Web Review

The Official Anne Frank House Website
www.annefrank.org
Designed and constructed by The Anne Frank Stichting
Reviewed Nov. 23, 2009

To young scholars across the world, Anne Frank is the face and the voice of the Holocaust. The personal confidences in her diary touch people in all corners of the globe and give the history of antisemitism a personal relevance for millions of people. The Anne Frank House recognizes her valuable contribution not only to history but to social consciousness. Because of the compelling nature of her story, the Anne Frank House designed a website that provides a moving experience, secondary only to visiting the museum itself.

The content of the website is primarily instructional. These features are primarily directed to the curious and casual visitor. In addition to discovering the basic facts about the museum, a visitor also has access to brief biographies of Anne Frank, her family, their benefactors, and the others in hiding. These biographies are enhanced with images that portray the people mentioned in Anne’s diary, their secret attic, and their surrounding community in Amsterdam. The creators of the website have recently developed the Anne Frank channel on YouTube, which provides access to interviews with witnesses of the events surrounding Anne’s life, including Otto Frank. The channel also features the only known video footage of Anne herself, in which she gazes out of a balcony, only a few weeks before going into hiding. Through the biographies, images, and videos, the website creates a unique personal connection between the visitor and Anne Frank.

The website’s most useful features cater directly to teachers and their students. The “Anne Frank Guide” is a useful tool for middle and high school teachers to use The Diary of Anne Frank as a means to teach students about the Holocaust. This page provides condensed historical information about Anne Frank and World War II in conjunction with suggested activities and lesson plans. Furthermore, the site provides unique guides for eighteen different countries, each in their own language and containing specific facts about how that particular nation was impacted by the war. The guide also takes the events of Anne’s diary out of their context and demonstrates how they can be related to present-day acts of genocide and, with equal importance, acts of humanity.

Students benefit from the interactive aspects of the website. A section on homework help allows accessible information about Anne Frank and World War II and provides a quiz. A graphic novel on the Holocaust dilutes the horrific event to an acceptable context for very young visitors. But, more importantly, the website encourages young people to relate Anne’s experience to their own life. The site has a forum for responses and discussion of the diary and its history. Additionally, the Anne Frank Tree allows guests to “leave a leaf” on Anne’s interactive monument. On a virtual leaf, a visitor chooses a theme that characterizes Anne’s legacy, such as humanity or courage, and then leaves his or her name along with a brief message or picture. These are then added to the tree, which visitors are free to peruse for inspiration.

The Official Anne Frank House website provides an educational and meaningful look into the life of an extraordinary young woman and the history that shaped her. Through its ease of use and caliber of content, it achieves a quality of experience that is rare on the internet. This website is a valuable resource for all audiences.

Digital Discord

I think it is ironic that all of our readings about the benefits and harms of digital history are accessible online. I wonder if the authors feel that the negative effects of digitalization won't apply to them? Or if they are compelled to embrace it because the technological forces are simply too strong to resist? It's likely just a simple matter of the good outweighing the bad.

Virginia Heffernan provides an interesting, general overview of these pro/con points in her NYT article, "Haunted Mouses." She laments that expanding accessibility to the internet is also promoting expanding accessibility to misleading information, gruesome images, and an entirely unhealthy thirst for information (regardless of its credibility). I think Heffernan is missing a crucial point-- there is a market for misinformation that has existed long before the internet. While the age of constant connectivity provides a new and tempting outlet for sensational media, we can still find tabloids at every supermarket checkout and elderly relatives relating memories that have been colored by time.

I have more appreciation for Nate Hill's criticism in "Hyperlinking Reality," in which he comments that the internet is not being used to its full potential to bring communities together. His bar code experiment attempts to counteract the isolating effect of technology by allowing members of communities to interact in a particular space, despite the differences in time, effectively creating a new kind of virtual community.

Speaking more directly at historians, Dan Cohen and Roy Rozenweig attempt to address the many questions about academic communication via the web in their online book, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web. Cohen and RozenWeig are strong proponents of using the internet as a tool for historians and seek to advise the historical community on overcoming some of its inherent difficulties which they identify as: "quality, durability, readability, passivity, and inaccessibility." Despite these obstacles, the authors hail the internet as a new means for opening previously closed sources to a wider population and igniting a curiosity about history in the public. While I believe their book serves as an effective guide for setting up a historical website, promoting it, and perfecting it, I fail to see how they address the initial dilemmas they put forth in the introduction. For instance, they do not give any potential solutions to how the historical community can deem a site for the public credible, nor do they pragmatically address the class divide that makes the internet more available to one social class than another.

In "Wiki in the History Classroom," Kevin B. Sheets addresses one of the scariest popular sensations facing history teachers: Wikipedia. Instead of cautioning his students against Wikipedia, he used the popular "Wiki" website to allow his students to create their own page about a particular topic. Through their contributions, deletions, and edits, students learned Sheets' intended lesson: history is a conversation. And, though Sheets never mentions this, I believe that this type of lesson could also teach students to be critical of sources they find on the internet.

As I said in my very first blog post, I love the internet. I love that this week's readings cost me absolutely nothing on Amazon or the Temple Bookstore. Accessibility of information on the internet is one of the best advances to emerge from the 20th century and, hopefully, as we move forward, we will develop a societal intelligence about how and when to best use this information, both academically and personally.