Author: Kelley Stewart

Final Project

This semester I learned a lot. I was able to learn about aspects of the New Deal that I hadn’t covered in my own studies. I was a bit on the fence about the integration of certain aspects of information technology and historical study, (specifically when we learned about glitching1) but I’m glad to say that I understand the possible functions of all the skills we learned. I became very interested in what I feel is an underrepresented group in discussions about the Great Depression, and decided that I would do my final project on women and how their positions within society changed. 

Something that I hadn’t heard before were statistics for female employment during the Depression, and how they changed. 10.5million women were in the workforce in 1930, and that number rose 24% to 13million by the time World War II began. 15% of married women were employed, and 50% of single women were working. In order to show all of these wonderful accomplishments (and a few disappointments), I chose to use image annotation, image glitching, and timeline creation for my project. I used image annotation because I’m a visual learner, and I find that it’s often easier for me to learn and focus when there are images present. It also gives you a sort of ‘hands-on’ way to view information attached to photos2. 

I chose image glitching because it was the skill I struggled with the most. I honestly didn’t see how it could be useful when we first discussed it in class. However, I’m glad to say that I do understand the purpose now. It literally forces you to look at images from a different perspective, and introduces new ideas in your mind. Glitching is also completely random, so you can’t manipulate it to prove your point. I found it to be an interesting way to look at images of working women. 

Finally, I chose to create a timeline because it was the best way to show the changes within the government and within society in a linear way. I think over the course of the semester, the timeline tools were my favorite. Using the timelines to study the ex-slave narratives was extremely helpful, and it was extremely raw at the same time3. Listening to casual conversation about a period of time that is still so painful, but they’re almost relaxed about, and reducing it to a timeline is incredibly intense. 

I found myself confronting the way that I consumed information on the internet as well. The presentation in class about fact-checking resources was extremely interesting. I’ve always been very careful about the sources I use, but after I learned about Professor Kelly4 and his class that centered around building a fake Wikipedia page, and story to go along with it, I’ve been nervous. I’ve not cited Wikipedia in academic papers for a long time, (probably since elementary school) but I have used it as a resource in casual research before. I’ll definitely double check everything I read on there from now on!

Overall, I learned a lot in this class. I’m a history major, and the 1930’s was my main interest for a long time. I was mostly focused on the Dust Bowl, so learning about other aspects of it was incredibly interesting. I learned a lot of digital skills that I hope to use in my studies in the future, and I had a really wonderful experience learning about the different cultural projects introduced in the New Deal. 

Here is the link to my final project: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/the-working-women-of-the-1930-

Folk Music and the Dust Bowl

Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin’s records from the Arvin migrant camp in California are invaluable to understanding folk music in a transient environment. I chose to pull my sound from the “Voices of the Dust Bowl” project through the Library of Congress. Music, and folk music has always been very fascinating for me, because folk music is very regional. It’s a good way to see the uniqueness of different areas around the country. The music may only be slightly different between say, West Virginia and Oklahoma, but they are different.

The recording is called “Come Sit By My Side, Little Darlin“1and it was sung by Nathan Judd, and recorded by Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin in 1940. The location was the Arvin FSA Camp in California. Arvin was a camp for refugees from the Dustbowl, mostly people from Oklahoma (20% of migrants were Okies)2. Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin made a variety of records at Arvin. They took photos, made recordings of music, and recorded interviews. These records are invaluable, because they give us awesome primary sources for folk music examples, and it becomes easier to pick out cultural influences.

Migration reached an all time high during the Great Depression. Unemployment was high, and so were foreclosure rates. People moved away from their home bases in search of work. Many went to California, specifically the Arvin camp. The Arvin camp had people from all over the Midwest and Southwest living there, which meant you got a large spread of folk music with different cultural significance and influences. The collection of recordings that Todd and Sonkin made gives access to many different influences.

In our reading “Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West”, music is shown to be motivating, and spirit lifting. “It makes me feel as if life is not yet over for me.”3 Music provides an outlet.

Mapping Colorado

I chose to do Tour #2 from the American Guide issue “Colorado: The Highest State”. It provides a detailed trip between Sterling, Colorado and the Continental Divide at Muddy Pass, Colorado. I chose it because Colorado has some of the most beautiful scenery in the United States, second only to Western Oregon in my opinion. (Although I am biased, I did spend a few years growing up in Oregon.) I had a thought that this trip wouldn’t be accessible for people of color who were traveling in Colorado, and unfortunately I was correct. The reality of travel in the Western United States in the mid twentieth century for anyone who wasn’t white, but specifically African American people, was that it was very difficult. You were not able to find lodging in the Green Book along the route for Tour #2 in this guide.

https://www.infoplease.com/atlas/north-america/united-states/colorado-map

My map for Tour #2

The available lodging on Tour #2 in Colorado

Segregation and racial bias affected the trips that were realistically available to African Americans in the United States. If there was nowhere for them to stay along the way on one of these American Guide tours, then it wasn’t realistic for them to go. Racial bias very much affected the flow of tourism, specifically in the South Western United States, because segregation limited the amount of tourists visiting. If a percentage of the population doesn’t have access to a site, then it’s only logical that traffic would be decreased. It’s incredibly frustrating to see this in 2019, and the thought that it was the norm makes me pretty angry.

I had actually heard of the Green Book before we discussed it in class, and I saw that fairly inaccurate movie titled Green Book. While the movie was not accurate to the lives of the men it was portraying, you did get an idea of how important the Green Book was as a guide 1 for African Americans from the 1930’s until the end of segregation. Learning how to use the site in class gave us a startling view of the reality of travel. As you can see in my screenshot above, there is nowhere to stay that follows the route of Tour #2. The closest and only place to stay is a hotel in Boulder, Colorado. I think it’s extremely important to be able to digitally map routes from the past, because it gives you a real world visual to draw from. Hearing about the lack of places to stay is one thing, actually seeing the spatial representation is very intense.

In Sarah Bond’s piece on mapping racism she states “People of color have been using maps to visualize racism for a long time.”2 Having spatial awareness and a visual track of just how sparse non-segregated hotels were in the 1940’s is a useful tool to exhibit just how difficult vacationing was for African Americans and people of color in the United States.

Blog Post #8 The Archives

When we went a visited the Special Collections to examine different objects from the Federal Theater Project, I don’t think I’d ever really thought about how archives and collections acquire their things. Finding out that the archives are a bit beholden to what donors decide to send them made me slightly uncomfortable. It feels like they’re at the mercy of the donors, which really means that the public and scholars are at the mercy of the donors.

This is a problem because I feel it could lead to collections being biased in some way. Archives are extremely important, not only to scholars, but to the rest of the general public because they store large amounts of information, and sometimes even artifacts. In an ideal situation, archives wouldn’t have any problem acquiring pieces, but unfortunately they have to resort to donations most of the time.

The digitization of the archive is also very interesting. It was explained to us that there’s a hierarchy of digitization, so objects that are fragile, or that may be difficult to preserve are first. But what about documents that are already hard to read? I wanted to ask about this at the talk but the questions period was over so quickly. I was wondering this because our files had a memo in the front that the type was already fuzzy and a bit distorted. I wasn’t sure how well that would translate on a computer screen.

Speaking of which, I think that seeing the objects and papers from the Federal Theater Project made it easier to connect with. It was less of a hypothetical thing and a true reality. There’s also a lot of information that we don’t have access to online, and being able to see it and put your hands on it definitely makes it a much more interesting experience. I really admire the archivists for taking care of such important documents, and doing it so well. And learning about “portable theaters” was really cool too.

Sources:

https://acrl.ala.org/dh/2017/09/13/archivalpraxis/

https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-theatre-project-1935-to-1939/articles-and-essays/federal-theatre-melodrama-social-protest-and-genius/

Skill assignment 5- Text Analysis

For my text analysis project, I decided to use my own collection of ten documents, and compare it against the class corpus. My historical question is “What was the experience of working women like in New York City during the 1930’s, and how was their employment affected by the economic downturn?” The role of women in the economy has always been very interesting to me, especially women in the workforce in the early twentieth century. It wasn’t common for middle and upper class women to be employed, and it was extremely rare to see a woman in a public sort of job, like a doctor, or a reporter. I wanted to see if I could find a spread of interviews with working class women, in order to get a better idea of the jobs they had before the stock market crash, and how their careers changed as the depression continued.

A photo we talked about in class that really piqued my interest in this topic was the Migrant Mother with her children. Even though I narrowed my search down to specifically women from New York City, the female farmers who fled the Midwest during the dust bowl also had the unique experience of having to completely change their lives, and their livelihoods. Dorothea Lange wrote about her interaction with the woman in the photo’s, and it reminded me of the interviews that the Federal Writers Project conducted all over the country. “She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.”1

My corpus focused on my own question, so the cirrus word cloud was different for my corpus was different than the class corpus. However, it was not nearly as different as I thought it would be. The word “man” appears in the class corpus 1220 times. The word “woman” does not appear enough times to even be included in the cirrus. The same is said for my own cirrus, the word woman is not included in the word cloud. I found this very strange since all of my documents were interviews with working women in New York City. When I went back and read my interviews, I found that the word woman hardly appeared and instead the subjects were just referred to as “Mrs” or by their first names. One woman in my corpus documents was only referred to as Big Bess, and she had been prostituting herself out of her apartment prior to the depression. A surprising statement from the interviewer was included in the interview, and it’s only surprising because of the language used. “Women of minority races and economically bankrupt groups have always been exploited by materially stronger groups.” 2 That sounds like a sentence right out of a 2019 text analysis, rather than a statement by an interviewer in 1938. Big Bess no longer wanted to work as a prostitute by the time of this interview, but felt stuck. “I’m getting sick and tired of this life, but what can I do? I don’t know any other kind of work and even if I did, where would I find it? Besides, once you get accustomed to seventy-five or a hundred dollars a week, it’s pretty hard trying to get by on fifteen or eighteen.”3

Because my corpus was tailored to my specific question, I wasn’t able to find much information in the class corpus that pertained to my inquiries. This showed me that even if you have a large spread of information, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s useful to you specifically. Voyant helped me to locate different terms, but in the end the information the terms were attached to didn’t really help me too much.

The cirrus for my own corpus of 10 documents.
The cirrus for the class corpus of 322 documents.

George Johnson and Jefferson Davis

George Johnson had the unique experience of being owned by Jefferson Davis and his family. 1Jefferson Davis was the President of the Confederate States of America, elected in 1861, and a fierce opponent of abolition and a supporter of states rights. With this reputation, I found it interesting that Mr. Johnson described him as a fair, even kind at times, owner. His experience is very different than the norm. The only incident he recounts that even hints at violence against a slave, is the story of a young boy who was having trouble keeping up with the rest of the group while hoeing a line. The foreman wanted to whip him, but the boy ran to Jefferson Davis and informed him of the incident. Jefferson Davis sent the boy to get breakfast, and fired the foreman.2And even though Mr. Johnson had been free for almost 80 years at the time of the interview, he still referred to his former master as Master Jeff, and spoke highly of him. I’m not sure that I’ve ever encountered this attitude towards a former master in the accounts of freed slaves I’ve read.

The two timeline layers intersect in 1860, when Lincoln was elected, and in 1941 when the interview was conducted. I included the end of the Civil War in 1865 as more context, even though Mr. Johnson didn’t explicitly mention any events in 1865. History is often tracked through a military lens. Lincoln’s election was a triggering event in the Civil War, the Civil War ended in 1865, and the United States entered World War II in 1941. Personal histories are tracked in a more specialized and day to day way, whereas the most common lens for wider histories is the so called “Great Man” lens. I was surprised Mr. Johnson didn’t talk about emancipation, or about the actual Civil War itself, as he was a young boy during those years. The interview itself was highly interesting, and if one were writing about the formation of towns and communities of color following the Civil War, it would be highly useful. Oral histories are often hard to track, especially if they’re oral tradition, or stories passed down for years. I think if they’re like this interview, a personal history being told by the subject themselves, and they’re recorded, oral histories can be beyond useful. It may be difficult to track timelines though, without the inclusion of specific dates. I had some trouble with this.

Mr. Johnson’s voice is very clear, and he doesn’t seem to need much prompting. He knows exactly what he wants to say, and the interviewers don’t need to interject much, and don’t interject much. They occasionally ask clarifying questions, but mostly just let Mr. Johnson speak. There are a few “uh huhs” interjected, but it’s mostly just a recording of Mr. Johnson talking about his life. It’s really interesting and feels very natural, like they’re just recording a conversation. I think that in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, historians realized that they needed to record the voices of these men and women who have lived through a truly insane portion of American history. Not only were these men and women born as slaves, but they lived to see slavery outlawed, the end of the Civil War, World War I, and in the case of some of them, World War II. I’m very glad they did. Weight is given to these histories when you hear them straight from the people who lived them.

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=11QyV47oBzDHgwOhTYed5Ec5dvnZlBLaDUvG3McqAoIw&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650

Algorithm Analysis- Blog Post #4

Algorithmic criticism is extremely important today. The internet gives us access to incredible amounts of information, and algorithms control how that information is presented to us.1 I always thought that the algorithms were presented based on the data recorded from my previous interactions with searches and which websites I visited, so finding out that really the algorithm isn’t so much individualized as it is democratic, and focused on general search results from everyone who uses Google, was a little jarring.2 Media and the depictions of minorities, specifically black men and women, have always been skewed. In the 1930’s, the NAACP used media to gain support for an anti-lynching bill, (that disgustingly ended up failing to pass) and this led to the NAACP becoming the top organization in regards to the interests of African Americans. However, at the same time, racist political cartoons, commentary, and advertising were commonplace.

Today, the concerns and difficulties that people of color face have a much more public platform, and in general, people are paying more attention. So why is it when Noble searched “black girls” on Google, the first page was all pornography?3 Is this a representation of the greater public’s opinion on black women? Or is this just a disturbing side effect of the use of artificial intelligence in data gathering for search results? It’s extremely disturbing that searching the word “Jew” on Google brings up antisemitic websites, and it’s not that this is an issue that Google cannot avoid. France and Germany both have laws in place that ban the sale of Nazi memorabilia. When you Google Jew in France, the antisemitic sites don’t come up in the search results (this is still a fact- I asked my French step dad). So it is possible to make sure that certain results don’t appear. Why hasn’t this technology been applied in the United States? As usual, search results, internet presence, and advertising is portrayed through the male gaze. There is very little intersectionality online, and there was very little intersectionality in the WPA era. At this point, in 2019, I’m really questioning what has to happen in order for the concerns and portrayal of minorities online and in algorithms to be accurate and not based off some inaccurate stereotype.

Citations:

In class discussion, October 9th, Professor Jess

Noble, Algorithms of Oppression

The Truth About Algorithms, Cathy O’Neil

Blog Post/Skill Assignment #3

I selected a photograph of Willie Neal playing the fiddle while Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin record. 1930’s documentation was a mixture of photographs, and recordings. This photo is an example of both. When I glitched the image I was hoping that it would separate Willie Neal from Todd and Sonkin. We learned in class that specifically Alan Lomax would record folk music artists, sometimes take them on tour around the country, and copyright their recordings under his name. I’m not sure if Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin did the same thing, but if they did, I wanted to look at this photo and only focus on Willie Neal if possible. 

Rather than focusing on the recorders, I want to focus on the folk music artists. Lead Belly’s name is linked with Alan Lomax’s, as are dozens of other musicians. The questions I asked myself were: How are folk musicians depicted in relation to those recording them? Does the composition of the photo impact the perception of those depicted? I’m more interested in the social aspects of image analysis, and I used that lens to interpret the glitched image, as well as the original. The different scopes of analysis help us to fully understand the image, from many different points of view. 

The social aspects of image analysis encompass where the image was created, the subject of the photo, when it was taken, who it was taken for and why it was taken. I’ve always been more interested in societal representations and social interpretations. It’s very interesting to me.  Because of this, I chose to focus on social issues. Based on what I know about Lomax’s recording and what he did with them, I wondered if other recorders did similar things. If so, I wanted to show Willie separately, and my final glitched image does that 1 It literally cuts the recording equipment out and places it to Willie’s left, leaving him center and only showing the people around him enjoying his music. The recordings of folk music are important; they kept a regional culture alive and thriving, but the artists themselves rarely got direct credit for their own compositions and performances. 

Link to original photo: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/189

Link to glitched image: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/190

Citations: In class lecture with Professor Jessica Dauterive on image analysis

https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000394/ Library of Congress, Voices of the Dust Bowl, Photo of Willie Neal playing the fiddle while Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin record him.

Blog Post #2

When I search for information on large databases I usually use keywords. The whole time I was in highschool, we were told to use keywords in order to find the most relevant information. However, it was pointed out by Professor Guidone that doing this can actually limit the amount of information you’re shown pertaining to your topic. But when you’re searching in a database the easiest thing to do is to find your keywords and type them into the search bar. I can certainly see why it limits your access- you’re only being shown documents with a very specific word in them. 

The awesome thing about digitization is that everything is permanently preserved on a computer, and it’s much more accessible. Information and artifacts have never been easier to look at, and you can do it from anywhere in the world. (As long as you have an internet connection.) Digital exhibits are extremely important in today’s academic society as well. The ease of access to technology has opened a whole new world in the sense that the possibilities of what we can do with them are endless. A really good example of a digital project that has the ability to educate thousands is the Enslaved Children of George Mason project. The information contained in it is a harsh reminder of how enslaved people were treated. They’re spoken of as less than, as possessions. It’s a little sickening when you remember that most of the Founding Fathers were slaveowners, and really only believed in independence for white men. It’s important to remember that yes, these records exist, and we have incredible access to them, but that’s what they were. Records of ownership, and records of possession. Our university is named after George Mason, but he viewed people as nothing more than possessions. 1

The way information is presented is also very important. Sometimes newspapers or other records were formatted a specific way, and it doesn’t translate well online, so there are steps that have to be taken to assist with that. Professor Guidone showed us the Essex Register as an example of this. He did also point out to us that mostly everything prior to 1920 has been digitized, which is extremely helpful. Digital projects have opened up a whole new world of academia. So much more is available to us, and you don’t have to leave your house to look at a specific newspaper you need for research. You can just look it up in a database. 

References

Bracey, A., Farrow, K., Fatima, A., Perez-Garcia, E., & Murshed, F. (2017). The Enslaved Children of George Mason. Retrieved from https://ecgm.omeka.net/

Guidone, T. (2019). Digitization and Keyword Research [PowerPoint Slides].

Blog Post #1: Wearing Gay History

This first week we talked about asking historical questions, using and analyzing primary sources, the Communist Party in America, and a lot of the cultural programs that were enacted during the Great Depression and the overall culture of the 1920’s. I’d really love to talk more about the impact the Red Scare had on the cultural attitudes of the twentieth century. Not just the political attitudes, although those are linked with culture.

This was actually a really cool exhibit for me to focus on for this post, as I consider myself to be queer. LGBT history is extremely important to me and there was one photo in the exhibit that really stood out to me. It was a photo of a camouflage army jacket with a pink triangle painted on the front and the back. During World War II gay men who were arrested and sent to concentration camps were identified by having pink triangles painted on their prison issued shirts. All of these photos are of pieces of clothing from very important events in LGBT history. There’s a jacket from The Gay Games in Sydney, a hat made for Team Los Angeles from the Gay Games in 2006, and the aforementioned jacket. The way this exhibit is set up is very interesting. It’s important to have exhibits like this available on the internet, it makes them more visible and more accessible to the general public. Anyone can see them anywhere- you don’t have to go to a museum to look at them. We can also see who the contributor was (if they were identified), what year it’s from, what collection it resides in, and the geographical location of either the item itself, or where the event it originated from was located. Part of scholarship is sharing your thoughts, your pieces, and your work, and creating a digital exhibit like this one provides easier access and a larger forum of discussion.

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