Digital Humanities JournalThis article describes the authors’ experience teaching college students how to use Google Earth to create atlases of historical Silk Road journeys. It argues that a digital humanities classroom, with clearly defined assignments and extensive evaluation, is an exemplary setting for establishing and verifying genre conventions and review standards. Approaches that are developed for the classroom can be modified for professional settings. The authors introduce criteria for evaluating digital historical atlases as works of humanistic scholarship, and suggest that digital humanists do the same for other disciplines and genres as well.
