History of Valentine's Day Assignment-Commentary

The history of Valentine’s Day assignment, like the entire “Digital History” course, was a much bigger challenge than I originally envisioned. The biggest problem I had with the assignment was a result of my own background. As a trained historian I had trouble using only free sources on the internet. I am used to examining books, scholarly articles, primary documents, among others. Historians usually shy away from sources on the internet unless they are academic. However I had to rely on free sites through Google. I found myself uncomfortable citing general encyclopedia sites or from sources of whom I was not familiar with. Some of the sites did not state where they obtained their information or the creator of the site. I was unable to check the footnotes, bibliographies, and the author’s background like I normally would with books or articles.

I also had trouble finding sources with original information or any sources that added anything new to the existing narrative. Most of the sites I found basically explained the same story. While the history of Valentines’ Day comes largely from legend and myths I was unable to find pieces of evidence, which I could critically examine and form my own conclusion. In short, it was a challenge to find anything original on the subject.

Another problem was the process of citing sources. Again as a historian, I am trained to footnote or endnote all of my sources. I am constantly conscious of plagiarism and making sure every source is credited with the information that I use in my writing. However, with hyperlinks, online encyclopedias, and other websites I was unsure as to when and how to cite. I included a hyperlink to every source that I used in all of the paragraphs, but I still was not sure if I was citing correctly.

The last challenge of this project was the writing style. At the risk of sounding redundant, as an academic I am trained to write in a formal manner. However, with writing short papers for a blog I was unsure as to the proper writing style. Should I write in a more casual manner? Should I enter my opinion or write as if it were a scholarly article?

The obvious benefit of this assignment was I, like most others, had no idea about the history of Valentine’s Day. Therefore this assignment forced me to look at this piece of history as well as work on my researching skills using the web.