Hazel Flores – The Digital Past Course Blog

Final Blog Post

In examining the entire semester and the different topics we touched on as a class concerning the 1930’s, I found myself constantly going back to the idea of how FDR’s New Deal was to sort of be the reprisal of the America that existed before the Great Depression, (at least in terms of pride). But in thinking about that, I began to question how “great” that America really was, and if the New Deal was any better, and I realized it would probably depend on who you asked. America has never and still is not completely 100% equal for all, and it 100% was not equal during the 1930’s, at least in terms of the lives of black and white Americans. That being said, I decided to formulate my final exhibit question around this concept by asking “How was 1930’s America different for white and black people?”. I examined this question by utilizing certain skill assignments that we had used during the semester such as image annotation ¹, story mapping, and glitching. I felt that these three skill assignments best corresponded with the topics I was going to more closely analyze which were the differences in art, everyday life, and travel. Each skill assignment allowed me to go more in depth with my analysis than I had previously thought I would be able to.

While doing this final exhibit, I was able to reflect more regarding the actual history of the 1930’s and how all the skill assignments we learned this semester actually helped me learn all of the things that I did. It helped me gain a better understanding of the impact that digital technology has, and how as ethical digital citizens, we have a duty to use technology and the information on it responsibly. For example, had it not been for the glitching article ², I wouldn’t have been able to draw the conclusions I did regarding Augusta Savage, and the glitched image that I included in my final exhibit. In my final exhibit I also included a storymap that mapped a trip from New York to Missouri, and to do that I had to utilize the “Navigating the Green Book” project ³ so I could determine what stops an African American traveler would make during that time. All of these things, when utilized correctly, transform history and the ability to understand history, into a more modern thing. As a viewer, as a student, when you interact with history while using technology and new platforms you may have not previously known of before, you’re forced to get a better understanding of the content because you are actively interacting with the content. It’s far different from just reading a textbook or article about it. But with that ability to interact more with history through the use of technology, comes the responsibility of being professional and ethical when doing so. For our lecture on Digital Citizenship, we read an article about how a George Mason University professor had his students create a hoax on wikipedia ⁴ and that alone sparked outrage, even though it was a lighthearted assignment. So if anything this just cemented more the idea that what you say or do and how interact with online digital content is extremely important. Everyone needs to be ethical and responsible so as not to spread false information. In a general sense I feel like the more that digital humanities becomes a bigger place for scholarship and the more that people actually take digital humanities seriously, the more that we will see conversations concerning digital citizenship in the news.

In all, my ideas regarding digital humanities and 1930’s history have evolved and grown because of this course. By combing history with digital projects, I was able to interact more with the content I was learning, and able to gain a better understanding of both digital humanities and history all at once. Through using the two, I was able to formulate broad historical questions, and then closely analyze those questions with each skill assignment we were given. This course provided me a better grasp of the history of the 1930’s, but more so than that, it provided me with new resources that I will be able to utilize in future project and scholarship to come.

Impact of segregation on tourism

When creating my own map related to the American Guide Series, I chose to create my Map centered on Virginia, particularly in the Gainesville area because it’s where i’m from. The “Virginia: A guide to the Old Dominion- Tour 4a” ¹, focuses on the town of Gainesville all the way to Front Royal, with stops in the Shenandoah Valley.

There’s an extensive list of stops that can be made when traveling through this area, and this is one of the tours that’s considered short in the Virginia guide series. In comparison to the Navigating the Green Book map, which shows little to no areas for stopping in both 1947 & 1956.

Virginia as a whole had no stops for African Americans at all in 1947, demonstrating a vast difference in the tourism experience for white people and black people in 1947 and in the 1900’s in general. There’s only one stop for black people that was added in Northern Virginia in 1956 and that’s at a hotel in Warrenton, where as there’s references and descriptions of multiple lodges and hotels in the Tour 4a stop descriptions.

As described in this exhibit by Utah State University, “the American Guide Series was a successful contribution to American culture and literature” ². This is true, but only for those “Americans” who had the privilege of traveling to the locations mentioned in the guide series without segregation limiting them. Aside from that point, analyzing the maps also made me think about how mapping is able to display different inequalities in history. For example, in our class discussion concerning mapping, we were able to analyze redlining in America through the mapping inequality project ³. This further enforces and demonstrates to me as someone analyzing history and mapping, that a lot of history is described in beautiful sort of flowery language and glazes over how differently people of the time experienced that “history” depending on the color of their skin, class differences, gender, etc..

Special Collections

The Federal Theater Project, while heavily criticized, was one of the only (if not the only) occasions when the government actively supported and put money into the arts. Our visit to special collections and exploration of certain artifacts from the Federal Theater Project allowed us an in person look at actual materials that were created or written regarding or for theatrical performances for the FTP. My own opinion was genuinely affected by being able to see actual artifacts from the FTP because the article that my table paid particular attention to was a proposal by someone talking about the importance of the FTP and the arts, and it made me realize even more how little the government puts funding into the arts and values the arts and theater. Even when there was a government funded program for theater, people involved in theater/arts were still trying to convince people to care about it. The archive also serves as a means to research and gain a better understanding and appreciation for the effort of those involved in the Federal Theater Project productions. For example, when reading about the voodoo Macbeth play in the Library of Congress’ article, the reader gets the idea of the impact of the play, but not necessarily the effort or what the production looked like.¹ So with archives such as Special Collections in the George Mason University Library, researchers are able to physically hold and see real life artifacts from actual productions.

Something that was significantly interesting about our visit to Special Collections was that archivists do have a say in what gets digitized or not, but only to a certain extent. When money is involved, certain items can get digitized faster or be prioritized over other items. This could be because they were paid to digitize them faster, or it could be because they were given to Special Collections from a donor to the archive, and so of course they get priority. This did spark a question in my head about how money influences history, not only in Special Collections, but in all archives everywhere. Aside from that however, archivists do get to decide sometimes if items are just genuinely unimportant or important. They also get a say in how something will be digitized, however it’s generally a photograph if it’s a 3D object. They also make sure to have rules and regulations concerning the access to the items in order to protect their quality.² This ensures all researchers are able to look at whatever artifacts they want to see and know that they’re in good condition and similar conditions to the way they were when they were produced.

Special Collections proved to be valuable to us as students, and their importance to actual researchers is far greater. Our visit demonstrated to me just another reason as to how technology is an important aspect of the recording of history and the impact of digital history today.

Distant Reading

The American Life Histories collection, created under the Federal Writer’s Project, serves as a broad corpus of information and firsthand accounts from a time that seems so incredibly different from now. Many questions and ideas can be created when examining the life histories included in the American Life Histories collection.

While my initial question of “How did the New Deal era effect dating and social customs?” worked for my own ten document corpus that I assembled, it didn’t work as well with the classroom one. I made folders on my laptop for four different years that many of the documents were created in and then ultimately decided on the documents created in the year 1938. From there I input that into Voyant and noticed the major words in the word cloud were: 1- the website for the library of congress and 2- resources. Both which I new weren’t words actually important to the content of the document, so I added them to the list of words to be ignored. Upon analyzing the generated word cloud from the 1938 documents, I noticed there was a sort of family and home life theme.

Words such as house, room, Mrs., and family appeared multiple times, thus I thought it would be better to shift my focus to that and changed my historical question to “How did the Great Depression era effect family and home life?”. While classroom lectures had briefly touched on family life during the Dust Bowl and we read about how said families had to move to different places with kids in wagons, as mentioned in ¹, there wasn’t an entire lesson focused on how family life changed because of the social and economic factors of the time. In the American Yawp – Chapter V. ², there is mention of a particular woman’s letter to the first lady about her fear and sadness of bringing a baby into the world they were in at the time (the time of the Great Depression). Both of these came to mind when I was doing a close reading of the document titled Early Railroad Travel, where a father described how he moved his kids from Kansas to Oregon. By doing a closer reading on one of the included documents in the corpus, I was able to conclude that one way families were effected was by the fact that many had to move around for work opportunities. In this way, Voyant was extremely helpful because I was able to pick the specific document because I noticed it was the one that used the word “children” the most.

In conclusion, there’s obviously more research and evaluation that can be done using voyant (and in general) of the corpus. Voyant proved itself to be extremely useful in both a distant and close reading sense. By using Voyant, I was able to draw certain conclusions regarding my own historical question, and I will be utilizing this resource for future projects.

Uncle Bob Ledbetter

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Throughout everyone’s educational careers, the mistake of slavery is taught over and over and over again. We learn about those who fought to abolish it, about those who didn’t, and about what the slaves were used for. However, very rarely are the voices of the actual slaves heard. By listening to the audio tracks in this collection, it makes it that much more real that the slaves were real life people, with real life memories, and real lives. And that realization just makes the history of slavery all that much more awful, even though it already was before. In the interview with Uncle Bob Ledbetter ¹, a former slave, Ledbetter describes quick memories he has of his life, but he doesn’t even remember his own birthday. He claims he never knew it. He never learned to read or write either. It just shows such a stark contrast of the way people live today and the way things once were. Thus, there’s usefulness in that it demonstrates a sort of more active level of history. It’s not just text that one is reading about things that happened in the past. The listener actually gets to hear the voice of history, which is all that much more powerful. This mimics the story told through Jennifer Rittenhouse’s novel as well, where a man travels through the south, interviewing the people of an ever changing America ².

For the timeline included above, the major thing that becomes apparent once there’s a visualization of Bob Ledbetter’s history is that there’s not much “history” to it. So, upon realizing that, it makes one thing differently of the interview that was conducted. It’s no question that Bob Ledbetter had more history. He was a 73 year old man by the time the interview was conducted, but one can question why more of his memories weren’t recorded. Then when listening to the interview and how it was recorded, the listener realizes it’s because it was a white man recording the interview and dominating the conversation. The interviewer who interviewed Uncle Bob Ledbetter was John A. Lomax. Now, this isn’t to say Lomax purposely dominated every aspect of the interview in a malicious way, however Lomax repeatedly asked Ledbetter to sing the same song, when he could have asked him to tell him about a memory from when he was younger. So with that being said, why would Ledbetter speak about something he wasn’t asked about, when he was raised in a way in which black people were taught to do as the white man said. Consciously or subconsciously, those sort of things effected all the interviews in this collection. Of course, this shouldn’t take away from the collection. It is still a valuable piece of history that can be used in many different ways, however it does make one realize how the culture and social customs of a certain time most definitely effect the way history is recorded, and one must keep that in mind when evaluating any sort of historical account.

The Power of Art

The creation of art and the inspiration behind art pieces has changed significantly over time- as it obviously should. Life, society, politics, and so on are constantly transforming through each generation. However, a way to link new art to old art is the creative digital art form of glitching. Michael J. Kramer delves into the power of glitching images taken during the American Folk Music revival, and the glitched images themselves create a whole other meaning that previously wouldn’t have been seen had they not been glitched ¹ . The photograph I chose to analyze and glitch was one titled “Augusta Savage posing with her sculpture Realization”, created as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, pictured here. I chose to analyze this photograph because I felt that it represented African American woman and African American people’s involvement in the New Deal era very well. It revealed that African American’s were an integral part of the Federal Art Program, and shows how important art was during the Harlem Renaissance, and the Great Depression era in general. The fact that an African American woman was documented posing next to her art that was funded by the government, speaks volumes about the change occurring in America at the time, and the obvious need of art and its power to bring others together. While we haven’t delved extensively into the Harlem Renaissance, we have touched on other African American artists, such as Leadbelly, as well as other american artists who demonstrated the power of music and the arts in a time where america was feeling less enthusiastic. Morris Dickstein, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in an article specifically about how song, dance, and art brought people out of the depression. ²

He makes a point to emphasize that the arts of the time were not a form of escapism, but rather a “speed, energy and movement at a time of economic stagnation and social malaise”. The photograph and documentation of Augusta Savage with her sculpture proves there was a speed and energy at that time. African American’s were just as much as a part of this artistic movement as were white people, and they were being more recognized for it.

With these theme of change and the power of art in my head, I found myself thinking about how art effects America now, and how art from the New Deal/ Great Depression era, still impacts the people of today. How did the artists of that era feel when creating their art? Did they know it would be so impactful or did they just think of it as a federally funded project for the Federal Art Project. And lastly, would something like the Federal Art Project work today? In analyzing the Augusta Savage photograph, and other documentations of artists at the time, I felt as though America was just in a different head space at the time. Documentation of artists with their work isn’t necessarily created today in the way it was back then. People wanted to boost morale, they wanted to change. America currently seems more divided than ever so the idea of art being used in such an obvious way by the government, and being documented by the government, doesn’t seem like something that would work. However, I do feel that interacting with the art of the past, as we did when creating our exhibits and the glitched image, does allow for people to get a deeper understanding of the art of the Great Depression/ New Deal era, and demonstrates that art is an extremely powerful thing that should be considered important and valid.

Keyword Searching and Its Impact in the Digital Age

Tony Guidone’s presentation went more in depth with the topic of keyword searching, and he offered a more detailed idea of the drawbacks and the benefits that key word searching provide. Text searching has changed the way people interact with information both academically, and in other more recreational, simple ways. The entire concept of Google is based on keyword searching. But in terms of its academic impact, keyword searching has made it much easier for people to interact with old historical artifacts and use it in a way that’s “smarter not harder”. With keyword searching, there is no need to read an entire source to find what you’re looking for. This does significantly create social change because it alters the relationship regular people, not just scholars, have with digital projects and digital data in general. However, even though there is accessibility gained in keyword searching, there’s also things that are lost. For example, the original reading experience and the context that comes with reading and examining a whole work is lost because the reader is only looking for what they need, and thus is only being shown results that serve their research purposes.

In a blog post done by Miriam Posner in which she writes about a presentation she gave regarding Humanities Data ¹ , she explains the importance of data and it is evident that keyword searching plays a vital part in her research. However, she emphasizes the individual and their interpretation of the data that’s analyzed. What is obvious through both of these presentations is that research, digital data, and the humanities are deeply intertwines, and the relationship between the three things are only continuing to change with evolving technology and the way users choose to interact with it.

Blog Post #1

Before the first week of class, I was a little anxious as to what this History/IT class would entail, but upon taking it i’ve become excited for the course and the things we will be learning in the future. One of the main things that I found interesting during the first week was the fact that all technology now isn’t necessarily new, but rather an evolved version of previous technology. The concept of technology being ever evolving is interesting on it’s own, but realizing the level at which history has a part in the evolution of it just makes me want to delve deeper into the subject. For example, the fact that the little folder icon on your laptop exists because of the creation of the filing cabinet and manila envelopes during a time that record keeping became important just demonstrates all the working parts that go into the creation and evolution of things; time period, need, etc. So I’m excited to explore different data sets and resources that rely on historical records and see how people have decided to use and share these things to make them more easily accessible to people of today’s age.

The project I was assigned to review was the Mapping Occupation Project, published by the University of Georgia. The project is considered an exploratory map (following the DH Field Guide), that details U.S. Army posts during the time of Reconstruction. It also provides descriptions for the data that’s being shown, such as historical background, the purpose of the army posts, and their movement throughout the period of reconstruction. The publishers of this project say that the date shared on this map can be used “ as a guideline through a complex period, a massive data source, and a first step in capturing the federal government’s new reach into the countryside.” The Mapping Occupation Project was created through the gathering of information from manuscript sources in the national archives as well as repositories. It’s also downloadable which makes it’s accessibility all that much greater. The digital tools and transformations included within this project do add to the scholarship considering the creators could have just created the map to give a visual idea of where Army posts were and left it at that, but instead they dove in further by providing information, context, and “spatial narrative” to the data. It’s interactive in that you can zoom in and out of the data and the way in which it’s displayed is visually appealing and simple. It transforms the data from the archives into something that people of today’s age can use and explore for their own research purposes.

Sources:

Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbit, Mapping Occupation: Force, Freedom, and the Army in Reconstruction, http://mappingoccupation.org, published March 2015, accessed (9/3/19).