Thanks for visiting our weblog!

As you may have read in our introduction, this website has a specific function; to compare two mediations of the Armenian genocide. The physical museum/memorial Tsitsernakaberd in Yerevan, Armenia on the one hand, and the ‘same’ virtual museum/memorial on this website.

There are some things you should know before navigating our blog. Some tips on how to use it, but also some information on which choices we made in the process of constructing it.

The most important of all choices we made for this website, is to construct it in the form of a blog (or ‘weblog’). While we are presenting an academic analysis and comparison – or so we believe – this specific form (or mediation, if you will) forces the contents of this website to change as well. A nice example of how the medium shapes the message. This has a number of implications that we’ll explain below.

First of all, we’ve tried to adapt our ‘academic’ writing style to a style more native to ‘blogging’. In our experience, this meant writing “can’t” instead of “cannot”, “we’re” instead of “we are”, and “shouldn’t” instead of “should not”, to name just a few examples. In other words, we’ve adapted our style of writing to a somewhat more informal form of English.

More importantly, a blog doesn’t adhere to the same ‘linear’ structure as a scientific journal article or book. First, a visitor can find our blog on Google, and potentially access it at any random point. Second, a blog is ordered on a post-by-post basis; not built step by step with each successive article or chapter. This means that each post should be a short ‘story’ on its own – not necessarily a part of the greater overarching argument.

We took this last point quite seriously, and decided to structure our blog according to a ‘discussion logic’. One of us would write something based on one ‘theme’ (or ‘category’), and the other would respond. There is no ordering of our posts on this blog other than chronology.

To make things a little easier for the visitor of our blog, we ordered our posts into four categories, represented by the photographs on the left. Hovering over these photographs with the mouse pointer provides the visitor with the title of the ‘theme’ in a tooltip. Each theme subsequently has two posts (one from Inge, one from Jeroen); the oldest post is displayed on the bottom, the newest on top (as is customary on blogs).

We decided not to bore our visitors with an excessive amount of background information on the Armenian genocide. We’re on the internet here. Find it yourself. Allright, a little help then – Wikipedia is a fairly good place to start looking for background info.

Finally, be sure to leave some comments here and there – a ‘real’ blog lives on comments from its visitors!

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