Ashley Rhein – The Digital Past Course Blog

Final Project

The Federal Theatre Project was not as glamorous, or as long-lasting, as some of its other New Deal programs. However, during the short four-year period that it existed, the FTP made waves. My historical question was: what impact did the Federal Theatre Project have on the culture of the United States?

Even before the onset of the Great Depression, theatre was struggling. Movies had grown in popularity, and traditional theatre found itself more and more pushed to the side to make way for cinema. “Unable to compete with the motion picture industry, actors, stagehands, technicians, musicians, and vaudeville performers found themselves displaced by technology even before the depression” ¹. Naturally, this forced theatre workers to look for employment elsewhere, and the onset of the Depression made this search all the more difficult.

The president at the time, FDR, started the New Deal in an attempt to ease the unemployment throughout the country, and also revitalize the arts. Through this New Deal, many different projects sprang up to deal with the issue, and one of them was the Federal Theatre Project. Some of the other projects, such as the Federal Arts Project and the Federal Music Project, gained success and a positive reputation. The FMP especially. The president and first lady “sponsored a series of nine concerts… in the White House between 1934 and 1942” ². However, unlike the other projects, the Federal Theatre Project did not succeed as a project in the long run, and it is considered “the least successful of all the projects in this artistic/political endeavor” ³.

Even thought the Federal Theatre Project was ultimately considered unsuccessful, the project still made an impact. It put theatre workers and actors to work again, and it produced many different plays and productions. One of the most notable productions of the FTP was the play Macbeth, which was altered to have a 19^th century Haitian background, and an all-black cast. The play was very successful in drawing an audience, and it “ran for 10 sold-out weeks at the Lafayette” ⁴. The success of the play encouraged an interest in more African American versions of classical tales.

I chose to focus my final project on the Federal Theatre Project because the subject of theatre interested me. As a child, I had always enjoyed being a part of my local school and church play productions, and, later on, I developed an interest in musicals and opera. I was lucky enough to see renditions of “Les Miserables” and “Phantom of the Opera” in person in Washington DC, and I was awed by them. Since then, I have always had an interest in theatre.

For my exhibit, my first skill page is a couple of image annotations. The images are photos taken at the outside of theatres in which the “Voodoo Macbeth” was shown. They depict the large crowds and enthusiasm of the people at the play. The second skill page is a timeline of the Federal Theatre Project, and it lists the major events of the FTP. The third skill page is a storymap that illustrates a few of the major cities that the popular “Voodoo Macbeth” toured. These three skill pages help to illustrate the impact that the FTP had through visual means.

The history of the 1930’s is interesting, and many different things happen within that decade. It was a time of great change. I’ve found that the digital humanities is a useful tool for studying history, as it allows for a more in-depth and personal view of peoples’ lives through time. There is value in that, and I intend to look for more digital humanities projects when I do historical research again.

Exhibit: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/the-ftp

Skill 7/Blog 9

For this skill and blog assignment, I chose to focus on folk music. During the 1930’s, folk music was very important. Most ‘sophisticated’ styles of music during the Great Depression became associated with the elites and the upper classes, such as jazz and opera. They were disconnected from the average American. Folk music, however, was relatable, did not put on airs, and was usually created by average people.

In the 1930’s, when the United States sought to unify itself through shared culture, folk music became a unifying factor. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent $27,315,217 in order to “rediscover and define American culture” ¹. One part of this massive undertaking was the upliftment and preservation of folk music. The president and the first lady invited folk musicians to play at official events, and they also “sponsored as series of nine concerts of folk music and dance in the White House between 1934 and 1942”². Their tactics worked. By their efforts, folk music grew popular among average Americans, and folk music became a style of music that was distinctly American.

Since the 1930s, folk music has evolved and gone through many transformations. Today, most would likely consider modern country music to be folk music. However, it is interesting to take a glance back at what folk music was initially like in the 1930’s when it became popular.

As I went through the audio collections in the Library of Congress, I began to realize why folk music became so popular and widespread. Unlike jazz or opera, folk music felt disconnected from what could be considered “the elite”. The feel of the music I listened to was casual, warm, and inviting. The tuneslisten were simpler and easy to remember, as well as easy to hum or whistle ³. And the singers sang about things that were also simple, easy to remember, and easily relatable and familiarlisten to the average non-elite American ⁴.

Before I took the time to actually listen to old style folk music, I had no idea what it sounded like. I’d seen pictures of folk artists with guitars and banjos, but I couldn’t picture the music they played. I imagined something similar to country music, with songs that typically focused on lost love and sorrow. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by how cheerful and mellow folk music could be. When describing music, I think it is important to include actual audio of the music as well. Without the audio, describing music is like describing color to someone who is blind.

A Guide to the Old Dominion

The tour that I chose for this assignment stretched from Hoover’s Airport in Washington DC down to a small town in Virginia called Ashland. I chose this tour because it set in an area that I am familiar with. I grew up in northern Virginia, and I was curious to learn more about the routes suggested by both the American Guide Series and The Green Book. In our reading from Shaffer, she wrote that the American Guide Series had attempted to capture the “real spirit” of the various regions throughout the US ¹. Even though I am a native to the area depicted in the tour, I don’t know all the historical and cultural details of the locations. Not to mention, this tour was written in the 1930s, and the guide likely included details that I did not know about.

The tour was interesting enough. I learned a little bit more about the history of several towns that I was familiar with. However, what really caught my attention was the Green Book project. I took the same tour that I had mapped out, and I entered the start and ending points, from DC to Ashland, Virginia. The Green Book route completely stopped in DC, and did not enter Virginia at all. I viewed the US map that listed all the safe locations in the country, and there were none at all in Virginia.

This Green Book project reminded me of the article “Mapping Racism and Assessing the Success of the Digital Humanities”. In that article, it illustrated the number of lynchings on the US map by county ². It’s one thing to hear about the number of lynchings in the US, but it is another to see it visually represented on a map. Similarly with the Green Book project, it was quite startling to see that Virginia, my home state, did not have even one establishment friendly to African Americans in the entire state.

It is saddening as well. A white American would have had little difficulty finding businesses that would accept them on the tour. But an African American would have been unable to find a business friendly to them in the entire state. A simple vacation in Virginia, a tour to see the sights, would be next to impossible for an African American, and there are likely more states that were void of any Green Book locations. Tourism had been encouraged in the Great Depression in order to foster a sense of pride and common culture in the US, but it’s clear that this was only available to a select few.

Tour Map: https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/28256ced8b3045dd2c400c8dbe9fa0ec/a-guide-to-the-old-dominion/index.html

Blog #8

Our visit to the Special Collections was enlightening. I really enjoyed flipping through the physical records of the primary sources we were shown. Looking through physical copies and objects is a different experience to viewing an online digital copy. Physical records practically force you to treat them with deliberate care, otherwise you risk damaging them. They force you to slow down and consume the information wholly. Too often when I search through sources online, my eyes will skip and skim down the page. But when I sit down with physical paper, I absorb much more information. Personally, I found it easier and much more enjoyable to go through physical records instead of digital ones.

The sources that my table examined was a group of documents related to the Federal Theater Project. The documents described different types of portable, low-cost theaters that people used in order to entertain people. Some theaters were as small as a shoebox, while others took place in a trailer. Entertainers would travel from one public space to another, and provide small, low-budget shows for audiences. During the Great Depression, many theaters closed down ¹. It’s likely that this decline in official theater productions caused a rise in less official, portable ones.

For scholars, the archive is an extremely valuable resource. The archive has a wealth of primary sources that offer useful information for whatever topics they are researching. Both digital and physical archives are useful, but both have their unique disadvantages. Physical copies are time consuming to search through, and they take up space. Digital copies, on the other hand, are easier and faster to access. However, digital copies lack context, and context is valuable for understanding a source. Information does not exist in a vacuum. Context matters. The Library of Congress recreated the exact style and layout of Thomas Jefferson’s unusual library just to preserve the original context of his library ².

Even the manner in which physical sources are arranged provides context. Digital copies of sources do not have the same level of context that physical ones do. However, they are very useful for the general public. While a scholar or researcher might be willing to travel to a specific library in order to wade through piles of paper in order to find the information and details they want, the average person might not. Digital sources lack the same context as physical sources, but typically that context is not necessary unless the person searching is a scholar.

However, not all sources can be easily digitized. At our visit to the Special Collections, there were a variety of sources that were available for us to look at. Most of them were physical paper copies of letters, notes, and diagrams. Those sources can be digitized with relative ease, but there were sources that would be difficult to digitize. Most notably, on one of the other tables there was an old theater costume. This sort of source is best seen physically. The only ways to digitize a costume is through a series of pictures, or perhaps a video that shows the costume through multiple angles. Both ways are inferior to viewing the costume in person.

Skill #5/ Blog #6

Initially when I began this assignment, my historical question was “how did folklore and superstitions from different cultures evolve in the US?” When I first came up with the question, I was unsure how it would be answered, or even if it could be answered with the documents available. As for why I chose the topic, I have always had a fascination for stories, customs, and beliefs regarding the supernatural. When I saw the categories of folklore and superstitions in the Amercian Life History collection, I knew I had found a subject that I would enjoy diving into. This was the reason why I ultimately chose to work with my own corpus. While the other items in the class corpus covered a wide range of topics, my own corpus dealt almost exclusively with folklore and stories regarding superstitious customs and the supernatural.

My experience with Voyant Tools was interesting. Once certain keywords are added to the stopwords, the tools become potentially useful for identifying and exploring word patterns and trends. I experimented with many different features, but my favorite feature was the Cirrus one. It arranged the words in a manner that was visually engaging, with a unique arrangement and colors, as well as useful for finding trends. My second favorite feature was TermsBerry because it also arranged common words in a visually engaging manner. With TermsBerry, the words were arranged in bubbles. The third favorite feature was the Links feature. It linked various related words together in a sort of web that you could drag and move around.

As I used the different features in Voyant, I began to realize that there is an answer to my historical question, or at least a part of an answer. Unfortunately, I did not discover any information from my corpus about how folklore and superstition evolved, but I might have learned more about its place during the 1930s. Throughout the different tools I used, some of the most recurring words were ‘family’, ‘home’, and ‘mother’. This inspired me to think about the role of folklore and superstition, and I realized that folklore and superstitions are learned and passed down through family. They require a base, such as a family, in order to survive. In the text, “Southern Customs”, an example of this is given. The speaker detailed several of the superstitious remedies for illnesses that were passed down through her mother’s family¹. Also in the test “Myer”, there is another example of this occurring. The speaker detailed a story told to him by his father about a strange, potentially supernatural, event that occurred to him, and he also talked about some of the superstitions that his grandfather taught him as a child².

Through the use of Voyant tools, I came up with a new question to consider the topic of folklore and superstition with. Through the use of close reading of the texts, I discovered an answer. While I was not able to answer my original question, I was able to answer a different one. Folklore and superstitions were passed down through families, and it is through families that they survive.

Blog Post #5

The interview that I chose was the one with Uncle Bob Ledbetter. He seemed to me to be a very kind, older man with a positive outlook on his life. The tone of his voice was cheerful and pleasant. Without the audio recording, it would be more difficult to discern his feelings when he spoke. The audio transcript gives a general idea of how he might have spoken, and the tone he used, but the audio recording gives a clearer picture.

Another way in which the recording is useful is in examining the accents of African Americans at the time. This is a topic that has come up more than once in our class readings. Transcripts cannot portray the nuances of an accent. This is an issue that came up in Lauren Tilton’s article, “Race and Place”. She noted how the interviewers for the ex-slave narratives solidified the many different accents of the interviewees into one general accent.¹ With the audio recording, there’s little need for an inaccurate, accented transcript because the accent can be heard clearly and accurately through the audio. Because of this, these recordings are a valuable resource for linguists who wish to study the dialects, accents, and speech patterns of African Americans during the early 20th century. ² Many of the recordings are not well made, unfortunately. I went through several different interviews before I chose Bob Ledbetter’s, and many of them had sound issues. However, from the bits and pieces that are clear, they give an accurate depiction of the different ways that African Americans spoke at the time.

Bob Ledbetter’s interview did not specifically go into a lot of detail about his experiences as a slave. He was born in 1861, the same year the Civil War started, and he was only four years old when it ended in 1865. However, it is clear that despite being technically free, he did not reap all the benefits. He never went to school, and he never learned basic math skills. He could only read because his father taught him, and later on he taught himself how to write. As a grown man, it appears that a great deal of his work involved cotton picking and other manual labor. Even though he was a freed man, he did not have the opportunities of a white man. ³

What surprised me about this interview was how cheerful Bob was. He talked about the songs he used to sing, he laughed and was very friendly. What surprised me the most was his opinion of the people he worked for, the Norris family. He described Mr. Norris as “the meanest man there was around”, and yet he claims that he was never mistreated. It’s possible that he glossed over the Norris family because of the interviewer John Lomax, who was white. However, he may have been telling the truth. It’s difficult to know. ⁴

The timeline that I created is simple and small, because Bob Ledbetter gave very little concrete information about the events in his life. Most of the events I figured out through some basic subtraction and guesswork. The second timeline layer consisted of the dates of the beginning and end of the Civil War, the Stock Market Crash, and the Outbreak of WW2. Usually historians tend to focus on the large events of history, and ignore the smaller, more personal events of lesser-known individuals. My timeline takes Bob Ledbetter’s personal history and sets it against the backdrop of these large events in history. I believe that adding them both together gives them both context, and it allows for a fuller picture of history.

Timeline Links:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YUvdDq2A0NgtyE-r-55cbmag8lcF51GmY-Odjl1J4Hc/edit#gid=0

Blog Post #4

There has been a lot of advancement in the areas of feminism and equality since the 1930s. Segregation no longer exists in the United States, the Civil Rights Act passed, and more and more women are the workforce than ever before. However, while there have been huge strides for equality, there are still some kinks that need to be ironed out.

Most people with access to the internet use Google for all their internet searches. A few use Bing and other search engines, but for the most part, Google is the king of search engines. Google, like all search engines and databases, is run by an algorithm, and all algorithms are created by people. And people have biases, and these biases bleed into the algorithms that people create. 1

When one types various keywords into the Google search bar, a lot of different recommended searches will appear below. When someone types in keywords that include ‘women should’ or ‘women should not’, the suggestions that appear below more often than not reflect a sexist bias. These suggestions include “Women should: stay at home, be slaves, be in the kitchen, not speak in church.”2

These ideas are not accepted in mainstream society, like they were in the 1930s. However, they still exist in the fringes of our society. I suspect that it will take several years, maybe a few decades, before these ideas fade away completely. The algorithms that create these autosuggestions have an impact on this. Everyone uses Google, from small children to elders. If a group of children come across these autosuggestions when they surf the internet, then these sexist ideas will continue to live on into the next generations, even though they are harmful. This is why Google should work to revise their search algorithms.

We as a society have made great strides towards equality, but there are a few small steps left. Even something as seemingly small as a search algorithm can help to make those steps faster.

Skill Assignment #3 Blog Post

Originally, I used this image in my first Omeka skill assignment. I chose it again for this skill assignment because I thought that it was a very poignant depiction of a common occurrence in the 1930’s. This photograph is of a farm auction that took place in Derby, Connecticut. In the 1930’s, auctions were common as farms foreclosed due to unpaid debt. Many farmers lost their land and their most valuable possessions because of these foreclosure auctions. 1

My historical question was: what new perspectives can I find from glitching the photograph of the farm auction? When I started the assignment for glitching the photograph, I wasn’t sure if I could tease out a meaning from an essentially corrupted image. However, I still went forward with the assignment, unsure if I would find something worth writing about. I borrowed my grandmother’s mac laptop, the only mac computer nearby, and I set to work. Thanks to the tutorial posted to slack by a fellow classmate, I managed to successfully glitch the photo. The first glitch split the auction crowd in two and flipped the left side to the right, and vice versa. The next glitch desaturated a large section of the photograph of most of its color, and the last glitch almost completely removed all of the color from the bottom half.

The glitches forced me to look at the photograph in a new way. However, it was not easy for me. I had to look at the photograph in a way that went “against the grain of history”. 2 The first thoughts that came to my mind when I saw the glitches were confused and unimpressed. How could I find a meaning or new perspective from a corrupted and disjointed picture? I stared at the photo and wracked my brain for several minutes.

Then I realized something about the subject of the photograph. The subject was that of a farm auction, an event that must have been very distressing for the people whose property and belongings were being sold off against their will. The glitched photograph showed the auction and its attendees as split up and almost completely erased from the image. As I examined the photograph, I thought of what it would’ve been like if these farmers did not have to auction off their lands and belongings, if these auctions had not occurred. Many people would not have been forced to move and find a life elsewhere. Many things would have been different, if those auctions did not happen.

Exhibit References

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/farm-auction–derby–conn/farm-auction–derby–conn

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/admin/items/show/177

References

Ganzel, Bill. Penny Auctions Fight Foreclosures during the Depression, https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/money_10.html.

Kramer, Michael J. “Glitching History: Using Image Deformance to Rethink Agency and Authenticity in the 1960s American Folk Music Revival.” Current Research in Digital History, http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-08-glitching-history/.

Blog Post #2: The Digitization of History

Tony Guidone’s lecture was one that I, for the most part, agree with. The digitization of historical data and information is immensely important, as it provides previously difficult to access historical data to anyone with an internet connection. Data that would previously take hours or days can now be found in a matter of minutes, all due to the digitization of data. Personally, I find that concept to be very encouraging, because I have always believed that such information should be readily available and easy to access.

Many times in the past, I have come across topics that have interested me in my free time, and I have been inspired to research them, only to find that the information I sought was in some records office several states away, or in another country. For example, I have always had an interest in researching my family tree. I want to see how far back I can trace my family lineage. My father did a similar project when he was my age. He spent months going through old family and court records, and he eventually crafted a family tree that was highly detailed for the 20th, 19th, and 18th centuries. Further back, the tree is sparse and uncertain, and it ends with one man who lived in England in the 1600s.

Ever since I saw the sparse areas in the older parts of my family tree, I have wanted to fill it in and see how far I can go, and I have wanted to do so for both my dad’s family and my mother’s family. However, I keep facing the same wrinkle every time: the ancestors I wish to research all lived and died in Europe or in South America, and nearly all their records are in other languages. It is my hope that one day those records will be digitized and accessible online. As I am the stereotypical broke college student, traveling to Europe and South America is out of the question. So for me, the idea of such information becoming digitized and available to the public is exciting and filled with possibilities.

However, I understand the flipside of this issue as well. As information and data becomes digitized, the context is often lost. This can be a real problem when trying to understand history accurately. Ian Milligan is one of many who addressed this issue, and he noted that since many researchers are relying on information found online the “research process is built upon an often misunderstood foundation”(Milligan, 2013). Miriam Posner is another who addressed this issue. She noted how data, such as historical photos, was being stored in disorganized digital lists, completely without context or organization.

I do believe that this is a problem, as historical information and data requires context in order to truly understood. However, I believe that ultimately the digitization of historical data is a very good thing, and I believe that over time, and through trial and error, we will find out how to best deal with this issue.

Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, University of Toronto Press, 27 Nov. 2013, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/527016.Posner, Miriam. “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction.” Miriam Posners Blog, 25 June 2015, http://miriamposner.com/blog/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction/.

Blog Post #1

Originally, I only signed onto this course because I had little interest in programming classes, and this course seemed the least likely to make me design and program my own website. However, the more I read of the syllabus and course description, the more interested in the material I became. I have always been interested in history, usually the older the better. In high school, I took AP US History, but unfortunately, the class barely touched on the topic of the 1930’s and the New Deal. As such, I have very little in-depth knowledge of this time frame, but I am very curious to learn more. From what I have learned so far, the 1930’s were a time of major changes in technological advancements, and such advancements only continued as the years went by. I found it very interesting that companies such as IBM existed and utilized the punch card as early as the 1930’s.
I was assigned the digital project “Robots Reading Vogue”. This project consists of several collections of different types of data that has been compiled from every single Vogue magazine from the first until the most recent. Some of these data collections consist of the picture averages of all Vogue covers per decade, the types and frequency of words that appear in the magazines over time, the colors and hue types that were used in the magazines throughout the decades, and data related to the types of advertisements that have been published in each magazine over time.
This type of information can be highly valuable to anyone researching trends and patterns in a major magazine over time, especially to students in the digital humanities. There is even a collection of data in this project related to the number of students who have used the information in this project in the past. Overall, the project itself is very easy and intuitive to use, and if one has the interest and time to devote to analyzing the data themselves, the patterns and trends of Vogue magazine throughout the decades are very interesting. I would be very curious to learn if there are more digital projects provide similar information for other major magazines

Dauterive, Jessica. “What Is Digital Humanities?” Slides, https://slides.com/jdauteri/what-is-digital-humanities#/6.
King, Lindsay, and Peter Leonard. Robots Reading Vogue, http://dh.library.yale.edu/projects/vogue/.
Posner, Miriam. “How Did They Make That?” Miriam Posners Blog, 1 Feb. 2014, https://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that/.