AHR: "Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd" by Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt

"Imaging the French Revolution—an experiment in digital scholarship—is organized in three sections. In essays, seven scholars— selected for their previous work on revolutionary images—analyze forty-two images of crowds and crowd violence in the French Revolution, a shared on-line archive that provided the starting point for the project. Offering the most relevant examples and comments from an on-line forum that took place during the summer of 2003, discussion highlights an effort by those same scholars to consider issues of interpretation, methodology, and the impact of digital media on scholarship. In many cases, authors incorporated the fruits of these discussions into their final essays. These instances are marked for readers with the icon labeled “Further Discussion,” which provides a link to some of the original excerpts. Finally, images allows readers to consider the work of the scholars and to draw their own conclusion. Not only are readers given access to the same archive as the scholars—an usual circumstance, particularly for visual studies—but we also provide an “Image Tool” that permits close study and comparison of the forty-two images. Furthermore, each image includes relevant data and is linked to the various places throughout the site (both discussion and essays) where scholars discuss it. For a more detailed explanation of the historiographical and methodological goals of this project, as well as an appraisal of its results, please consult the introductory and concluding essays."

URL: http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/imaging/home.html