, gray and boring, but the images of battles and burning buildings certainly make up for an otherwise dreary blandness.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Deconstruction 23
URL: http://www.igc.net/~lab23/enzo23/index~1.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Shel Kimen
Small. Insightful. Philosophical. Intellectual. Creative. Insightful. Small. Philosophical. Creative. Intellectual. Insightful. Small. Links and Strong Graphics. But Small and Insightful. Outstanding Layout and Organization. Deconstruction 23 is a movement of creativity and philosophical merit brought to the Web with essays, stories, links and a nice layout. Insightful. But Small. I want more. More. MORE!
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Humanities External Degree Catalog Index
URL: http://dolphin.csudh.edu/~hux/huxindex.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Shel Kimen
Earn a humanities Masters degree from California State University, Dominguez Hill, entirely online. At $120 per unit, students can make use of the Internet to study philosophy, art, literature, history and music. You¹ll communicate with professors via e-mail, and use the Web, if you please, to receive assignments and participate in online courses. From the surface, this looks like an interesting program. Register and get started from this Web site.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Rhiz-o-Mat
URL: http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/~messiah/rhizomat/rhizomat.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
The core of this site, the actual Rhiz-o-Mat, is nothing more than a Web quote generator, drawing from the book, *A Thousand Plateaus*, by Deleuze and Guattari, two modern social critics. It ¹s a particularly annoying generator because the pages are set to auto-reload with a new quote at too rapid a speed to let you read the entire quote. The rest of the site is not technically part of the Rhiz-o-Mat, but it¹s incredibly strange and funny, and any trip to the Rhiz-o-Mat will likely propel the viewer into other areas of this unique space.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

SPEED
URL: http://www.arts.ucsb.edu:80/~speed/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
SPEED is an online zine which, in its own words, ³Šprovides a forum for the critical investigation of technology, media, and society.² That¹s a tall order, but SPEED seems to be up to it. The young publication combines the critical writing of an academic journal with the hit-and-run graphic style of Wired, giving both immediate appeal to the eye and delayed gratification for the brain. As of February, only two issues were up, so stay tuned. But how long can they keep this up? Better visit now before everyone there gets burned out.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Media History Project
URL: http://spot.colorado.edu/~rossk/history/histhome.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Marshall McLuhan alerted Americans to the intricacies of the media, and watching the watchmen has since become a popular sport. The Media History Project is a great place to learn the basic histories of the telephone, TV, music, comics, and other methods humans have developed to get the word out. Colorful icons and sharp writing egg you on to further discovery, but some links are sadly broken, and the multicolored text is hard to read on some monitors. Teachers will wet themselves over the included syllabi, anal retentives will dig the site¹s organization, and all will be edified.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Islamic Architecture in Isfahan
URL: http://www.anglia.ac.uk/~trochford/isfahan.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
This architecture-oriented travelogue lets you examine the mosques, palaces, bridges, and other public structures of Isfahan, Iran, from numerous angles. Approach the imposing Sheikh Lotfallah mosque, step inside and peer down the curving corridor, then look straight up into the ornate dome. Taxi to the main square to get your bearings, then follow the directional road signs or text links to the most intriguing spots. More closeups would be nice, but navigation is direct and easy. The text, while prosaic, provides plentiful information not only on the buildings, but also the builders, religious concepts, and fundamentals of Persian architecture.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Carl Jung: Anthology
URL: http://www.enteract.com/~jwalz/Jung/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Intended as a primer on the Swiss psychiatrist's oeuvre, this site takes an appetizer-tray approach to its subject. Click on any of 18 big themes, including The Ego, Archetypes, Good and Evil, Dreams, and Man and Woman, and you'll get a selection of quotes from Jung's *Collected Works.* They don't exactly provide an explanation of Jung's thinking or its application, but the site does offer links and references for those who want to learn more. And if interpreting Jung for yourself seems like too much trouble, you can always take the Jungian personality test, which will analyze you in about five minutes.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Serendip
URL: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Did you know that you have a blind spot in the back of your eye as big as a pencil eraser, and that your brain is filling the bits you can't actually see? Serendip's series of optical demonstration screens will prove it to you, and the text -- plainly written but not dumbed down -- will help you understand it. The blind spot is one of several topics in Serendip's Brain and Behavior section; you can also enter a discussion forum or visit the Playground and try a mind game. The '70s-style graphics on the welcome page may not qualify as groovy, but the content definitely does.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Nunamuit
URL: http://www.nsbsd.k12.ak.us/villages/akp/nuna1.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Documenting the Nunamiut people of Anaktuvak Pass, this slice of indigenous Alaskan culture stands out for its gorgeous, artfully presented images. The photographic Journey Through Time shows how Nunamuit shelter, clothing, and transportation have evolved using a thoughtful arrangement of thumbnails, so you can view the whole exhibit at once, then click on individual images to enlarge them. Select the museum icon to view exhibits on local history and ethnography, or *Nunamuit Today* for a portrait of contemporary culture. The text can be a tad superficial, but the beauty of the site makes up for it.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

National Endowment for the Arts
URL: http://arts.endow.gov
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Blending the practical with the poetic, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) site serves artists and art lovers alike. Check out guidelines for NEA grant applications, links to other art organizations that might fund your creative efforts, and articles on bread-and-butter subjects such as electronic payment for art and writing posted online. You can also read new stories and poems by NEA fellowship winners, or get information on community art projects. Think about the 67 cents or so you kick in each year to support the NEA, and wish that all your tax dollars were so well-spent.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Soviet Archives Exhibit
URL: http://sunsite.unc.edu/expo/soviet.exhibit/soviet.archive.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0996
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
This thoroughly engrossing site, based on the first public display of the former Soviet Union's declassified internal records, lets you examine an ink-smudged letter from Lenin condemning the educated classes as "lackeys of capital," a telegram from Andrei Sakharov, and numerous other personal and official communications. The document images, accompanied by English translations and explanations of the historical context, are divided into sections such as Attacks on the Intelligentsia, Secret Police, and Perestroika. You can take the guided tour through the entire exhibit, or jump around to individual areas of interest.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

PersiaNet
URL: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~sebrahi/PersiaNet.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0996
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Recipes, links to political organizations, English and Farsi versions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam - this repository of all things Persian will connect you to just about every conceivable Internet resource related to the ancient land now known as Iran. The introduction orients you with a map and provides extensive hotlinks to basic information. Click on a list of topics to explore subjects such as film, travel, human rights, and documents related to the Iran-Contra affair. All the material is elegantly presented and neatly categorized. It's also thoughtfully maintained - green dots alert regular visitors to new links.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Ellis Island
URL: http://www.i-channel.com/ellis/index.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0996
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Studded with vintage photographs and quotes from immigrants who passed through Ellis Island, this electronic tour of the former gateway to America is touching as well as enlightening. Find out why many immigrants left the inspection line covered with cryptic chalk marks, why some were asked to solve puzzles, and why most exited the island with tags pinned to their clothing. Portrait icons embedded in each section connect you to audio clips of immigrants talking about their experiences; the navigational icons, while equally charming, are unfortunately not so obvious. Unless you're clairvoyant, you won't know where you¹re going until you get there.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

African American Holocaust
URL: http://www.tnp.com/holocaust
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Although a notice following the title page warns of graphic material, nothing could have prepared me for the horrific series of images that ensued. There is no written documentation here, no context beyond the brief captions, just photo after photo of lynchings, burnings, and beatings, interspersed with bitter and piercing quotations. The menacing opening image, of a Klansman standing in front of a burning cross, gives way to increasingly intimate photos of savagely tortured black victims, often surrounded by their eerily stone-faced white tormentors. The word evil is referenced lightly these days; this exhibit shows us its true face.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Discoverer's Web
URL: http://huizen.dds.nl/~engels/discovery/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
What a task Andre Engels has undertaken! The goal of his text-only site is to "gather all kinds of information found on the web about voyages of discovery and exploration." And he is off to a heavy-duty start. Organized by time periods and geographic region, Discoverer's Web is a massive list of links to both FTP and Web resources devoted to everyone from Herodotus to Samuel de Champlain. Let's hope this man has a T-1 line.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Nineveh Online
URL: http://www.nineveh.com/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Patrick Joseph
Nineveh Online is a site devoted to promoting Assyrian culture. Prior to visiting this excellent resource, my knowledge of Assyria was vague at best. I now have a few more associations to work with. One of the world¹s ancient civilizations, Assyria is today a loosely scattered entity of some three million people living mainly in Iraq and elsewhere, as refugees. Akin to the Kurds insofar as they both lack a sovereign homeland, Assyrians are generally Christian and speak their own language, often called Syriac. You can learn much more at this site, a kind of homeland in cyberspace. There is a BBS, as well as pages devoted to kids, women, the Assyrian language, food, amnesty issues, and more.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Jerusalem in Old Maps and Views
URL: http://www.israel-mfa.gov.il/mfa/maps.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1296
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Patrick Joseph
Maps are the stuff wars are made of, a fact which the history of Jerusalem epitomizes. This site examines the rich (and murderously disputed) history of the Holy City from the vantage of the cartographer, with maps from as far back as 565 A.D. and as recent as 1905. The site amounts to a blessedly brief and wonderfully informative historical aside, which is relatively free of any Israeli nationalist overtones (at least, none that I noticed). Visitors are sure to learn a thing or two. Myself, I feel richer for knowing that the River Jordan is composed of two separate tributaries, the Jor and the Dan. Larger images would be a nice option, and more content welcome, but, as is, I highly recommend it.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 17

Pattern of Knowledge
URL: http://www.tiac.net/users/kba/pok.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Karen Wickre
Art Bardige of Cambridge, MA offers up an elaborate and thoughtful theory about the history of human invention. It¹s a noble attempt. Enter into Bardige¹s construction. The meta-chart is too tidy and clipped for me, but the text is interesting, if biased (remember, you¹ve been warned). He feels that the years 1859-1865 ³were the most extraordinary in all human knowledge,² based on this output: Darwin¹s Origin of the Species and Marx¹s Das Kapital, among others. If you like this kind of thinking, come in for a read far removed from the daily grind.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

The Bertrand Russell Page
URL: http://www.crl.com/~bpmac/russell.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Karen Wickre
Mathematician, philosopher, agnostic, libertarian socialist - Bertrand Russell was a larger than life character. Created by Russell admirer Bruce McLeod, the page contains the text of a number of Russell¹s speeches and essays. You have to dig through some links to find a bio of this controversial and considerable intellectual, but it¹s worth it if you don¹t know him. Russell, who was British, was actively prohibited from lecturing on US college campuses, vilified by the Catholic Church, and generally viewed as trouble by the establishment. You¹ll find several of his best-known pieces here, including ³Why I Am Not a Christian,² and ³What Is the Soul?²
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Duke Papyrus Archive
URL: http://odyssey.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/homepage.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
We¹re used to classical names for archival Web pages: But while Project Gutenberg isn¹t centered around that German bookmaker, Duke¹s Papyrus Archive is all aboutŠ drum roll, pleaseŠ Egyptian papyrus! Over 1300 papyri (yes, that¹s the plural) are cataloged here, with descriptions, translations, and images of the documents in two resolutions. These pictures are the most exciting part of the site for me: seeing the actual scraps of linen from which scholars have reconstructed an entire world. Fully searchable, although there¹s not as much cross-linking as there could be.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Irish History
URL: http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~jdana/irehist.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Sometimes you come across a Web site that impresses with the depth of one person¹s passion and dedication. Such is the case for the Irish History on the Web site, managed by Jacqueline Dana. At first blush, it seems like the usual collection of links: but what makes this site unusual is that (a) the links are well-organized and relevant, and (b) a lot of the linked material is by Ms. Dana herself. There¹s an unquestionable bias toward Irish nationalism, but whether you¹re for or a¹gin¹ it, the history alone makes this site worth a visit.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Philosophy
URL: http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/hyper-weird/philosophy.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Bremser
If you want to find out about hall-of-famer philosophers, this is the place to do it. The page offers a paragraph or so of bio information about many famous old-school think tanks ‹ Plato, Descatres, and Locke to name a few. Also included are links to writings of these great minds at other sites. A nice starting place if you are doing some research, but if you come for new style (ie. Derrida, Foucault, etc.) you¹ll have to look elsewhere.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

The Robot Wisdom pages
URL: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/home.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Bremser
This quirky, text heavy site is one man's, Jorn¹s, rants and raves. There is interesting cultural discourse on James Joyce, thoughts on artificial intelligence, and science goop in general lodged here. The design is simple in the typical gray and blues and he¹s quick to offer some credible rants on Web design (/~jorn/checklist.html). It¹s just O.K.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Black Harlequin Space
URL: http://www.peg.apc.org/~agarton/bhspace.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
Black Harlequin is..... ummmm.... a ³new media opera.² At least that¹s what they call this artsy collection of images, music, and words. And who am I to argue? I say kudos to these artists for pushing the envelope. While the music (Real Audio and Wav files) and poetry isn¹t especially cutting-edge, the creator¹s philosophy about using a text-free graphical interface to navigate the site is a step in the non-linearity direction of true new media. While you still may be drawn to the URL at the bottom of the browser to find your bearings, at least this approach is more creative than simply hammering out new ³back² and ³forward² buttons.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

MSARP Virtual Slide Show
URL: http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/faculties/SS/ARKY/show/showintro.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
No, not your neighbor¹s Florida vacation photos, but images of archaeological research in the Canadian High Arctic. Clear and impressive images of a house excavation and metal artifacts like bone needles are examples of the nearly two dozen server-pushed JPEGs in the show. You can even loop samples of Inuit Throat Singing or ambient environmental sounds to get you more into the Arctic mood. A fine use of the technology, but nothing interactive except a chance to ooh and ahh at the sometimes snowy landscape. Just like a grammar school slide show ‹ only slower. Guess you had to be there.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Semiotics for Beginners
URL: http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/semiotic.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
Those who need a quick course on signs and signifiers for literary and cultural analysis, or anyone interested in a different critical tool, will find this quick and dirty explanation of semiotics very useful. A semiotic question: When you say Internet, are you referring to the global computer network, or the word that is our agreed-upon sign for the network. Roland Barthes was into it, so it should be good enough for you.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Duke Papyrus Archive
URL: http://odyssey.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/homepage.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
We¹re used to classical names for archival Web pages. But while Project Gutenberg isn¹t centered around that German bookmaker, Duke¹s Papyrus Archive is all aboutŠ drum roll, pleaseŠ Egyptian papyrus! More than 1,300 papyri (yes, that¹s the plural) are cataloged here, with descriptions, translations, and images of the documents in two resolutions. These pictures were the most exciting part of the site for me: seeing the actual scraps of linen from which scholars have reconstructed an entire world. Fully searchable, although there¹s not as much cross-linking as there could be.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Bertrand Russell
URL: http://www.crl.com/~bpmac/russell.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Karen Wickre
Mathematician, philosopher, agnostic, libertarian socialist - Bertrand Russell was a larger than life character. Created by Russell admirer Bruce McLeod, the page contains the text of a number of Russell¹s speeches and essays. You have to dig through some links to find a bio of this controversial and considerable intellectual, but it¹s worth it if you don¹t know him. Russell, who was British, was actively prohibited from lecturing on US college campuses, vilified by the Catholic Church, and generally viewed as trouble by the establishment. You¹ll find several of his best-known pieces here, including ³Why I Am Not a Christian,² and ³What Is the Soul?²
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

No Dogs or Philosophers Allowed
URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~kknisely/philosophy.tv.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Serious but not humorless, this viewer's companion to the TV show by the same name provides articles that give context to the on-air discussions of existential questions. Wondering if time exists? What about the past or future? Are we moving through time or are we simply in time? The No Dogs site will clue you in. You can also buy videotapes of past shows, find out where to tune in for current ones, get a list of books to read, and learn how to participate. Links connect to other philosophy sites.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Left-Wing Lingo, Ideologies and History
URL: http://www.dsausa.org/Docs/Lingo.html#pic
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Ananda Nada
This site introduces the complex history of left-wing ideological movements. Web-author J. Hughes' simple layout and cogent writing draw together movements ranging from Populism to Communitarian Socialism. His brief explications of varying theories and praxes link out to relevant and consistently rewarding sites. Unfortunately, Hughes makes the common blunder of placing his text on a white background (making it harder on the eyes), and his family tree of U.S. Socialist History is too large to read on most monitors. Nevertheless, this site makes superb educational use of the Web.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

U.S News Online
URL: http://www.usnews.com/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Ananda Nada
Readers of the print version of U.S. News will want to check out its well-done Web version, which offers more than just the same stories for free. Here, feature articles run with links to related pieces that sometimes date back several years. Furthermore, there's a search engine to probe the archives. Those eager to correspond with other readers about current events are invited to post their comments in the Talk Back column. And to top it all, the site hosts spacious audio and video archives. There's even something called a chat infobank to enlighten the IRC-illiterate.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
URL: http://pharos.bu.edu/Egypt/Wonders/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0996
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Everyone knows about them, sure, but how many could name them from memory? Maybe that ignorance is due to the fact that six of them no longer exist - one may even have been a figment of excitable literary imaginations. That would be the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, number two on what this site calls the "canonical" list of seven wonders, compiled during the Middle Ages. Artist renderings show you what the vanished structures might have looked like, and a photo of the lone survivor, the Great Pyramid of Giza, testifies to its remarkable endurance. Accompanying descriptions fill you in on the history and vital statistics.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Images of the Southwest
URL: http://www.library.arizona.edu/images/images_of_the_sw.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Built by the University of Arizona Library, Images of the Southwest is thematically all over the map, encompassing mission churches of the Sonora desert and Chicano murals in Tucson, a cowboy artist at work and an electronic walk through verdant Sabino Canyon. Some of the more unusual sections include histories of Jewish pioneer families culled from the Bloom Southwest Jewish Archives and photos of life in Arizona¹s World War II Japanese relocation camps. Images are generally sharp and rich, and explanations sufficient and readable. The overall quality and variety make this extensive site a great stop for browsing.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Texas Environmental Center
URL: http://www.tec.org/tec/tec.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Consult the Encyclopedia of Water Terms, view a photo essay on environmental conditions in TexMex border towns, check weather reports for the Colorado River Trail, and connect with various conservation groups and government authorities through the Texas Environmental Center. Sections on water quality, air quality, and land and wildlife provide brief summaries of the issues as well as links to organizations working on them. The water quality section is particularly thorough, with links to water resource maps and monitoring projects as well as the encyclopedia. If you¹re concerned about environmental conditions in what the center calls ³one of America¹s last frontiers,² start your activism career here.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Bucknell Russian Studies
URL: http://www.bucknell.edu/departments/russian/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
If news coverage of the recent Russian elections left you more confused than enlightened about the country¹s current political situation, this site should sort it out for you. In addition to a Political Orientation Map showing the major candidates¹ philosophical positions in relation to one another, you¹ll find polling data and a post-election analysis. The Russian Materials page takes you to wide range of other Russia resources, providing links to sites focused on everything from art and architecture to Russian feminism and space research. Bucknell Russian Studies is a great stop if you¹re researching Russian subjects but don¹t know where to start.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Chinese History Virtual Library
URL: http://www.cnd.org/fairbank/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Covering Chinese history from 1644 to the present, the Fairbank Library draws material from disparate sources to produce a rounded, if not necessarily complete, portrait of each era. The Qing Dynasty section, for example, includes general historical outlines, a discussion of opium in China, and images of antique snuff bottles. If your interest in China is casual, head for the bits of social history. One that neatly turns the tables on Western representations of China is a European travelogue written by a Chinese tourist, which contains this factoid: ³America is a small, isolated island in the middle of the ocean.² The British must have told him that.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

The Costume Site
URL: http://ddi.digital.net/~milieux/costume.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Net nirvana for clothing addicts, the Costume Site is a wide-ranging collection of links to resources supplying costume designers and others with images, historical information, and instructional guides. Look at everything from Andean textiles to get ups from the TV series *Battlestar Galactica.* Trace the history of the corset, worn as early as 1600 BC by Minoan women, and the codpiece, invented in the 1400s to cover male genitalia exposed by short tunics and hose ending at the upper thighs. Find out how to make kilts, Japanese chain armor, and Middle Ages footwear. If people have worn it, there¹s probably a Web site devoted to it.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

MacTutor History of Mathematics
URL: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
Number crunchers take note: the MacTutor History of Mathematics from the School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences University of St. Andrews in Scotland is a comprehensive guide to the fascinating (seriously!) history of mathematics. Check out bios of more than 1000 famous mathematicians by name or time period, deep background on the development of important mathematical ideas, and even articles about famous curves. The Devil's Curve is my fave, although I don't remember it from high school. I knew I should have taken Calculus.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Aboriginal Studies
URL: http://cooms.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-aboriginal.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1296
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Daniel Alarcon
The WWW Virtual Library is not designed to be flashy or fancy; it's meant to be an effective and quick way to get information. Information, not fluff. At the Aboriginal Studies site, they don't just throw up any link that comes along: Many are called and few are chosen; every site is inspected before it makes the page. Only 72 sites had made the cut when I checked it out, but they represent the meatiest links out there on the subject of Australian Aborigines. The site is updated daily, and the amount of information is truly mind-boggling. This site, like all WWW Virtual Library sites, is a resource for scholars and the intellectually curious everywhere.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Cold War Hot Links
URL: http://www.stmartin.edu/~dprice/cold.war.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1296
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Daniel Alarcon
The Cold War. I lived through the tail-end of that paranoid era; I remember when Reagan called the U.S.S.R. the Evil Empire and we designed a missile defense program dubbed Star Wars. But the `80s were small potatoes compared to the late `50s, early `60s. The Cuban Missile Crisis, McCarthyism, The missile gap, backyard bomb shelters. *That* was real hysteria. Now Anthropologist David Price has compiled an extensive list of sites dedicated to one-too-distant episode in American history. Go to the House of Un-American Activities Home Page. Check out declassified Pentagon and CIA documents. Get the scuttlebutt on the U.S.'s most repressed homosexual, J. Edgar Hoover. The links are all over the map‹some downright ridiculous, some inoperable‹but generally good. Relive the good old days, when right was right and red was wrong. I'm prepared to name names.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Israel Archeology From the Air
URL: http://www.israel-mfa.gov.il/mfa/archair.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1296
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Daniel Alarcon
Unlike other sites aimed at attracting tourists to the Holy Land, this site relies almost exclusively on photographs and I guarantee you won't get shots as good as this. Aerial photography provides a unique perspective from which to view both the landscape and the archeological sites that are woven into the geography. Despite the amazing photos, the site does have its limitations. The fact that you can't zoom in on the images gets frustrating; and besides an opening statement, there is little in the way of context or maps. The photos are downloadable and well-worth the time. Or you can go to Israel, rent a plane, and try your own luck.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Albert Camus Literary Criticism Home Page
URL: http://www.wolfenet.com/~willej/indexa.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1296
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Daniel Alarcon
Albert Camus, novelist, philosopher, member of the French Resistance, is one of those mythic characters of the twentieth century: a man of letters and a man of action, who commanded respect from all circles for his unwavering dedication to principle. This site is gathering of scholarly minds trying to make sense of his writings and thought, analyzing the stark implications of Camus' philosophy. There's also a collection of Camus' own essays, and a succinct biography to acquaint you with the major events in this writer's life. The site suffers from a lack of aesthetic foresight: no one can or should read that long from a monitor, and the legal pad motif makes matters worse. Still, your eyes adjust...
Overall Rating (out of 18): 16

Skeptics Society
URL: http://www.skeptic.com/skeptics-society.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Karen Wickre
"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them." The Skeptics Society has adopted these words of the Dutch philosopher Spinoza as their motto. The Society publishes a magazine and holds regular conferences to investigate cultural and scientific ideas on religion, conspiracy theories, life after death, urban myths, and paranormal events. Their page includes selected articles from the magazine, papers, interviews, and an excellent reference page of other skeptical sites. A thoughtful and low-key presentation is what you¹ll find here, as befits intelligent skeptics, which these folks seem to be.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

American Studies Web
URL: http://pantheon.cis.yale.edu/~davidp/archives.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Every Web page has it: the obligatory list of links to other (questionably) relevant sites. The American Studies Web, however, is *all* links, to sites on matters as diverse as the U.S. Constitution, the San Francisco Diggers, and the great Irish famine of the mid-19th century. It¹s a huge list, but rather disheveled: neither alphabetization nor subject organization seem to have sullied its pure anarchistic gestalt. Use the ³Find² command on your browser if you¹re looking for specific information, and be sure to go up one level (to http://pantheon.cis.yale.edu/~davidp/amstud.html) for the whole experience.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

American Civil War
URL: http://cobweb.utcc.utk.edu/~hoemann/warweb.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Like Jacqueline Dana¹s Irish History pages (see separate listing), George H. Hoemann and Mary E. Meyers¹ Civil War pages are basically just a collection of well-organized links. Unlike the Irish page, however, these links go mostly to outside servers, meaning that the material is less cohesive, and you¹ll occasionally not be able to get at the information you want. When you can get it, though, most of these links are well-researched: Civil War buffs are notoriously fetishistic. And Hoemann and Meyers are qualified guides to this world of six score and 16 years ago.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

CultureFinder The Internet Address for the Performing Arts
URL: http://www.culturefinder.com/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Bremser
CultureFinder is a straightforward site to cover "high" culture, like theater, classical music, and dance. With lots of text heavy pages, containing reviews of dance performances and classical music events, there¹s definitely some solid content here. And the bonus: Search the entire country for culture events near you. It¹s extremely informative, quick, and valuable to those who love the classical arts.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

BEARS in Moral and Political Philosophy
URL: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/bears/homepage.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
Trudging through philosophy papers is a time-consuming task, especially when most of them are not worth the paper they¹re printed on. That¹s where BEARS comes in. BEARS is literally the Brown Electronic Article Review Service from Brown University. Offering short reviews of philosophical treatises of all kinds, BEARS let¹s you know what¹s worth your time, and what¹s not ‹ sort of like a philosopher¹s Cliff¹s Notes. Let¹s face it, in these fast times even short stories are too long.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

An Illuminati Outline of History
URL: http://www.impropaganda.com/illuminati.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
Finally! The secret history of the greatest secret society in the world is unveiled! Follow the occult practices of this political and mystical sect from the days ruling Atlantis, through the sly doings in the US in 1776, and into the last few decades of turmoil. Find out who put the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill, and who really assassinated JFK! LSD, UFOs, CIA, all the greatest acronyms are explored in this must-read historical reference to what¹s really going on! Remember, stay clear of those Masonic lodges. Robert Anton Wilson must be proud.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Laurie Anderson's Green Room
URL: http://www.voyagerco.com/LA/VgerLa.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
The multimediatrix of performance art arrived on the Web last year, just in time for her ³Nerve Bible² tour. While the itinerary on this site are long outdated and there isn¹t any ³backstage² left to interact with, there is plenty of information on the Puppet Motel, Voyager¹s CD-ROM ‹ trip deep into the twisted caverns of Anderson¹s mind. Also of interest on this site are details about the Real World theme park that Anderson, Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno have been ³planning² since the early 1980s. I¹m still waiting. Anxiously.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Deco-Echoes
URL: http://www.deco-echoes.com/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
I really wanted to like the Deco-Echoes site. After all, I¹m a big fan of the 1950s Jetson¹s aesthetic. But unfortunately, this page is one of those good ideas/poorly executed deals. For example, the site¹s history of mid-twentieth century design is ridiculously cursory and graphics-light with only one visual example of each decade¹s design style. One redeeming factor on Deco-Echoes though are the links to vintage dealers ‹ probably a good bet if you¹re in the market for a spacey TV set circa 1958. While I¹m excited to check out ³The Echoes Report² magazine hyped on this page, Echoes¹ site-creation skills, like their subject matter, seems to be stuck in the past.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Dead Man Talkin by Dean
URL: http://monkey.hooked.net/m/hut/deadman/deadman.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
As you read this, Dean is currently hanging out at San Quentin Prison in California waiting to die. For real. Find out what New Year¹s is like in Prison, and learn why lethal injection may not be the best way to encourage those on death row to keep fighting the system for their lives. ³ The idea of going to sleep and not having to be in this place any longer is too seductive,² Dean says. You can even e-mail your questions to Dean via infamous Bay Area talk-show host Alex Bennett and he¹ll answer them in future columns. This is hardcore, not the People¹s Court.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Nizkor
URL: http://nizkor.almanac.bc.ca/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Patrick Joseph
This is a site with a mission: Confronting and debunking the myths and misinformation propagated by the revisionists who would suggest that Hitler¹s pogrom never occurred. Nizkor actively engages--or attempts to engage--the persons who espouse such nonsense online and provides a plethora of information (see the Shofar FTP archive, which will soon be available in hypertext) to counter their claims. Dedicated not just to the six million Jewish Holocaust victims, but to the estimated twelve million Jews, gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, et al, murdered by the Third Reich, this site deserves attention.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Black Panther Coloring Book
URL: http://www.cybergate.com:80/~jonco/bpcb.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0696
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Bremser
Despite what some say, there are a few good Web sites that take print content and just scan it in, simple and clean. No typing. No code. This coloring book from the Black Panthers is one such example, offering an activity and good insight into the philosophy of the group. A Frames version of the site makes it easy to navigate through the site, and you could always download the images if you feel like coloring...
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Literary and Critical Theory
URL: http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/SSPCluster/theorists.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
This collection of mostly student essays seems very useful on the surface. It covers the greats of literary theory, such as Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, and and Foucault, but the texts of the essays isn¹t online. The only use for it is as a syllabus of important authors that could be used by the independent scholar, or the student who wants to impress a professor with a little bit of name-dropping.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Eighteenth-Century Studies
URL: http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/18th.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Shel Kimen
The entire English server at Carnegie Mellon University is amazing, and the 18th Century history archive is just another wonderful piece of the whole. It¹s slightly sad, however, that subjects of such extremely high interest potential ‹ Rousseau and Locke, The history of Lady Julia Manderville, and Rare Maps from Revolutionary America, to name a few ‹ are bestowed with dull and unimpressive layouts. Does this treatment endorse the philosophy that such pristine literature and classical brilliance needs to remain far, far away from Internet technology, or does this site merely lack someone to do the HTML dirty work?
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Conceptual Metaphors
URL: http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/MetaphorHome.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
Although designed for cognitive scientists, the Conceptual Metaphor site should be of interest to writers and anyone who enjoys language. The metaphor system being used isn¹t explained, but it isn¹t too hard to figure out from the content. There¹s the ³source,² the thing being defined, and the ³target,² the thing the ³source² is being compared to. The site indexes metaphors by name, source, and target. It¹s an ugly, raw site, and the link to references listed the titles of three books without any more information.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Spoon Collective
URL: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
The University of Virginia, sponsor of the electronic version of the excellent Journal of Postmodern Culture, runs a number of mailing lists under the name Spoon Collective. The lists cover the latest topics and authors of cutting-edge cultural criticism and philosophy, such as Baudrillard, Bakhtin, and Film Theory. The postings to the lists are archived along with general info and longer papers, and, for some topics, a Web page has been built. Follow the instructions to join a list, or just satiate your intellect with the archives.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

The New STOA
URL: http://www.cs.latrobe.edu.au/~doug/generic/generic.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
³When Computer Scientists Discover Philosophy:² on the next Geraldo. The proposition of this site, a modern version of Stoic philosophy, is pretty intriguing. The site¹s author claims Aristotle and Plato forced a division between philosophy and science, while his revived Stoicism brings them back together. The pages make it seem like an actual movement, but a look at the ³Core Papers² section shows only one author, who also happens to run the site.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

FDR Cartoon Collection
URL: http://www.wizvax.net/nisk_hs/departments/social/fdr_html/FDRmap.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
This worthy high-school project puts some 30,000 cartoons dealing with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration online. A work in progress, it suffers from some design inconsistencies and explanatory text is supplied in some sections but not in others. The cartoons themselves vary in quality and range in theme from perennial political issues to war chestnuts like the one of Mr. Average American standing on Hitler's chest, tightening a belt around the Fuhrer's neck until his tongue and eyes pop out.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

The Museum of Television and Radio
URL: http://www.mtr.org/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0996
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Patrick Joseph
I suspect that what will intrigue archaeologists of the future most, digging through time-encapsulated layers of our garbage, are the mounds of discarded televisions in the trash heap. In fact, maybe my generation should swap that ³X² nonsense for two new letters: Call us ³Generation TV.² Most of us, after all, were weaned straight from the bottle to the boob tube. So, while it may be the most maligned medium of our day, the television -- and the radio before it -- are important cultural foundations, like it or not. And the Museum of Radio and Television -- in New York and Beverly Hills, (where else?) -- will save those archaeologists a lot of trouble, archiving, as it does, broadcast history from its earliest inception to last night¹s Movie of the Week. The Web site functions as a publicity page for the museum, introducing the two physical locations, previewing exhibits online, and giving up-to-date information on the weekly schedule of events. Obviously, this is more valuable to New Yorkers and Los Angelenos than the rest of us, but if you¹re planning a visit, this will at least get you started. Concise descriptions are given for each of the museums featured exhibits, which currently include one on stand-up comics on TV and another on radio and televisions¹ role in chronicling recent history. The Listening Series features radio programming, with a tribute to the late George Burns, for example, and another devoted to baseball on the radio. If you can¹t make a show in time, don¹t fret, they¹ll always be available for viewing or listening at one of the museum¹s private consoles. The museum not only houses exhibits, but also offers research programs and artistic seminars, including one entitled ³Individual Visions,² with award-winning documentary film maker, Ken Burns. There¹s also a plea for help in finding certain ³lost programs.² Anyone have a copy of the NBC radio broadcast of the 1933 All-Star game? I should note that there¹s plenty of room for improvement here; at the moment there are no sound or video files available for download, nor can you perform an online search of the museum¹s archives. Still, it¹s an attractive, easily navigable site and makes for an interesting visit. TV and radio are the Digital Age¹s predecessors, remember, and we could learn a lot from the old ³new media.² The first lesson is this: the landfills of the twenty-first century will be filled with computers.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

The Museum of Television and Radio
URL: http://www.mtr.org/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0996
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Looking for Nick at Nite-style snippets of our television heritage? You won't find them here. Essentially an electronic brochure for the Museum of Television and Radio's two branches (in New York and Beverly Hills), this site is worth a visit if you're planning a trip to either outpost; otherwise, it's just a tease. Skip the tour - it quickly deadends in a cul de sac of tiny porthole pictures of rooms you can't explore - and click on Exhibits for slick overviews of current shows, complete with appropriately dramatic photos and synopses of major themes.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Hill Monastic Manuscript Library
URL: http://www.csbsju.edu:80/hmml/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0996
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Listen to Gregorian chants and examine the fancifully illustrated pages of handwritten books at the electronic branch of this archive and research library devoted to medieval manuscripts. Hill has microfilmed more than 25 million pages in an effort to ensure that they survive should the originals be lost to fire, flood, theft, or war. You can sample the library's holdings in the Sights and Sounds section, which offers generously sized images as well as various audio files. On the downside, you¹ll need the erudition of a monk to understand these images - there's little commentary to help you make sense of them.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

The Mountain Institute
URL: http://www.mountain.org/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0996
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
The Mountain Institute is probably a fine organization, no doubt beloved by the beneficiaries of its efforts to preserve mountain environments and cultures. This Web site, however, is so mired in vague generalities that it's hard to tell precisely what the institute does. You have to work your way down the table of contents to the Projects section just to find a mission statement, and if you reach the level of an individual project, you might discover that execution of "the plan" has been delayed, but you won't discover what that plan is. The pages are pretty, but that's no compensation for muddled content.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

U.C. Berkeley Museum Informatics Project
URL: http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
The photos that adorn the Museum Informatics home page are inviting, but step inside for a look and you¹ll realize that this site is for the cognoscenti. Unless you work in the field of information technology for museums, there¹s little of interest here. If you¹re conducting research or just curious about Berkeley¹s holdings ‹ the university has 80 museum and archive collections ‹ you can access links here to individual museum Web sites and several searchable scientific databases. Once you locate the sites you want, though, there¹s no reason to return to the Museum Informatics Project; that is, unless you¹re an...um,...informaticist.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

ÉCLAT
URL: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/Complit/Eclat/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
The University of Pennsylvania¹s directory of comparative literature resources on the Web covers an impressive amount of ground, although it provides little, if any, commentary on the sites it lists. Links are divided into eight categories, including comparative literature program sites, theory sites, electronic libraries, academic journals, and professional associations. Some of the sites are briefly described, and the contents of others can be assumed, but if you want to know anything about the specific contents of a theory site, for example, you have no choice but to go there and start reading.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Biography.com
URL: http://www.biography.com/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: David Pescovitz
Based on A & E's excellent television show, the Biography Web site is pure mind candy for those enthralled by other people's pasts. Speak out about Biography subjects like Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Lewis in the "Speak"bulletin board section. Then, test your knowledge in the Anagram Game or Biography Quiz. (Who was the U. S. engineer who, in 1852, developed a lift that incorporated a safety device, making it acceptable for passenger use in skyscrapers? Tune in to Biography to find out.) Biography.com is an educational complement, rather than a boring advertisement, for a fine television show.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Extropians
URL: http://www.c2.org/~arkuat/extr/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Patrick Joseph
Extropians, in case you didn¹t know, believe in the ascendancy of human beings and the ultimate triumph over pesky things like mortality and the confines of the body. It is a way of thinking that marries the optimism of technology with the mysticism of religion and this site is thick with a weird breed of newspeak which is part techno jargon, part mystical incantantation. It makes for a bemusing read. Some of my favorite lexicoctions: ³pancritical epistemology,² and ³neurochemical enhancers.² And though the creator of the site swears that extropians are ³never, ever dogmatic,² the overall tenor was vaguely Moaist, with good communist-type sloganeering, like ³transformation over torpor.² No images, lots of text, almost all of it hyper-linked and cross-referenced.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 15

Mind and Body
URL: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Table.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Karen Wickre
Mind and Body is the catalog from a 1992 exhibit of the same name at the National Library of Medicine on Rene Descartes, the origins of mind/body dualism, and the development of the field of psychology in America. In a very scholarly style, the largely-text site describes how Descartes came upon his findings and how the scholarship of philosophy then changed. If you know nothing about the subject, you might want to do some basic reading in philosophy first. If the subject interests you, you¹ll probably find some new info within the site, which includes illustrations and portraits from the exhibit. Not for the non-reader.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Electronic Journal of Sociology
URL: http://gpu1.srv.ualberta.ca:8010/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Scholarly journals usually need to be spiced up, and the Web is a perfect way to do it. So why is the Web-only Electronic Journal of Sociology as dull as a two-pound brick of paper? It has all that you¹d expect to find in a paper journal: abstracts (in tiny, unreadable type), articles, and references. But no pictures, no search engines, no indices. Well, there are some smart messaging features which allow visitors to make comments but at the moment, there¹s not much traffic there. The articles are good, but the presentation needs work.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Soviet Archives Exhibit
URL: http://sunsite.unc.edu/expo/soviet.exhibit/soviet.archive.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
This archive of Soviet documents is arranged around a museum analogy: Go directly to either of the two ³floors² or follow the golden footsteps for a guided tour of Soviet history over the last 80 years. Unlike a museum, however, there aren¹t many pictures to look at, although the knowledgeable guide¹s talk is full of imagery. Be warned: it¹s a lot of reading: missing are the songs, photos, and personal reminiscences that would humanize such a tour; also, the text is so biased toward cold-war ideas as to threaten its credibility as a history text.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Wittgenstein and His Children
URL: http://www.techline.com/~john7/wittgenstein/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
A photo as you enter this site encapsulates its tenor well: it¹s an image of 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein with an angel¹s halo above his head. Deification of the individual aside, this site offers very little in the way of hard information: mostly, it¹s a space for people to discuss The Man And His Works using the NetForum messaging system. In that regard, the site is moderately successful, although there¹s not much chat going on (c¹mon, folks! it¹s a sexy topic!) and some of the links are broken.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Classics and Mediterranean Archaeology
URL: http://rome.classics.lsa.umich.edu/welcome.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
It¹s appropriate that a site dedicated to the past is so stuck in it. Don¹t get me wrong: Someone did a terrific job of gathering far-flung Web links and centralizing them in a format handy to scholars. But in the end, it¹s just an extension of a Gopher site: text-based, with few helpful internal links or explanatory texts, and user-friendly it ain¹t. Don¹t expect any commentary on which sites are worthwhile (or even appropriate to your needs). Still, content is more important than technical flash in academia, and this site is a wonderful portal to other resources.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Philosophy
URL: http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
I always like to find online texts. It¹s a great way to save a trip to the library. The philosophy section of the English Server at Carnegie Mellon University is a pretty good repository of material, from Aristotle to Rousseau. There are also some more general thematic texts thrown in, such as ³Women in Philosophy.² The Web page is only an index for a Gopher server, so all the pretty HTML ends at the top level.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Popular Culture Links
URL: http://www.mcs.net/~zupko/popcult.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
Popular culture has become fair game for academic analysis, allowing episodes of ³Gilligan¹s Island² to merit the same amount of attention as Joyce¹s *Ulysses*. Sign of a bankrupt culture, or do academics just want to have fun? No matter, this page is a bunch of links to all sorts of popular culture resources, and the only reason it¹s mentioned here is because the design is so bad that the text can only be read by putting your face about two inches from the monitor.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Existential Home Page
URL: http://home.navisoft.com/darkstar/exist/index.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Shel Kimen
I¹ve searched high and low for an existential home page. I¹m therefore discouraged that I must settle for gray backgrounds, and rather mediocre jaunts through my favorite philosophical movement and collection of personalities because there is little else available online. This site is a classic example of a big fish in a very small pond. It¹s a nice introduction to the movement, but will most likely be repetitious for anyone who has taken an introductory philosophy class.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Greek & Roman Cities of Western Turkey
URL: http://rubens.anu.edu.au/turkeybook/toc.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Excellent
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
Michael Greenhalgh, a Professor of Art History at the Australian National University, is one academic who has embraced the Web and its possibilities by choosing to publish his book on ancient cities in Turkey, electronically, before the print version came out. It¹s a fascinating and well-researched topic, but it really lacks in that none of the archived pictures are linked to their references in the text. Also, it¹s a perfect test of the viability of publishing lengthy texts on the Web and having people read them online.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Electronic Journal of Sociology
URL: http://gpu1.srv.ualberta.ca:8010/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Scholarly journals usually need to be spiced up, and the Web is a perfect way to do it. So why is the Web-only Electronic Journal of Sociology as dull as a two-pound brick of paper? It has all that you¹d expect to find in a paper journal: abstracts (in tiny, unreadable type), articles, and references. But no pictures, no search engines, no indices. Well, there are some smart messaging features, which allow visitors to make comments, but at the moment, there¹s not much traffic there. The articles are good, but the presentation needs work.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Soviet Archives Exhibit
URL: http://sunsite.unc.edu/expo/soviet.exhibit/soviet.archive.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
This archive of Soviet documents is arranged around a museum analogy: Go directly to either of the two ³floors² or follow the golden footsteps for a guided tour of Soviet history over the last 80 years. Unlike a museum, however, there aren¹t many pictures to look at, although the knowledgeable guide¹s talk is full of imagery. Be warned: It¹s a lot of reading. Missing are the songs, photos, and personal reminiscences that would humanize such a tour; also, the text is so biased toward cold war ideas as to threaten its credibility as a history text.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Wittgenstein and His Children
URL: http://www.techline.com/~john7/wittgenstein/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
A photo as you enter this site encapsulates its tenor well: It¹s an image of 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein with an angel¹s halo above his head. Deification of the individual aside, this site offers very little in the way of hard information: mostly, it¹s a space for people to discuss The Man And His Works using the NetForum messaging system. In that regard, the site is moderately successful, although there¹s not much chat going on (c¹mon, folks! it¹s a sexy topic!) and some of the links are broken.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Bonfire of Liberties
URL: http://www.d-a-c.com/exhibit.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0896
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Noting such symbolic book burnings as an Alabama textbook committee's 1983 rejection of Anne Frank¹s diary because it's a "real downer" and China's 1931 censorship of *Alice in Wonderland* because "animals should not use human language,² the site demonstrates how varied and limitless are the grounds for restricting reading material. But Bonfire of Liberties is proof that a picture is not always worth a thousand words. The images--book covers, French engravings, an unreadable copy of the Bill of Rights--are not, by themselves, all that edifying. Sadly, no background information on the featured works or the circumstances of their censorship is given.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

The Amistad Research Center
URL: http://www.arc.tulane.edu
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
You can find out what's in the extensive collection of this independent archive, library, and museum at Tulane University, but you can't access any of it here. Largely devoted to African-American history, the center also has material on other ethnic minorities and the gay rights movement. If you're researching in these fields, a glance at the annotated list of manuscript collection holdings - ranging from personal papers to an indexed record of Southern civil rights legislation and the FBI's surveillance files on Malcolm X - might inspire a trip to New Orleans; otherwise, you won't find much to keep you here.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Gutter Tribe
URL: http://www.auschron.com/gallery/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0996
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Sponsored by the alternative newsweekly, The Austin Chronicle, Gutter Tribe is the result of photojournalist Jana Birnbaum's six weeks of hanging out with homeless youths on the streets of Texas's capital city. The site's two galleries offer a poor choice: one-bit black-and-white images, or large, eight-bit, grayscale images recommended only for those with fast network connections. The one-bit images that most viewers will see are so flat and toneless that they lack power; the photographer's statement and the story that accompanied the piece provide a better sense of the kids' living conditions than the photographs do, as well as their conviction that they've found the ultimate freedom.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Thoughts of an Historian Caught in the Web
URL: http://elmer.harvard.edu/~peters/thought.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Here Harvard¹s Peter Shoemaker posts his noodlings about what happens when the study of history intersects with the Internet. His essays are studded with hotlinks, so you can jump to many of the examples he cites and judge their significance for yourself. An essay on presenting historical exhibits in the context-free Web environment leads to several museum sites, for example, and a previous essay on writing history links to a course syllabus, Roman legal codes, and the Bryn Mawr Medieval Review, among other things. The site has promise, but needs to be bulked up ‹ at last look, the two essays cited here were the only ones available.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

The Vietnam Experience
URL: http://www.shore.net/~cadmus/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
In a moving essay here Vietnam veteran Robert J. George describes the lingering feelings of confusion and pain that compelled him to begin work on what eventually became a 26-book series called the Vietnam Experience, now out of print. The essay is accompanied by evocative photographs of day-to-day life for American soldiers in Vietnam as well as links to related resources, but mainly this site is a feeler sent out to determine interest in a new retrospective and locate potential contributors. Once you¹ve read the background and responded, there¹s nothing left to see or do.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

California Museum of Photography
URL: http://cmp1.ucr.edu/exhibitions/cmphome2.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Online exhibits drawn from this University of California, Riverside museum touch on historical subjects ranging from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles and San Francisco to Ellis Island and prerevolutionary Russia, as well as contemporary themes such as X-ray photography and artists¹ visions of guns. The collection is impressive and this site displays ample portions of it, but you have to drill through too many layers to get to the pictures. You¹ll also need substantial system resources to view them efficiently. Unless you¹re a serious photography fan, the payoff may not be worth the patience required.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Native American Documents Project
URL: http://www.csusm.edu/projects/nadp/nadp.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Described as ³only a shadow of a beginning,² this site is part of an effort to make documents detailing the history of federal policy toward Native Americans more accessible. Currently there are three meaty sets of well-organized data here, among them reports by the 1871 Indian Affairs commissioner and Board of Indian Commissioners. Some may be surprised to find that even government-appointed commissioners of that time considered many federal and settler actions dishonorable, illegal, and greedy. Although the dense, dry prose and complete lack of visual relief might repel nonacademic visitors, most of us could learn a thing or two here.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

1492: An Ongoing Voyage
URL: http://sunsite.unc.edu/expo/1492.exhibit/Intro.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1096
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
This Library of Congress exhibit features some interesting images and an elegant interface ‹ too bad they¹re undercut by the superficial, error-ridden text. Typos pop out of every page, and the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand are misidentified as Isabel and Fernando. We¹re told that Columbus was accused of ³maladministration² but not why. Later we read that the continent Columbus landed on was named America after his death, but there¹s no mention of Amerigo Vespucci. Images such as Columbus¹s coat of arms and an Aztec codex might be worth a trip here, but use the outline to go directly to the objects that interest you and skip the disappointing text.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Thinking Allowed
URL: http://www.thinking-allowed.com/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
You can peruse 38 transcripts and purchase more than 200 videos drawn from this independent public-television series featuring discussions between host Jeffrey Mishlove and various intellectual luminaries. Follow the train of thought that leads to this statement by Mishlove, from a talk with Fred Alan Wolf about Physics and Consciousness: ³It¹s almost remarkable, when you talk about it that way, that I¹m sitting here looking at you and you look like a humanoid.² Seriously, though, this is meaty stuff‹we¹re not talking beach reading. Thinking required.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Cultures of the Andes
URL: http://www.andes.org
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1296
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Daniel Alarcon
I know there's gotta be a few people out there looking for some good jokes in Quechua. Well, look no further. Andes.Org has a lot to offer anyone interested in this cultural region of South America. There are audio files of Quechua songs, lessons in the basic structure of the language, a pronunciation guide, as well as dozens of pictures of the region in which the language has currency. Not the product of an organization, this is the fruit of a mere husband and wife team. The site could certainly use maps and more historical context, and I'd love to see video of the traditional dances that are described in such detail. The novelty of Quechua jokes (funny though they may be) does not compensate for some major oversights, like the absence of an account of the Spanish Conquest.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 14

Viking Navy
URL: http://www.digalog.com/viking/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
It¹s a pity when passion gets subverted by incompetence. That¹s the situation with the Viking Navy Web page, a sorry advertising vehicle for a fascinating project. In brief, Californian Peter Sjolander is engaged in building Viking-style boats to ³perform as well today as they did 1000 years ago.² The site includes some photos, drawings, and descriptions of his experiments, but his appalling writing and HTML coding make the juicy fruit of his experiences inaccessible. Serious nautical history buffs and scholars may find this site interesting, but the casual Web browser would do best to skip it.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 13

Australasian Philosophy Network Home Page
URL: http://www.arts.su.edu.au/Arts/departs/philos/APS/APS.home.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Wayne Cunningham
While this is supposed to be some kind of nexus for philosophers working in Australia and New Zealand, it really comes up short, primarily because of a lack of content. It does have the table of contents listings from the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, but no online articles. There¹s also a directory of philosophers working in Australasian Universities, but, besides addresses, there¹s no information about areas of study.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 13

Viking Navy
URL: http://www.digalog.com/viking/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
It¹s a pity when passion gets subverted by incompetence. That¹s the situation with the Viking Navy Web page, a sorry advertising vehicle for a fascinating project. In brief, Californian Peter Sjolander is engaged in building Viking-style boats to ³perform as well today as they did 1,000 years ago.² The site includes some photos, drawings, and descriptions of his experiments, but his appalling writing and HTML coding make the juicy fruit of his experiences inaccessible. Serious nautical history buffs and scholars may find this site interesting, but the casual Web browser would do best to skip it.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 13

The Mariners¹ Museum
URL: http://www.mariner.org/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Good
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Sandra Stewart
Ah, the romance of the sea. Oh, the blandness of the Mariner¹s Museum site. You¹ll find plenty of information about the museum and its holdings here, but no exhibits or samples‹even from the photography collection, surely a relatively easy one to excerpt online. What few images there are seem intended mainly as decoration. The ³little-known maritime facts² are dry bits of history, and the research library accepts requests only by regular mail (there is an e-mail connection for photographic services). Even as an online brochure, this Web effort is too lightweight.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 13

Semiotics for Beginners
URL: http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/semiotic.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1296
Content Quality: Good
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Daniel Alarcon
I, for one, have better things to do than read someone's thesis from a computer screen. Semiotics, the notional science of symbolic meaning in our daily lives, seems like a subject that could be well adapted to the Internet‹the very act of communicating electronically must be symbolic of something. But instead of a fascinating, interactive rollercoaster ride and all-out deconstructionist jag on modern life, we get page after page of writing that never gets going. I found going farther and farther down the rabbit hole, trying in vain to find something, anything worth looking at. Notice I didn't say read; who reads more than a page off a monitor? Not me.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 13

Nothingness.org
URL: http://www.nothingness.org/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Excellent
Site of the Month: No
Author: Shel Kimen
Nothing is something. Nothingness.org, ironically, is rife with interesting material, yielding thought-provoking intensity on every page. It¹s brilliantly composed in concept, layout and content. Near and dear to my own heart, Nothingness.org will provide entertaining, informative and intelligent ideas for a diverse range of people. It is a renaissance of art, politics, design, history, and ubiquitous web paraphernalia (links, resources, etc.). The site¹s creator presents a perspective of social anarchism, highlighting institutions that have continuously flowed through free thought¹s wake: Dadaism, Situationism, and other various sociopolitical movements. Each section accurately and cogently outlines itself. For example, the Situationist Archive page opens up with a search engine and a detailed, well-organized list of everything contained in the area: text, journals, biographies of key figures Guy Debord and Raol Vaneigem, and lists of related resources. All the articles include by-lines and dates, so it¹s easy to find material by your favorite thinkers. Kudos to the site¹s creators for offering this information ‹ a simple amenity that most sites rarely include. Nothingness.org also offers a French language option. This should help to search information on the Situationists, whose movement exploded in France. By far my favorite section is the poetry area, which, as far as I can tell, is written solely by the site¹s creator. It¹s outstanding. When I last counted, there were 36 of these creations, some flowing with rhythmic, seductive dance, and others shouting jarring political revelations. It¹s fitting the author is such a wonderful writer. Check out his reading list, which is hyperlinked to many of the full texts. (It¹s masked as ³word² in the open-book icon on the front page.) In an e-mail interview, the creator, who goes by the name Spud, wrote, "I have always advocated copyright-free texts, the dissemination of information, and the virtues of mostly unknown political and art movements. The D.I.Y. attitude of punk rock is the cornerstone of Nothingness.org, and the walls are made of all the paper I have time to build with.² And build he does, as a freelance graphic designer for his own company, Dada Typographics; as a moderator of the Graphics mail list; as a 9-to-5 day job drone; and as a Web site maintainer. Given all these distractions, Nothingness.org is an accomplishment in triplicate. This site displays a genuine ³commitment to cause,² and everything linked here, displayed here, and sporting the Nothingness.org domain is part of a unified perspective.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 12

Origin of Knowledge
URL: http://www.hsr.no/~onar/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Karen Wickre
Onar Am, the author of this densely-written page, is a composer, mathematician, philosopher and systems theorist. If that weren¹t enough, he has put down his ideas about all of these things into a series of articles available at his site. I¹m impressed by Onar¹s depth and range, but not his writing style. (OK, he¹s Norwegian, but his English is suspiciously academic. The problem isn¹t his unfamiliarity with English as much as the stilted formality he uses - there¹s a lot of the royal ³we,² for example. But if titles like Stabilizers in Dynamical Systems and Perspectivism Applied turn you on, Onar may be your man.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 12

Pearl Harbor Remembered
URL: http://execpc.com/~dschaaf/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 1196
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Poor
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: Yes
Author: Patrick Joseph
It is hard to judge a memorial site like this one by the usual standards. Indeed, by any standards. Nevertheless, I hope that the creator of these pages continues to add content to the initial fruits of his labors. It¹s a noble enough project, but for now, visitors, I fear, will be disappointed. There are a couple of grayscale maps of the attack, a ³Remember Dec. 7th!² poster from the aftermath, a list of casualties, and a few photo images embedded in the narrative of an invasion survivor. More such links, not to mention more narrative, would enrich the experience. The site is a private effort, though, and as such deserves praise. To do justice to the horror and history of the event, however, more work needs to be done.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 12

WORLD WAR I
URL: http://www.msstate.edu/Archives/History/USA/WWI/WWI.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
This University of Mississippi site on World War I is rather spare, with only four articles and links to three sites, two of them external. But click on the ³Return to USA page² link and you'll find the real riches ‹ an extensive history of the U.S., based at http://www.msstate.edu/Archives/History/USA/usa.html. This parent site covers not only military history, but also prohibition, the development of black citizenship, and women¹s suffrage. So, don¹t stop only at the WWI area: U. Mississippi¹s U.S. history site is more than the sum of its parts.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 11

World of History and Literature
URL: http://www.uio.no/~hakonw/sites.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Excellent
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Håkon Winther, a 24-year-old Norwegian student of English and Germanics, has arranged his favorite links in an organized, rigorous fashion, showing not only breadth of interests, but impressive depth. It helps if you share his interests; here goes with a brief listing: in history, he has links on the A-bomb, World War II, Vikings (how Norse!), and Germany. For literature, his turn-ons are Shakespeare, von Goethe, and Dickens. Be sure to visit his main page at http://www.uio.no/~hakonw/home.html for some lighter fare, including a picture of him as a child. How cute!
Overall Rating (out of 18): 10

Origin of Knowledge
URL: http://www.hsr.no/~onar/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0596
Content Quality: Poor
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Karen Wickre
Onar Am, the author of this densely-written page, is a composer, mathematician, philosopher and systems theorist. If that weren¹t enough, he has put down his ideas about all of these things into a series of articles available at his site. I¹m impressed by Onar¹s depth and range, but not his writing style. (OK, he¹s Norwegian, but his English is suspiciously academic. The problem isn¹t his unfamiliarity with English as much as the stilted formality he uses - there¹s a lot of the royal ³we,² for example. But if titles like Stabilizers in Dynamical Systems and Perspectivism Applied turn you on, Onar may be your man.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 9

Post Modern Culture
URL: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/contents.all.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Bonnie J. Burton
With article titles such as ³Pee-Wee Herman and the Post Modern Picaresque² and ³Play It Again, Pac-Man,² the Post Modern Culture site has to be hip. Poems by digital demona Kathy Acker and a special MOO just for readers show this journal off as anything but arrogant. PMC publishes six volumes of fiction, essays, poetry and reviews online without skimping on content and design quality.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 7

The Stanford Electronic Humanities Review
URL: http://shr.stanford.edu/shreview
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Bonnie J. Burton
The folks at Stanford never stop thinking, and this journal proves that even more students and faculty skip sleeping. Read provocative essays on artificial intelligence and its impact on the humanities, the merger of cognitive science and literary criticism, and more. As with most academic-driven humanities journals, Stanford largely ignores design but at least makes an effort to join the future of new media by creating an image-map table of contents.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 7

Exploring Ancient World Cultures
URL: http://www.evansville.edu/~wcweb/wc101/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
If anybody needs exposure to world cultures, it¹s the people of Indiana. Fortunately, the University of Evansville (located in Indiana) requires first-year students to take World Culture 101, and has made it exceptionally easy for them to follow course curriculum by putting it on the Web. An unintended bonus is that we too can follow along at home. Evansville students are required to use this page, but the rest of us will want to visit just because it¹s so compelling.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 7

Buber's Basque Page
URL: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~buber/basque.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Many of us were given a choice of languages to study in high school: French, Italian, and Spanish. From this list, one would think that all European languages are similar. A visit to Buber¹s Basque Page puts a quick end to this assumption. The most striking thing about this site is that much of the information is in the Basque language itself. (Basque is a consonant-filled language, unrelated to Indo-European languages.) Dozens of links detail Basque games (like jai alai), as well as food and politics. There¹s even a link to a Basque lesbian and gay organization. Spelling, however, is spotty ‹ though I¹m sure they¹re spelling my language far better than I¹d spell theirs. Kaixo, Lagunak!
Overall Rating (out of 18): 7

Egyptology Resources
URL: http://www.newton.cam.ac.uk/egypt/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
The *Indiana Jones* movies shattered the myth that archaeologists are stodgy and mildly eccentric old men; this site reminds us that their real community is living, thriving, and online. Community is a big selling point of this site: besides offering the usual links to other sites, there are some bulletin boards, relevant news, and valuable resources, such as a German/Ancient Egyptian wordbook. The techno value is low: the main graphic is at too high a resolution and there are few features more complex than a standard link. But the tone is congenial and smart, and the community is warm.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 6

Stephen Loughlin's HomePage ‹ Aquinas
URL: http://www.epas.utoronto.ca:8080/~loughlin/index.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Stephen Loughlin, a doctoral candidate in medieval philosophy at the University of Toronto, obviously has a love for his field of study. In particular, he has a thing for Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican theologian of the 13th century. Loughlin¹s home page for the saint ‹ who says you have to be alive to have a home page? ‹ features a short bio and all the scholarly stuff you¹d expect from a doctoral candidate, such as a bibliography and a guide to his research. The tech level is low, but who needs tech when you¹ve got love?
Overall Rating (out of 18): 6

Inda Introduction
URL: http://www.en.com/users/ghigley/inda.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Inventing and using imaginary languages has been a popular intellectual and artistic exercise for decades: Tolkien gave his creatures their own tongue, and ³Star Trek² fans have Klinzhai. Now Gregory Higley, a 26-year-old amateur linguist, has thrown his complex creation, Inda, into the ring. The site gives a peek into Inda constructs with sample phrases ranging all the way from ³hello² to ³The matter is finished. I resolved to wait no longer for the king. I would take my revenge at my leisure.² Pity there¹s no vocabulary list. Inda is an impressive feat, deserving its place among other ersatz tongues of the universe.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 6

Chorus Reviews & Resources for Real World Computing
URL: http://www.peinet.pe.ca:2080/Chorus/home.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Visiting the Chorus site is like walking into the party of a graduate school dean: There are dozens of conversations going on, all about wildly diverse, scholarly subjects. For that reason, it¹s hard to get a take on this site. Is it about computer-assisted language learning? No, but there¹s lots of stuff about that. Is it about Bible analysis? Software reviews? Well... no... The pages are pretty, but that teeny-tiny-italic-type-against-a-pebbled-background effect will make you go blind.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 6

The Logical World of Etymology
URL: http://www.phoenix.net/~melanie/thelogic.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Bonnie J. Burton
Discover the hidden definition in every word by dissecting it. Find out that ³honey moon² has bitter inspiration while ³hot dog² has an amusing one. Learn some Latin and Greek prefixes, or travel to other related sites. Unfortunately, graphics take a backseat in this text-o-phile page, but most of us will be too busy looking up our favorite words to notice.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 5

Etymology of Names
URL: http://www.engr.uvic.ca/~mcampbel/etym.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Bonnie J. Burton
Fido, which literally means ³I am faithful,² might be a more suitable name for a child than Howard, defined as ³ewe herder.² On the Etymology of Names site, almost anyone from Aaron to Zoe can research the origin of his or her name. There are plenty of surprises; Doris, for example, means ³sacrificial knife.² What a Bonnie site!
Overall Rating (out of 18): 5

Diogenes¹ Links To The Ancient World
URL: http://www.snider.net/lyceum/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Diogenes, a cynical philosopher from Plato¹s time, used wit and humor to drive home his points. While this site has flashes of wit (e.g., calling Homer a ³media correspondent for the gods²), the underlying values seem absent. The site is broken into five areas ‹ Mesopotamia, the ³Holy Land,² ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Each area has a dozen links to others¹ sites, usually with a brief and caustic remark. The place looks nice, with a cool background and some good graphics, but they ultimately don¹t serve the site well. Maybe next time, Dio!
Overall Rating (out of 18): 5

World War II Archive
URL: http://192.253.114.31/D-Day/GVPT_stuff/new.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Boy, this site is well done. Lots of internal links leading to historical text documents, sounds, and movies in your choice of format. But it¹s a bit sinister: though it appears to offer a complete picture of the war, nothing could be further from the truth. The server is a propaganda site for our military in Europe, plain and simple. It shows only American good works (sidestepping some of our hideous wartime abuses), and is paid for and developed by Army brats on your tax dollars. Remember this next time Congress cuts funding to school lunch programs. Enjoy the site!
Overall Rating (out of 18): 5

The Darmok Dictionary
URL: http://www.wavefront.com/~raphael/darmok/darmok.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
I can understand a life dedicated to studying the subtleties of the ³Star Trek² universe. But to a single episode? That¹s the premise behind The Darmok Dictionary, an exegesis of the allegorical language used in the brilliant ³Next Generation² episode ³Darmok.² The site¹s author picks apart linguistics with the assiduousness of a doctoral candidate, using sound clips, references to other episodes, storytelling techniques, Asian languages, and comments posted in the Fidonet Trek forum. There¹s really not much to this site besides text, but it engaged me from beginning to end.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 5

World History to 1500
URL: http://www.byuh.edu/coursework/hist201/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
If this Web site is a faithful representative of class curriculum, then David Grandy¹s ³World History to 1500² college course is a full but uneven hodgepodge of facts and opinions. The site is almost entirely composed of links ‹ and lots of ¹em! ‹ to external documents, sans commentary or guidance. For his students at Brigham Young University, that¹s fine, as they have Mr. Grandy in the flesh to shepherd them from source to source. For the rest of us, however, there¹s only wandering and wondering, wandering and wondering.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 5

Bjorn Christensson Philosophers Guide
URL: http://www-und.ida.liu.se/~y92bjoch/filosofer/philosophers.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
It¹s time for a game: Poke-the-Philosopher-in-the-Nose! This page features graphics of 25 European philosophers which, when poked, deliver us to short biographies of the pokees, along with several links to their works (if extant on the net). All the usual suspects are here: Kant, Hegel, Plato, et all. But be prepared to wait, wait, wait: Display of all 25 portraits takes several minutes, even with a fast modem.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 5

Kong Zi ‹ Confucius
URL: http://convex.cc.uky.edu/~jatuck00/Resources/Confucius.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Good
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
³Confucius sayŠ² Years ago, this was the introduction to many a joke on TV¹s ³Laugh-In.² But how many people have any idea of what Confucius really *did* say? Well sit yersef down, cause Jimmy Tucker, a good ol¹ boy from Lincoln County, Kentucky, is here to enlighten y¹all. Jimmy provides a nice, short, enlightening (and 100 percent plagiarized) description of Kong Fu Zi, along with links to five of his works.It¹s a pity there¹s so little here, because it looks like an attractive beginning.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 5

Medical Humanities
URL: http://mchip00.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/medhum.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Bonnie J. Burton
At first glance, Medical Humanities seems to be an easy access database with an elaborate bibliography of articles and texts, but visitors will quickly realize that the main focus of the site is the promotion of certain classes at NYU. No good student of medicine diagnoses a problem without taking a closer look, however; put the site under a microscope and you¹ll see a useful little amoeba called ³Literature and Medicine² which has a large listing of summaries on novels about diverse topics from AIDS treatment to the confessions of an opium addict.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 4

HUMANITAS
URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~nhi/hum.htm
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Bonnie J. Burton
HUMANITAS makes most highbrows look like a bunch of Gilligans. From the National Humanities Institute in Washington, D.C., this journal has articles on post modern politics, reason and imagination. The only entertaining part of the site is the poem about murderous leeks narrated by a paranoiac in the fridge. With no graphics or attention to design, this site is bound to lose most of us entertain-me-while-teaching-me types.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 4

English as a Second Language
URL: http://www.lang.uiuc.edu/r-li5/esl/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Bonnie J. Burton
Habla Ingles? If not, then English as a Second Language is a good place to start learning how to say ³where¹s the bathroom² like an anxious American. The page serves as a directory of links to other ESL sites broken down into categories (listening & speaking, reading and writing), as well as offering pointers to other ESL students¹ home pages. Not much by way of original content or graphics, this directory is nevertheless more purposeful than most language spots on the Web.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 4

CTHEORY
URL: http://english-server.hss.cmu.edu/ctheory/ctheory.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Remember those dense ³journals² the English majors published in college? CTHEORY is one such journal, translated into HTML and released onto the Web. It¹s about average. Article quality ranges from the insightful and well-researched to the embarrassingly self-serving. It¹s part of the English Server at Carnegie Mellon University (http://english-server.hss.cmu.edu/), which offers vastly more (and more interesting) material. Still haven¹t had enough of the genre? Well then, zip on over to ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/, and you¹ll find literally hundreds more. You have been warned.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 4

The International Philosophical Preprint Exchange
URL: http://phil-preprints.L.chiba-u.ac.jp/IPPE.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
As far as I can tell, this started as an admirable archiving project for philosophy studies in progress. But it seems the project ran out of steam: You¹ll find journals and articles galore from 1993 and 1994, though very few from 1995 and later. Information is presented in eye-popping ugliness ‹ graphics too big for your screen and text too small to read (if formatted at all). Worth a stop if you¹re a serious academic, but better references are available elsewhere.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 4

Word For Word
URL: http://www.peg.apc.org/~toconnor/welcome.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Bonnie J. Burton
Word for Word needs some gifs and jpegs. This site, which promotes the column of the literary editor of The Courier-Mail Queensland newspaper, does little to spark much interest. Void of any surprises, Word for Word has a difficult-to-read format and zero design elements. There¹s more to good Web publishing than just words.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 3

The Gypsy Lore Society
URL: http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~ratS88/gls/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0796
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Bonnie J. Burton
The Gypsy Lore Society has a lot to learn from the people it celebrates. Gypsies are historically known for their colorful vagabond lives, whereas this site will be known for its bland little existence. The Society publishes both a journal and a newsletter, but doesn¹t bother to put the articles online. None of the information of value is in hypertext. Gypsy Lore enthusiasts will be better off following one of the other resource links to a different site.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 3

Modernism Timeline, 1890-1940
URL: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~eckman/timeline.html
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0396
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Electronically mediated educational interaction is commonplace nowadays, one example being this sparse site by an English professor, John Mark Eckman. His ³Modernism Timeline,² though, doesn¹t live up to the promise of today¹s medium. It¹s just a set of links ‹ one link for each year ‹ that lead you to pages listing nine or 10 events from the year. No commentary, no background, no graphics, no nuthin¹: just ³1919: R. P. Feynman born, Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio.² C¹mon, perfesser: you can do better.
Overall Rating (out of 18): 3

History of the United States of America
URL: http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/~winslow/
Category: Humanities
Issue: 0496
Content Quality: Not Rated
Aesthetic Quality: Not Rated
TechnoSmart Quality: Poor
Site of the Month: No
Author: Tom Geller
Well, well, well. Another graduate student has discovered the World Wide Web, and has built a site of some of his studies. I sure hope, though, that this isn¹t all that Charles Winslow has learned about U.S. History. Of the dozens of links, only three seem to work at the time of this writing: those leading to the inaugural addresses of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe. Whoops! That¹s not James Monroe¹s address. It¹s Thomas Jefferson¹s again, incorrectly linked. It would be charitable to believe Mr. Winslow¹s ³under construction² signs, but let¹s face it: The site is long dead, and it reeks like Monroe¹s corpse. Or is that Jefferson¹s?
Overall Rating (out of 18): 3