Natalie Cumming – The Digital Past Course Blog

The Student Brain Unpacked (Final Blogpost)

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/the-federal-theater-project-s-

To begin, let me say that I think this exhibit was challenging in many ways. I think that to create an essay with so much citation work behind it using three different methods and analyzing each at every step is no small feat. I knew heading into it that it would be a lot of work, but I didn’t really know. However, if I wasn’t so passionate about my topic, I would not have stuck with it with the diligence that I did. But, I soon learned that a lot of the deeper information surrounding the FTP was not available to me.

A huge obstacle I encountered was using just the resources we were provided. There’s only one on the Federal Theater Project. I started with the reading that intrigued me the most which was about the all-Black cast of MacBeth

. I read for a day before I started the project which I thought set me back but in reality, I do not think I could have completed it without that knowledge. With any government program, there is a lot of secrecy involved and it is our job to be informed digital citizens and understand what websites are summarizing and which websites are telling the truth and then some

More than my struggles with researching my project, I learned that the 1930s were far denser than I had been taught in my 7th grade social studies class. There’s a vast history due to its unique placement in between world wars and racial riots are coming to the surface. The 1930s was the brewing pot for revolution in so many ways.

I also had struggled executing my project. I’m not very technologically inclined and I knew that from the start of this class. The most important thing this class has taught me is to save and record my work.

This class was one of the comprehensive classes I have taken in my entire life. There’s so much information to be packed into a semester and so many different aspects that are covered in a day that can be covered for a whole semester in an entirely different class. Overall, I kept coming back to the class because I was so interested. The readings were amazing, and I learned so much about a time period that I could not have told you anything about before the class started. All I knew was that it was the start of the Great Depression. The projects were insightful and demanded that I used a different part of my problem-solving brain to deconstruct the technology I was working with in order to process the problem.

I also learned a lot about the history of research on this campus. A lot of our readings were from George Mason students, professors, programs, and buildings

. I had no clue that there was so much one-of-a-kind work being created by our university. This class also reminded me how fun and interesting studying history can be. I am not a history major, nor do I ever intend to be, but I do think history is essential to the world’s understanding of the future, socially and culturally. In this class, we got to go so many fun places and explore history in something that was still around today but had deep roots from almost a century ago. I really enjoyed glitching and the copyright discussions. They were really modern ties in both topics that also had very interesting conclusions to be made about respecting art and the creator

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. I really loved it when we had discussions in class like on the last day. To me, history is a lot about how we draw conclusions about primary sources that we are given and so it was so cool to see how everyone responds to them in their own way. This class was very resourceful and finishing each assignment left me feeling more accomplished and empowered about studying history.

Citing A 1930 Original, Right? (Blogpost 9)

Music has long been used to document the emotion of a certain era. But, all too often, we forget what story it can tell about the emotional struggle of the age. And, more importantly, how people were able to use music to express emotion through their or another person’s story. Sometimes these songs will only be shared within a family, community, or just another person. The creation of folk music, in particular, told a great story through much of the 1930s

.Though we understand how people can process through another, we have to question, what role does “artistic credit” play in folk music of the 1930s?

It’s clear that music has done its job of showing joy and sorrow of a time, but John A. McCready challenged this idea through a set of songs about a drunkard. However, these songs, though performed by McCready, are written by different people. And, without clear distinctions, we can interpret the recordings as his original work if not for a description to follow.

The Drunkard’s Dream

is an interesting example. There are many versions of this song that were created before McCready and many versions that would follow. However, there are many names by the same title but don’t hold the same tune or lyrics. But, some truly are covers that mirror the original. Most recently, a 1966 version by the Stanley Brothers. We have to wonder, which is the original? Or, has it never been published?

McCready croons out another tune, The Drunkard’s Child

that tells more of the drunkard from before. Through the metadata we learn that the original song was by J.W. Ferrell. Yet, in the description, Sidney Robertson Cowell discusses the significance of the dog barking in the background. Robertson Cowell explains, that dog belongs to the “drunken mother” the song preaches about. So again, we are left wondering, did McCready know Ferrell? Is that Ferrell’s dog? Or, does McCready sing about his own mother simply through Ferrell’s lyrics? The 1930s isn’t the first time songs have been covered. But, they weren’t reprimanded for the lack of credit that the 1930s singers or a more modern 1966 singers did not give credit to so, today, a copyright attack has been put on the singers of the 2000s, questioning their every move, demanding original content

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. But, how original can we be? There’s only so many options and permutations of music that one can create. But, musicians who are redoing the work of someone before them should certainly give credit where credit is due. It allows us to cycle back and see the original creator and how it made them feel first.

Mapping Massachusetts: The American Guide Series

This project informed me mostly of the ability to see the intricacies of the past. Little stories that the American Guide Series authors chose to include and some bigger stories that I never knew has such a great effect on the rest of the state or country. I was very intrigued to know more about Massachusetts. I picked the state simply because I knew it had a deep history and that there are still many things to see there. Even though I picked a region of Massachusetts that was largely residential, it still presented crucial implications about the state. Also, I really loved to see how many of the artifacts that I found still exist today. To me, the 1930s were a completely different time than 2019 in many ways so, it’s very interesting to see how they’ve remained successful, changed shape, and still apply today. Spatial mapping can show us the frequencies of what people considered interesting in the 1930s. The creators of each guide were specific in what they chose each time to include. If they were trying to be as accurate as possible,

I wonder if there are any things that they didn’t include that are now successful that may have just been starting when they created the guide?

Against my Green Book map, there were no locations on their map in the area I was studying. Instead of trying to make something show up, I felt like this showed more than a different map could. I did not think of the demographic that was living in the residential area of Massachusetts as any specific race but, its apparent that it was largely white if there were no safe places for black people just a couple of years later. All of the stories I learned and were so interested in had suddenly turned grey in my mind because all people couldn’t take part in them.

In a racially unwelcoming place, the past became clearer than before because now I could see not only the stories that happened but the people that got to tell them. To be clear, I still like the artifacts I found and the implications of industrialism in the surrounding areas but now, there’s a new vision of what the towns looked like and how it treated others.

Special Collections Research Day (Blog Post 8)

I really liked this opportunity to see the special collections in class. It is definitely not something I would have sought out myself even though I am a theater major. I learned that George Mason has one of the biggest, if not the biggest sourcing of theatrical artifacts from the Federal Theater Project. The archive is important for scholars because it allows them to see the physical documents that people actually saw during the 1930s. It allows scholars to study these objects closer and better draw conclusions from them. Being one-on-one with documents or objects like these offers a new outlook on studying one’s craft. The intimate environment that the Special Collections rules have in place to study these things definitely lends towards a more focused experience. ¹ For the general public, especially since George Mason is a public university, it allows them to have access to old historical documents that they cannot access anywhere else in the world. A lot of them are one of a kind so this allows a higher demand for these objects to be seen when people find out about Special Collections. I think, in a lot of ways, archivists are trying to digitize most artifacts because it allows them to be accessible by people all across the nation. If our goal is to educate others, or give them the tools to educate themselves, archives like Special Collections can be a really great resource if people know about it. But, digitized versions can lose some value that a tactile object can bring. So, our speaker talked a lot about how they try to digitize most artifacts but ultimately they do not all bring the same feeling as digitizing a document like a letter or a photograph does. My understanding of the Federal Theater Project changed because it pointed me towards how much documentation was being put out at the time. I forget that these programs had public responses, effects on the people involved, and operations that were happening that the public did not see that often kept them afloat. So, it was very cool to see them all in front of me. I was looking specifically at photographs of Voodoo MacBeth.

It was interesting to see what the photographers thought was important to catch and what wasn’t. For example, there were a lot more pictures of the audience than the backstage crew or actors preparing for the show to begin. I think that says a lot about how people viewed its impact on Black representation in theater. Overall, the Special Collections visit was a great way to see a resource I didn’t know existed. I hope it will remain in a physical and digital form so people can see it for many years to come.

Blog Post #6

My historical question was: How did the theatre impact the morale of people of color in the late 1930s? Originally, I felt like I could answer my own question with research and in-class readings about how it made theatre more accessible to all, more diverse, and lifted the spirits/served as escapism of the Great Depression

. However, after realizing that I wouldn’t find a personal narrative to say that, it made this assignment more difficult. My question was refined, changed, and even entirely overhauled days before the assignment was due but, what I have now, I really like.

My searching process was very specific. I started with narrowing down the date. Next, I started to do some keyword searching. I searched “black theatre” “black theater” “people of color performance” “colored theatre” “theatre and race” “theater and race” “black actress” “black actor” “federal theater project black” and “black plays”. I came across some really good documents about black actors being interviewed about how their life changed while on Broadway or vaudeville and others about the parties people threw afterwards. To me, it seemed clear that the general disposition was lifted. I picked sources that talked about the personal experiences of black actors. Finding these sources was harder than I thought but when I did find them, it was exactly what I was looking for.

I liked Voyant tools but I don’t think I will need to use it again. It’s very specific for this type of at-a-distance reading. As a theater major, I probably could use it to analyze scripts. But, for what it’s used for, it was really useful. My favorite tools were Cirrus and TermsBerry because they showed exactly what I wanted, frequency. I narrowed down the stopwords that I needed to get rid of that our tutorial so graciously taught us about

I compared my specific documents to the corpus as a whole to better understand how they differed from everyday rhetoric to the niche rhetoric of performance. I did a good job of exploring the different tools that Voyant had to offer. But ultimately, the research I have struggled to answer my question. So I did a little more closer reading to my texts and tried to understand if those readings confirmed my hypothesis. All of my readings centered around how much people of color were happy when talking about being in theatre which confirmed my concerns with my historical question. In the end, I feel like my question was answered. I was shown that people of color had a better outlook on their lives after the Federal Theater Project facilitated them being involved in the theatre. I was definitely searching for specific documents that answered my historical question how I wanted to see it and not how it objectively appeared but, I don’t yet have the corpus to truly delve into the truth of my historical question which, can only be left up to the future.

The Life of Aunt Harriet Smith

Aunt Harriet Smith’s interview, Interview with Harriet Smith, Hempstead, Texas, 1941

teaches us that slave narratives can be happy and light-hearted. Through her life, she was able to find some things to laugh about and tell stories about later. Even though she went through the absolute lowest form of treatment, she derived some positives from it all. The two timelines intersect through the big wars, big bills, and big social events that occurred during her life. They had an impact on everyone, including her. For example, the Model T was a car that she never saw but, her husband did, and he came back to tell her all about it. It’s evident that big events had an impact on almost everyone who lived during them but in very different ways. Some people have funny stories and some have the opposite. I was surprised that she spoke about all of her husbands. It made me laugh the way she spoke about them all. She really valued her first husband but he was killed and then the three that followed seemed to be more fun for her. Not that she didn’t have fun with her first husband, but she told wilder stories about her other husbands. This interview is useful because she is a former slave who reports little issues with her master. We can see her becoming so used to slavery that she excused and justified any act that her master did, no matter how severe. It takes her a little while to get to the crux of the subject or remember what really happened which is funny but a little frustrating, too. I believed that oral histories were important to the documentation of our past but, I forgot to address that they can sometimes be hard to understand

. My recordings had cracking sounds and you can hear Faulk periodically saying “lean in” or “speak up”. I also forgot that the people who had the means to record it had to have the equipment and might be in a higher social standing than their interviewee. I was happy that Faulk was not racist towards aunt Harriet Smith and that she was comfortable enough to speak so candidly with him, despite them discussing an issue that confronts race head-on. ³It’s clear that the social standing of the 1930s is better than it was before. They’re able to converse about the past and let her tell her whole story which, she’s not always been able to do. I liked how he asked questions and that you can hear someone cooking something in the background, it gives off the feeling that maybe they would have a meal together at the end.

Activists Are Hidden (Blog Post #4)

Algorithmic criticism is the act of taking formulas that have been implanted to make life more efficient and looking into how they were made to see if any assumptions were planted without proper evidence to support it. In essence, anything can be false. In order to be better consumers of media through these algorithms, we must deny their objectivity and choose to question them. It’s crucial we see that there’s a dynamic of what makes the most profit, who is in power, what is the algorithm trying to accomplish, and is it actually the truth? ¹ In the era of fake news, we must continue to be skeptical of everything.

The Long Civil Rights Movement impacted the 1930s because it was expanding at that time. There were crucial strides in Black liberation and the beginning of the demand for new rights. None of them gained as much traction as they have now, but they were still taking place and gaining members. The NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign encouraged Roosevelt to fulfill their desires.

The communist led International Labor Defense also rallied for African-American rights at the time and aided them with lawyers and other essentials they needed to continue their fight for equal rights. The groundwork laid for the future is evident. The organizations and their goals from the 1930s are still implemented today.

I do think there are connections with the digital activists and the WPA activists. Both of them are attempting to see the structures in place and ask: How can I show, through art and the things we already have, how these structures are misguided and have underlying implications?

. I think that any artist is in someway, an activist. And I think glitching can be considered an art or artistic in nature. So, by extension, they are activists. They may not be applying the same topics but they intend to achieve the same goal.

All of these activists were quiet or silenced for the majority of the 1930s but they chose to keep fighting for the equal rights we are still striving for today.

Extra Credit

I believe that in today’s culture, especially in America, we aren’t looking to a lot of media with “lighter fare”. With the exception of Tik Tok, a lot of issues that are coming to their apex have to do with life and death (ex. Climate change, female reproductive rights, trans rights, immigration safety, war, the incarceration system, the ongoing feminist movement, etc) so it is harder for people to try to ignore those issues. We know that we love to laugh but, our news and our adults have emphasized that we cannot stand idly by and try to escape what is happening in front of us. To be fair, the 1930s attempts to get out of the Great Depression were a lot more challenging than today’s time, economically. Yes, as Dickstein mentions, the arts are what can relieve an exhausted nation

but, even arts today are reflecting not an escape but a satire or, even direct relation to the issues that we face today.

For example, a new show that has gained ground recently is The Politician

. It garners attention because of its star cast but truly represents the government today through a high school class president’s struggle to win the election. It isn’t a story that is meant to leave behind the issues of our upcoming election. It takes those concepts, emboldens them, and shows us an eerie look into the future of how the election could turn out. Another example is Broadway’s smash hit, Hamilton

. On a global scale, Hamilton appealed to all audiences. It was not a happy ending yet, it called to what America was truly lacking: diversity and understanding. It didn’t try to distract the public from what was “really going on” rather, it emphasized the issues that America was facing outside of the theater. As of late, our media reflects the issues we want to discuss because we know now, better than ever, that hiding from them cannot get us any better at understanding them.

Skill Assignment #3

I selected Francisco P. Lord

because I noticed quickly he was an artist of color. I knew that our project would include glitching and I’ve always been very curious as to how artists of color have been systemically silenced. I was drawn to him also because the sculpture he’s working on is called “seated figure” but looks feminine. I was drawn to his ability to work on sculptures of women in the time and be able to see them as art, and create them so realistically nonetheless. I think it reveals that despite the 1930s preaching to be so embedded in gender roles, there were people who were succeeding in more progressive ways. That there were people like Francisco P. Lord who wanted to create art for the sake of beauty and not for social gain. I also like that the photographer, though employed by the Federal Art Project, wasn’t scorned by the racism taking place that he still took an equal amount of pictures of Lord ². The caption reveals that he was selected to be shown at the World’s Fair. I felt like that was important to our earlier discussion on race.

The historical question I am asking is: How did photographs of artists of color alter the racist narrative beginning to take foothold in the 1930s?

These methods, like glitching and annotating images, help us to think more critically because they encourage us to understand them beyond just a photograph. They make us think why the photograph was taken, how the other person was affected, and what happens when we try to glitch it to expose the true sentiment behind it. I like glitching more than image annotation because I feel like glitching is a very active way to analyze the images. It allows us to really delve into their creation, and how the image changes meaning when it is altered. I especially feel that it reveals undertones that the original image cannot show that we can only interpret with previous historical insight. Glitching

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made me draw conclusions about the image rather than see it for it’s objective parts. But, I feel like the annotation had to be the first step before understanding the glitching because I couldn’t have interpreted an image that I didn’t know anything about. I needed to understand it’s parts before I could draw assumptions about the whole. It helped me answer my historical question because I realized that photographers were open enough to take pictures of people of color and recognized their talent. So, as more photographs were taken of people of color, successful artists could be respected for what they were, successful artists. The question I still have going forward is how much those pictures were seen by everyone else? Because they can’t alter their narrative unless white people see them. Once I uncover that, I can truly understand more about my historical question.

Gen Z’s Privilege Part 300

Text searching has allowed our generation as a whole to get the quickest information any generation has ever received. We live and thrive off of Google’s brain and it has even shaped what our education systems deem to be useful information now ¹. Text searching has allowed our generation as a whole to get the quickest information any generation has ever received. We live and thrive off of Google’s brain and it has even shaped what our education systems deem to be useful information now. I feel confident that there is a privilege that millennials have because of our ability to instantaneously keyword search. I am on the speech team here at Mason, and we have a whole class before the season starts on keyword searching and how to do it effectively, especially when working with databases. I do believe that you can use digital projects to create social change. They can function as educational tools for people studying those topics, facets for famous people to see issues and donate, or simply as a place to create community.

As for what is gained or lost using digital media, it is clear that a lot is gained but some pretty important senses are lost. What is gained is a vast ability to access anything and everything whenever one chooses. Many people would not normally have access or “stumble” upon many primary sources that they do. Or, the detail in which these sources are presented. These databases lead us right to what we are looking for including the “date, newspaper page number, the section it appears in, and a further click brings you to the entire page, scanned at a decently high resolution, search terms highlighted for convenience”. You can look up any old artifact like the one Tony Guidone presented in class (coins), and be able to see it almost as well as he showed it even though he had the real one. And, again, it reiterates the privilege that accompanies the commodity of the Internet.

Many elderly people struggle with switching to e-readers because they like the feeling of paper in their hand or feel that television is biased in how they receive their news. I feel like this is what is lost in technology. The experience of the artifact. The act of searching for something in the library and finding it or locating the one person who has what you need and igniting conversation about their journey with the item is something that absolutely can not be transferred in technology.

Overall, the digital world has been extremely beneficial in helping us understand anything at lightning speed but it does not come without the cost of leaving behind the experience. But, for many new generations, it’s a price they’re willing to pay for the immediacy of information.

I feel confident that there is a privilege that millennials have because of our ability to instantaneously keyword search. I am on the speech team here at Mason, and we have a whole class before the season starts on keyword searching and how to do it effectively, especially when working with databases. I do believe that you can use digital projects to create social change. They can function as educational tools for people studying those topics, facets for famous people to see issues and donate, or simply as a place to create community.