- “Making Sense of Documents” provide strategies for analyzing online primary materials, with interactive exercises and a guide to traditional and online sources.
- “Scholars in Action” segments show how scholars puzzle out the meaning of different kinds of primary sources, allowing you to try to make sense of a document yourself then providing audio clips in which leading scholars interpret the document and discuss strategies for overall analysis.
In Making Sense of Documentary Photography, historian James Curtis offers a brief history of documentary photography, examples of what questions to ask when examining a documentary photograph, and an annotated bibliography and list of online resources for documentary photography.
“Scholars in Action: Analyzing Photographs” presents historian Frank Goodyear’s interpretation of an 1850s daguerreotype of Niagara Falls. I couldn’t get the sound to work, but I could read the transcripts—which I found insightful but maybe less enjoyable than hearing the actual interview.