Author: Jessica Burgess

The WPA: Defining American Culture and Parting Thoughts

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/jessicabfinal/jessicabfinal

Starting this class I was worried that I would be unable to keep up with the technical aspects. As a historian I knew that there is an ever growing world of digital humanities and I didn’t even realize that I was a consumer of digital history. I have found that as a budding archivist there is a great deal of knowledge packed away in digital archives.  1

 Through this class I gained confidence in my technical abilities and learned just how valuable and relevant digital humanities can be. Combing through the digital collections of the Library of Congress I learned a great deal about the New Deal. I knew that FDR pulled America out of the depths of the despair in the Great Depression, but I didn’t realize how the New Deal encompassed all types of occupations. 2.


I rooted my final exhibit around the way that the Works Progress Administration had an official mission as essentially a large scale employment agency. 3 However, in an unofficial capacity it set out to establish a national identity and define what it meant to be American. 4

I decided to look at the different ways that the WPA was documenting the American people or “the folk”. I really liked seeing the different ways that the WPA worked and how they made a difference to the American people and way of life. In my exhibit I highlighted the Federal Writer’s Project, Federal Theatre Project, Farm Security Administration, and Federal Music Project. I tried to show the diverse ways that the WPA defined what it meant to be American. Before this class I knew that the New Deal was an effort by FDR to put people back to work, but seeing the ways that people from all walks of life were included was fascinating. I knew nothing about the Federal One Project before this class. Learning how they recorded and documented American culture all over the country in so many different ways was important to support my argument. As a result, I feel like I have a better comprehension of the New Deal and the time period it encompassed. 

As a historian and prospective archivist I am much more comfortable with old paper than I am with new technology.  I found that through this class and my blog research I recognized digital humanities tools in the real world. I found the Knightlabs tools to be really helpful in expressing complex ideas with interesting and engaging ways.  In my exhibit I chose to incorporate the mapping, timeline and soundcite tools. I really liked how they were interactive and invited the viewer or reader into the material.  I personally encountered some of the Knightlabs tools in the “wild” so to speak. 5Because I had worked with the timeline previously I was able to better investigate the material in the article I found. 

The other Knightlabs tool that I really liked, even though it was buggy and difficult to work with was SoundCite. I discussed Sidney Robertson Cowell and the work she did in California recording the folk music of migrants. 6 I was able to match portraits with the recordings she made and it really brought the immigrants stories to life, using the story map also illustrated the North Carolina tour I chose really well. 

Overall, I learned that even if I don’t have plans to go into digital history it really behooves me to learn about how digital historians are using DH tools to bring history to the world in engaging and interesting ways. It also helps to have a working technical knowledge of these tools as they can carry over into other real world experiences.  I became much more confident in my technological skills and gained a wealth of knowledge about the New Deal.

The WPA Documenting the American Folk

The Works Progress Administration, founded in 1935 as part of FDR’s New Deal, set out to document American culture. The methods that they used to record the folk vary from spoken interviews, songs, photographs, written interviews, and state guides.

As part of the Federal One project the Federal Writers Project was tasked with reaching out and recording the stories of the American people. 

The FWP was managed at both the state and federal levels. John Lomax was a folklore editor and in March 1939, he and his wife Ruby set out on a journey that would traverse 6500 miles across the southern states. 1

John Lomax out on the road. 2

They made recordings of folksong of all kinds, ballads, cowboy songs, fiddle tunes, lullabies, and many more. In all there were more than 25 hours from over 300 different performers, all with their own unique story to tell and culture to represent. 3

 In addition to folksongs they recorded sermons like the one in Houston, Texas, April 12, 1939 by John Lowry Goree. 4

John Lomax was not the only FWP contributor to take to the open road. In the 1930’s Sidney Robertson Cowell was one of the folk music collectors associated with the Northern California WPA. She was perhaps the greatest activist in California when it came to collecting and documents the migrant experience. She interviewed and recorded the culture and songs of immigrants and their families. 5

As part of her collection Cowell also took still photographs of the people she chronicled. Her endeavor was “ one of the earliest ethnographic field projects to document European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-language folk music in one region of the United States”. 6

 “Less than a quarter of the total adult group.” Forms part of a group of field materials documenting unaccompanied singing and preaching in the Russian language performed during services of the Russian Molokan Church, Potrero Hill, San Francisco on September 14, 1938, collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell. 7

In addition to the FWP other Federal One Projects documented the American folk. The Federal Music Project and Farm Security Administration also fell under the Works Progress Administration. 8

The Federal Music Project was regionally managed and really showed the distinctiveness of the different parts of the US. This was vital, the southern hymnals were very different from the migrant songs of the people in Northern California. Just as the people were distinct so too was their music. 9

One project took place in the Federal Music Project Office, Jacksonville, Florida. The performer, Zora Neale Hurston sang a number of songs that helped to document the way that music featured in the culture and work of slaves. 10 Many of them are “work” songs, their beats keep time for the task they are doing. The music that the FMP recorded is a treasury of folklore, some telling stories and others long traditions from generations past.

The Farm Security Administration took more than 270,000 photographs during its effort to document the trials and tribulations of the American people across the country. The famous Migrant Mother image taken by Dorothea Lange is part of this collection. It shows the lives of the people displaced by the Dust Bowl and downtrodden from the Great Depression. It documents the many camps that sprung up and the people that lived there. The very people that the New Deal set out to help. These photos are perhaps the best record of how the New Deal was helping people.

The famous Migrant Mother 11

Throughout the New Deal era the Works Progress Administration sought to define the American people. What they did was document just how much of a “melting pot” the United States really is. Through the recording of local music, written interviews, and thousands of photographs the Federal One project illustrated the unique and engaging American Folk.

Close vs Distant Reading

Using the text analysis tool Voyant was both helpful and confusing. When I created my own corpus I essentially used a keyword search 1 in the “American Life Histories” 2 collection. My historical question was “ How did the role of Motherhood change in the New Deal Era?” I entered the word “motherhood” in the search field and it yielded no results. So from there I tried “mother”, here I was more successful. I found around 15 documents and I decided to use them as my corpus. 

From there I turned to the Voyant tool to look at our class created corpus for the Federal Writers Project collection. When I first uploaded the corpus I was just interested in playing with the word art tools.

Using Miriam Posner’s 3 tutorial was really helpful as a starting point. I especially liked the section “What the heck are we looking at?” and she was correct it is initially overwhelming. But as I continued to use the Voyant tools I understood them a little more.

I found the trends tool the most helpful. I repeated the process of using the terms “mother” and “motherhood” to investigate the documents. I found that the documents with the most mentions were the ones that I had contributed to the corpus. There were other options that I was able to look through though, just not very many.   I think that in this case the corpus was just too varied in what each of us was looking for. I found that in looking for an answer to my historical question my corpus was a better fit. 

As I read through them I found a somewhat surprising answer to my question. Motherhood hasn’t really changed much since the New Deal Era. Mothers seem to be the main caregivers, responsible for the children and the family in general in all the domestic type duties. They were the ones that made sure that traditions were carried on and that knowledge was passed down from previous generations. Mother’s have always been the bedrock of the family. 

Northern Arizona Tour

Here is the link for my Map https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/01c6c4260be82d66c0fbd0d6fc4f3a1c/northern-arizona-a-journey-through-the-red-rocks-pines-and-canyons/index.html

Using the WPA guidebook Arizona: A State Guide was actually a lot of fun. I chose Arizona because I am an Arizona native and I was curious to see what parts of that beautiful state the WPA thought would be interesting to see. The guidebook itself was pretty thorough, the tour I chose had many stops and even today would make for a great day or even a weekend trip. 

I think as a whole the Guidebook Series 1 is an interesting resource and I am glad that the Library of Congress has held on to them and made them available digitally. 2

Looking at the green book map of my trip was interesting, there was not one single stop on my tour that was also on the green book 3

. I could take this to mean that Arizona was not the most diverse of places at the time or that it was simply too rural and under developed to warrant much information. As most of the tour I looked at was outdoors and naturalistic areas I don’t think that there would be a great deal of difference in the experiences of white or African American tourists. That being said I am sure that stops at diners or hotels along the way may have varied. I did some research and found that unfortunately there a great deal of Jim Crowism in Arizona at the time. A recent article discusses how Flagstaff was segregated.  4 5 6

So minorities on this tour would have had to deal with segregation as they toured the state. 

The heatmap of Arizona. From Navigating the Green Book Project
The cluster view of my Arizona State Guide tour. There is nothing available. The only thing that came up was much further south in Arizona and not on my tour. From Navigating the Green Book Project

Mapping data like this is a wonderful visual tool. Seeing that there are virtually no stops from the green book in all of Northern Arizona was disappointing. It was just emptiness, no safe zones. I sincerely hope that the emptiness is also indicative of the rural-ness and that it was not a dangerous place for people of color. But realistically I think that the lack of safe places means that overall it was dangerous for people of color to travel in the area.

Special Collections Research Center- A great Resource

The experience today with the Special Collections Research Center at GMU was awesome. As a budding archivist it was great to how other archives handle their collections. Most of the rules outlined on the policy page 1 were what I have experienced in other archival centers. I was impressed with the wide range of materials that they had for the Federal Theatre Project. Being able to interact with the puppet and the “Dark Coat” was interesting and enjoyable.

It was interesting when Brittany described the decision process for digitization, seeing that they had a “top ten list” was genius! Her description of reasons for digitizing certain items was informative. I had only considered accessibility as a reason to digitize documents. But her statement about a documents stability as a deciding factor was interesting. If the document is physically compromised, but it’s contents are invaluable then digitizing it is a way to maintain that information for future.

Archives are a fantastic resource for university students and the general public alike. They are the repositories of information that could otherwise be lost. It was interesting that she mentioned the political reasons that some collections are part of the GMU Library collection. My personal experience with archives has been in the public sphere, dealing with publicly owned government records, but in considering private collections I have new questions. Her mentioning of being obligated to accept a collection because of a monetary donation fascinated me. I am of the thought that most collections are inherently valuable. She seemed to imply that some of these collections are unwanted or burdensome for the SCRC. I found that interesting, but reading the conversation between Thomas Padilla and Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez “Bias, Perception, and Archival Praxis” I understand that there is another side of archives. In this conversation Arroyo- Ramirez discusses that there is a sense of bias in collections. She states that scholars are discussing “issues of power, representation, and accountability by challenging the existing canon of archival neutrality and objectivity; speaking on colonialism, apartheid, and transitional democracies and their relationships to record keeping; and connecting these challenges to current archival practices.” 2 I have always considered archives to be neutral, but I understand how accepting collections only from certain people or groups they could be bias. If the documents collected only pertain or describe one side of history then they are not in fact neutral.

That is something that I think is really special about the Library of Congress Slave 3 narratives. These are stories from the other side of history, the often underrepresented stories. It is important for that history to be preserved alongside of the nations history.

Through our discussions about the Federal Theater Project this week I realized how much social politics affected the New Deal projects. I had the impression that they were all welcomed and celebrated for having put artists back to work in the economic crisis. It was fascinating to see that that was not the case. Our group examined the programs for the Children’s Theater’s production of “The Revolt of the Beavers” which we had previously learned was associated with communism and helped to fuel tensions for the FTP. It was really interesting to see these documents in person.

Using Text Analysis to Answer Real World Questions

This afternoon I attended Laura Crossley’s presentation “Text MiningDigital Humanities with API’s, OpenRefine, and R” 1. When Laura started her presentation I was worried that I wouldn’t understand much as I am pretty new to Digital Humanities. As a historian I am much more comfortable with centuries old paper than I am with any of the software she described. Her project was using DHNow, a digital publication originally intended as a case study for “PressForward”, and trying to describe its usefulness and its relevance to future digital humanities projects. She used DHNow’s Editor’s Choice blog as a corpus and was determining how much they are used currently. She noted that it’s number of blog posts has dropped in recent years, but argues that it is still useful and worthwhile project.  One of the larger questions Crossley was investigating was whether or not blogs in general could be considered a useful scholarly source, the issue being that over time links break and are no longer a valid pathway to the information in the blog, making citations increasingly difficult. 

One really interesting aspect of her presentation was seeing the way that she used tools to analyze the DH Now corpus. During our lecture yesterday the Voyant tools were really intimidating. I was unsure of how this type of text analysis tool would be used in real world projects. I could understand it’s usefulness in the scope of our assignment but not in a larger real world sense. Seeing this presentation changed that for me. Seeing the application of these tools to formulate questions was great. One thing that Crossley mentioned when she was discussing how she used topic models was that they are much better tool for forming questions- than for answering them. This was something that I missed when Professor Jess 2 was walking us through the different text analysis tools, so I was really glad that I attended the presentation. It was informative to see that these tools do more than make visually impressive word art. I was impressed with how she was able to use text mining tools to sift through mountains of data and find usable information for her investigation. 

Oral Histories

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1w5tPlrAwV9jsc3I0MNVkK_f54O55BtQMvIRBJHgwRU8&font=OldStandard&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650

Looking through the Library of Congress’s collection “Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories” 1 I was frustrated with the lack of information. When the Federal Writers Project was conducting these Slave Narrative interviews they did not take very accurate records. Part of that is the issue is that there was not a standard for how these interviews were done, and part of that is the fact that record taking in general had not developed as we know it yet. Even the question of how old a person is at any given time is not constant. In one interview a man named Billy McCrea of Jasper Texas 2describes that he isn’t even exactly sure how old he is. At different points and what I assume are census recordings there was a variation. He is somewhere between 89 and 117. 3.

Often in that time period the only record of a person’s birth, life and death was kept in a family bible. People did not have much, but they nearly always had a family bible.

I listened to many of the interviews and read the accompanying transcripts trying to find one that I was able to understand and had relative content for the assignment. 

For my timeline I looked at the “Interview with Uncle Bob Ledbetter in Oil City, Louisiana 4 . John and Ruby Lomax interviewed Bob in 1940. There was a lot of potential information, however much of it is assumed. There is no mention of dates, so I have based every date listed on a rough calculation. For example, the interview takes place in 1940 and Uncle Bob is 73. I worked backwards assuming that he was born in 1867, was probably about 10 years old when his father taught him to read, a teen when he saw his friends in jail and 21 when he could have voted in the 1892 Presidential Election. I was able to use 1887 as the date of his marriage since he said he was 20 years old. I really took some creative license and tried to apply a reasonable age to events. I was surprised that the Lomax’s did not press him for more information about his life. I would have thought that it would have been important to their project. 

The limitations of these interviews are the oral story in itself. I listened to many of the interviews and read the accompanying transcripts trying to find one that I was able to understand and had relative content for the assignment.  Most of the recordings are very difficult to understand. I am a little hard of hearing, so it was pretty difficult. The assignment scope was just to listen 5 but unfortunately I found that only using the audio was impossible for me. I listened to it to get a feel for the overall flow of the interview, but I used the transcript for actual information. Some of the transcripts have a disclaimer about the poor quality of the recordings and include passages where the transcriber simply used “????????” or (unintelligible). Being as we are in such a digital age I had previously put a lot of value on oral history. I still think that it is important, but now include the caveat that it is only as useful as the reliability of the recorded media. Oral histories that have been transcribed are more useful than a beeswax recording roll that is garbled and not understandable. 

Listening to the overall tone of the recordings were insightful however. Some of the people interviewed were very animated and impassioned talking about certain subjects. Other times it seemed obvious that they did not want to go into greater detail but felt pressured by the interviewer. The dynamic is interesting, there seems to be a wariness, and maybe a condescending feel to how they interviewed people. They certainly don’t all flow naturally though. This was an interesting assignment and showed me that oral histories are valuable but that the way they are recorded can have a significant impact on their usefulness. When they are also made available with text they are far more useful and can really tell a fuller story.   

Unfair Algorithms

Algorithm criticism is based on the idea that an algorithm is not in fact neutral as most people believe, but is actually “ opinion embedded in math”1 . Because algorithms are built by humans they have the same biases and prejudices that we have. Scholars and researchers like Cathy O’Neil and Louise Matsakis are calling for greater transparency and standards in the world of algorithms and artificial intelligence. In her article “What Does a Fair Algorithm Actually Look Like?” Louise Matsakis details that many people don’t understand how an algorithm works 2. They may have been declined a bank loan, or health benefits based on a computer algorithm meant to weed out potentially more at risk applicants. But by making the process that goes into designing these algorithms more open it would help people to better understand what they could do to succeed in or appeal those decisions. 

Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism excerpts illustrate how people of color are being oppressed in Google’s search results in a parallel to how they were treated in the early part of the 20th century 3. We saw musicians like Lead Belly dressed in costumes meant to reinforce ideas of how people of color were perceived as “less than” their white counterparts. In a similar matter when Noble entered the phrase “black girls” into the Google search bar the autofill suggestions were tantamount to porn results. Again the racial perception being that when searching for anything related to “black girls” the searcher would be looking for less than desirable traits, or behaviors. The sexualization of black women is propagated with the expectation of promiscuous behavior associated with them. This is racism that began early in American history and has been carried down through generations. 

So how can we change this? O’Neil says that people need to “question the algorithms themselves and  build ethics into them”4. Matsakis states that if people knew that by changing one small factor- or if the people using the algorithms understood which factors are playing into the decisions- the outcomes of these decisions could be changed. The outcomes would be more fair. The idea that someone’s zip code alone would preclude them from obtaining a loan is ridiculous, but it happens. I think that if consumers better understood these things they could more easily demand transparency, and if that demand isn’t met take their business to someone else. If there was a standard for ethics in algorithmic programming things like this would happen less often. I think that modern digital consumers are helping to change the attitudes and practices in their algorithmic designs. As more of our lives are intrinsically intertwined with computers the idea of using a computer program to weed through data is common. Thinking back to when Tony Guidone 5 came to talk to us about key word searches, I feel like there is a connection between using the right kind of keywords when searching for information and creating algorithms. We may not be automating them and turning our decisions into code but we are still using a process of elimination in the same way that algorithms do. 

I thought that algorithms could only be processed by computers, but now I think that we are also computers and process them constantly.

Through the Stained Glass to the Past

I chose this picture because it was something different. I wanted to find something beyond the many stories and photos of the negative and desperate times of the 1930’s. I really loved the idea of supporting the artists and finding ways to put them back to work, and subsequently, better the struggling nation at the same time.

I was able to determine that this pane of glass was for Washington Hall at the US Military Academy, West Point. A Works Progress Administration employee was there in 1936 to document Ennis’s progress on the stained glass. As a military spouse seeing the WPA and New Deal conducting work at West Point was a great crossover. There has always been a sense of pride for the US Military, except maybe in the Johnson/ Vietnam era, and seeing that this kind of work was taking place is good to know and see. It seems to be purely documentary, for the WPA without any additional intended meanings for the audience. While the photo is on paper it reveals that there were MANY different mediums for artists to work with and be a part of during the New Deal Era. Stained glass isn’t as commonplace as murals or posters but it does have its place. 

I’d like to see the final project for Ennis’s work. Washington Hall is the cadet mess hall now, and I am sure that many cadets pass by this alcove without appreciating the work that went into it. I was able to find pictures of the completed stained glass alcove but not from a great angle. The costume the model is wearing is in the colonial and Early American Military so it fits into the context of its location. 

Looking at the glitched version of George Pearse Ennis’s progress I found it was hardly distinguishable. I thought that was ironic as it was difficult to find a modern image of this work. In today’s world we often think we can find a picture of a famous place really easily. I thought for certain that just a quick google search would yield a color, hi-def picture of Ennis’s work. The best I could find was a full image of the larger stained glass piece, the pane in question is barely visible in the bottom left corner. I feel like it is lost to history, like so many of the projects completed in the New Deal Era. 

Glitching the image had me asking new questions.

Why is something so beautiful and took so much work to complete not a focal point? I think that it has just faded into the background, just like the image I created. I looked at the New Deal site map for our next skills assignment and most of the sites are little known, some overtaken by the local flora. They have all faded into the background. I have heard stories about “America’s crumbling infrastructure”, and I assume most of these dilapidated bridges, and roads were built during the New Deal Era by New Deal agencies. How much of our history is forgotten? Faded and overtaken by new scandals and stories.  The glitched version is a visual representation of the ways that history is corrupted, and how reality fades into the past. It’s difficult to see what the original image actually is. Many times we look at history and have few clues to what actually happened, all we see is the result. This glitch seems to perfectly illustrate that.

The glitching process helped me step outside the box and look at it from a completely different angle. I admit I was a skeptic when we first discussed this in class, but I really see the value now. By taking the same image and altering it so much, it allows for the creative process to flow and historians ask new questions. 

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/georgeennisstainedglass

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/admin/items/show/154

Digital vs. Physical

Tony Guidone’s 1 presentation was really informative.  It was great to see the artifacts that he brought in, especially the newspaper from Salem. One of the things that he talked about was viewing primary sources with more context. Specifically what stood out to me was when he showed the individual ads in the back of old newspapers and then mentioned how they can be viewed as part of the entire paper. When you look at the whole source, like a newspaper, you can see what else was going on in the area at that time. For example, The Virginia Gazette has historic newspapers all digitized. If you just look at the ads you see what people are selling, or looking to buy, maybe a horse has been stolen, etc. But when you also read the stories covered in the other pages there may be information about how many Virginians are selling out and heading back to England. It gives context that the advertisements alone don’t have. 

One of the other things that Tony mentioned that I thought was great was keyword searches. Just using keyword searches may bring back good information, but it also could bring results that have nothing to do with your research. He mentioned that words that we commonly use to describe things today are not what they may have been called historically. I know I have encountered this in my current internship. In the late 19th century, Fairfax County Circuit Court called all of the things the County Clerk dealt with “judgements” because it all was approved by a judge. However if you go to the records room today they are filed under “term papers”. The archivists there know the difference in language and can point people to the right places. 

Which brings me to my next topic on Tony’s presentation. He showed the class the slave index file cards that the Historic Records Center maintains, and how they have been digitized as part of the Mason’s Legacy Project. It really made sense when coupled with Posner’s presentation on data. Those cards in their physical sense are archives, but they are also data since they have been digitized into a searchable database. It helped to tie the ideas together into something easier to understand. Her example of a photo album2 as data also really made sense to me, the ability to physically interact with history is something that is lost when working with digital media. Seeing a jpg of an old newspaper isn’t the same as holding it in your hands. The text and information is there, but the smell of old paper is missing. The physical records of something have sentimental value in the way that a database doesn’t. Just the act of calling it data somehow strips some of the sentimentality 3.

Overall, between Tony’s presentation and Posner’s blog post I have a much better understanding of how digital history projects are relevant and very useful to historians today.

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