Author: Nicolas Karolewicz

A Digital Glimpse Into the 1930s

Throughout the semester in Digital History, we discovered the use of a variety of digital tools while learning about the 1930s in the USA. Thanks to the knowledge I acquired in this course, I was able to come up with a research question and answer it.

I decided to ask the following question for my Omeka exhibit: how did the FTP, FMP, and FWP influence the Folk culture in California? I picked digital tools to match the needs of my research question. Indeed, digital history implies the use of images, sounds, and text analysis.

StoryMapJS is a great tool for mapping and building a visual itinerary. Creating and mapping a tour based on the American Guide Series helps to highlight the importance of the Federal Theatre Project 1.

SoundCite is a fabulous tool when it comes to share with your audience the atmosphere that is emanating from your text. It is a harmonious way to introduce a sound within the text. It was of great use to present Folk songs and culture and how it was influenced by the Federal Music Project.

VoyantTool is a more serious distant reading text analysis. It is unavoidable when a corpus of text needs to be studied 2. This tool helped to emphasize the importance of Folk culture and how it was influenced by the Federal Writers’ Project.

Digital tools bring interactivity and a better understanding of the sources. They use our senses to dig into the history. They also attract the audience and makes it feel comfortable.

The 1930s brought a new dimension into the life of people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt developed the politic of the New Deal to fight against the Great Depression. FDR wanted to increase regulatory power, protect collective action, promote social reform, and regulate profiteering 3

The Federal Project Number One regrouping the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Art Project, and the Federal Writers’ Project entertained the population during this difficult period. It also brought employment in fields like theatre which was the will of Hopkins and Flanagan. 4

The FDR government believed in functionalism and wanted to promote this concept. In other words, all cultural forms in a given society – from superstitions to rituals of economic exchange – existed because they served functions in that society. For example, Folk songs that Alan Lomax used to record reflected a process of adaptation, an organizational superstructure and social functions 5

In the 1930s, the country was changing. Many people suffered from the Dust Bowl and migrants had to move and find a new place. They shared their culture and traditions, singing together on the railroads. 6.

The FDR presidency period was also marked by questioning and debates around civil rights. The 1930s were notably marked by the Long Civil Rights era. The New Deal helped to make civil rights a subject for political debate like gender inequalities, racism, discrimination, the place of African American and women in the South 7.

FDR and the 1930s are still in the mind of people and we can still observe its legacies. For example, The Green New Deal is an emerging energy infrastructure plan to combat a disrupted climate 8.

T. Mills Kelly gave us a great lesson about the credibility of sources on the Internet. He supported his argument based on his own course he taught at George Mason University Lying About the Past. He emphasized the importance of having a critic look on what we think is a reliable source of information or not. He created fake History published on Wikipedia with his students. They used part of truth and lies.

For ten days, no one noticed the discrepancy. They finally removed it from the web, but they hope that people will be more sensible in the future in picking their sources. He also explained that the growth of hoaxes on the web is an issue and they spread with social networks. We need to be careful more than ever. 9

The FMP in California

The New Deal government wanted to promote its policies with a federal control over the country. Actually, the states adapted the policies to their own circumstances. As a result, the New Deal shaped the states with diversity. How was music rediscovered through the FMP in California?

It is possible to come across sounds recording on the Library of Congress database. Sidney Robertson Cowell, who worked for the California Music Project, was facing cultural competition with music spreading in the 1930s through new technologies like the radio, movies, and similar centralized media1.

Cowell documented Anglo-American songs in Central Valley, Boomtown, Shasta County, California.

Cowell illustrated the story of merchants being stolen in the mountain2. She makes us take a glimpse into everyday life histories through music inspired from a mix of cultures in the 1930s.

Ward Ford, the performer, immerges us also into the life of farmers3. He sheds light on the usual troubles that farmers had to deal with.

The stories are sung, and it brings a different atmosphere. We want to listen to them, and we can picture in our mind the merchants being stolen in the mountain or the farmer who plows the field. We let them rock us. We suddenly imagine ourselves in Central Valley back in 1938 and what it was like to live at that time in California.

Radio Diaries shared content about Ballad for Americans4. Paul Robeson sings “I am the nobody who is everybody”. In other words, the radio documentary translates this expression as the way for Paul Robeson, and the folk culture in the 1930s, to talk to all Americans 5.

The FMP in California helped to enhance the folk culture and brought meaning to people life. Cowell, among others, was recording the voices of the time so we can hear them forever.

The FMP reminded people that it was still possible to live under the sun of California, singing your troubles, between joy and sorrow, the 1930s and the Great Depression.

Embedding audios helps to integrate the sound within the text. It results into a great uninterrupted flow. Nothing can stop the audience from feeling the atmosphere of the 1930s. It is also a direct and practical tool. Within a click, the audience can listen to the clip while reading. It allows a combination of reading and listening at the same time creating a dynamism within the text.

Mapping and Spatial History

The automobile tour for Americans in the 1930s was a way to discover their country. Through tourism, they could grasp the notion of nation in new ways. Tourism is a ritual of citizenship and Americans should be thinking in terms of behavior and belief, values and lifestyles, symbols and meanings.1

Migrants brought their traditions with them. The automobile travelers also brought and shared their culture wherever they would go. It was a symbiose where both residents and travelers learned from each other.  The migrants had no choice than learning from those new places and it brought diversity to the West.

The guidebooks reflect the expansion of tourist opportunities and the changing concepts of the nation. They were addressed to all Americans.2

I decided to map the American Guide “California: a guide to the Golden State”. I oriented my research around the theaters in California throughout the guide. The idea was to get a better understanding of which theaters and plays were highlighted by the government in the 1930s.

The Green Book was a travel guide published between 1936 and 1966 that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, gas stations, etc. where black travelers would be welcome.

The photograph below represents a screenshot taken from black travelers’ friendly places between Los Angeles and San Francisco represented by the heatmap view. Some places concentrated in those two cities are similar to the one we can find in the American Guide.

Nevertheless, places in between differ. The places visited by the American Guide are on the coast while the ones from the Green Book are deeper in the lands.

This naturally leads to understand that segregation and racial bias impacted tourism. Indeed, African American would discover a different road trip from what the American Guide would recommend. African American activists used maps and visualizations to understand and explain detrimental effects of slavery in the country.3

With the Green Book and the American Guide mapped, we can also visualize the inequalities related to tourism. African Americans would not get to see the same place, restaurants, bars and much more. These inequalities create a two-face tourism.

Black and white travelers were looking for entertainment and cultural exchange. They wanted to discover their country and see what regions had to offer. Nevertheless, it is obvious that African Americans did not have the chance to enjoy the same itineraries. Tourism was also marked by social inequalities.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) help to geolocate social justice movements, visualize historical and present racism, and highlight racial issues.

Thanks to StoryMapJS tool, I was able to map the American Guide of California. Mapping some places of the tours helped to come up with a new understanding of the Guide and the life of people at the time. We can click on an area of interest and discover what happened at the time and interact with different kind of sources.

When exploring primary sources spatially, we can better understand their organization and process. As a matter of fact, mapping the American Guide of California helped to visualize the itinerary followed which was determining for the government in the 1930s.

Archives and Special Collections

Archive is a way to remember and historicize records of people. It is also a way to secure and preserve our cultural heritage. Thanks to archive, scholars can access authentic records. Records can be any kind of artifacts, from pictures, 3D objects, newspapers, books and much more.

For the general public, it is a way to have access to their own culture or different cultures throughout the time. It is a great source of knowledge. Archivists are most of the time historians and can also accompany people in their research and bring useful information as well.

According to Brittney Falter, the choice of digitization can be tough. Documents can be almost identical, but present different annotations. 1 Should we in that case digitize all or just one? Brittney Falter explained that archivists have to work together to talk about those special cases and take a common decision.

When digitizing an object, how can we preserve the tactile characteristics of something intangible like digital information? In other words, how can archivists reproduce the virtues of artifacts when digitizing them? One way is to reproduce the structure of a library and its organization thanks to a software. One such emulation project is Emory University Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library’s recreation of Salman Rushdie’s computer.

Not all records are easy to digitize either. 3D objects, for example, require taking several pictures of them, but it is not quiet the same experience than in-person. We had the example during the meeting with Brittney Falter, of a doll with many threads.

How could we possibly reproduce this experience when taking a picture of it? This is why archivists have double responsibilities: the challenge of the digitization era and the preservation of artifacts of the past.

I was surprised by the importance of the Federal Theater Project in the 1930s and its impact on people. Indeed, it was more than a simple project. It was a multitude of projects with their own meanings.

For example, the idea of revisiting the classics like MacBeth with an all-black version “Voodoo Macbeth” was a revolutionary idea. It was a chance for African American to perform and tackle classics. 2

Within the FTP, there are five units including many companies. They represent a huge number of cultural events. It has been hard to grasp its existence until the meeting held by George Mason University archivist Brittney Falter.

Having the chance to have on hand an original scrapbook related to the FTP from the 1930s changed my understanding on the materials of the FTP.

I had on hand George Gershwin scrapbook which represents an overview of the FTP tour in the region of the West. It includes photographs and information from different units and companies. It was such a unique experience. The scrapbook is a big book with a beautiful cover. We can tell that it is old but the photographs inside are perfectly preserved.

Looking and touching 3D objects make the experience more real. While digital is a great tool for History, artifacts from Archives and Museums help to feel closer to the past and better imagine the life of former people.

The American Life Histories Collection and Florida

My historical question was, “How did the Great Depression impact farmers in Florida?”. I was for sure expecting to find texts in the “American Life Histories” collection related to Florida and farming. I assumed that I will be able to read scripts from interviews of farmer’s life and working conditions during the Great Depression.

Of course, I first made sure that my research was within the collection. Then I filtered my research by state, and input “Florida”. There were only a few texts related to Florida which made it easy to read through and pick the texts I wanted for my corpus.

I had the chance to use a software called “Voyant Tools”. This is a great solution to analyze huge amounts of data and practice distant reading. It is also great to correlate with close reading thanks to the tools offered on the platform.

I believe that Cirrus tool was the most useful one. It allows me to see the most used words in the corpus. You can also add stop words to delete from it, analyze any words you do not wish to see, and leave space for others which might be more important.

WordTree is a great tool too. Indeed, it highlights different words and also gives a notion of hierarchy between the words.

I first decided to upload the entire corpus. Cirrus tool (see below) gave a huge diversity of words. I had to use the tool Terms. I went back to close reading and picked few words to put in the search bar of Cirrus Show Terms. The most relevant words were: Farm (x591), and Farming (x64); Life*(x749) and Work* (x2773); Child* (x641) and Family* (x616). We can see that the stories are more about the life at the farm than farming. Stories talk about the life of people, their work, and family. The distant reading confirms the trend I noticed from my close reading.

The first analyzation is not enough to bring any answers to my historical question. Because I focus on Florida, I decided to reduce the corpus to all texts from Florida. It is a corpus of 42 documents (as opposed to 323 documents before).

I used Cirrus tool (see below) but added the following stop words: resource, congress, www.loc.gov, http, library, got. The word Florida shows up and this is reassuring. The analysis is working. The following important words appeared: work, good, home, Florida, mother, house, children, people, school, home. They are all related to my historical question.

Using the tool Terms, I compared the Florida corpus within the entire corpus using a proportion scale for each interesting word: Work (22%), Child (26%), Family (25%), Farm (38%), and Farming (44%).

The word “farm” is in a proportion of 38% within the Florida corpus out of the entire corpus. This only means that texts related to farming and farm within the entire corpus are mostly from the Florida texts.

There is definitely a trend for family, child, and work.

Then I ran WordTree (see below). The following words are organized around the word good: farm, strawberry, time, farmer.

“Good” seems to lead to a positive atmosphere related to the farm, the time spent, the life of the farmer, and surprisingly strawberries. It is confirmed by close reading, “as it is, we have good land and good health, plenty of good wholesome food, a roof over our heads, and good children” 1

I was expecting to get a deep understanding of the working conditions of farmers in Florida and a description of their work. Nevertheless, Benjamin Botkin said that he wanted to move “the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature.” In other words, we are looking at the everyday life of people. The text analysis reflects it. We are actually not looking at their working conditions but at their own life, feelings, and what later on they believed was relevant to share from this period with the interviewer.

I paired my findings with close readings in order to understand why certain words would come up more than others. I also picked words from close reading to inject them in Voyant to see where it would lead my research.

After using Voyant Tools, I understood that I should modify my historical question. I did not find any useful information around farming within the collection. I should instead focus on “how the life of Florida people was impacted by the Great Depression?”.

Text analysis is important for digital historians in order to better understand the past. It is essential to pair distant and close readings. Indeed, using one or the other alone could lead to non-sense. I found interesting to cross data and come up with an interpretation to answer my historical question.

Datathon Talk

The Datathon Talk was an idea of Diana Greenwald for the National Gallery of Art (NGA). Which purpose does it serve? The NGA has for mission collecting Art. Nevertheless, compared to other museums, the NGA has a pretty young collection, started in 1941. Of course, the collection has grown, notably thanks to gifts from donors. According to Greenwald, all of the aforementioned lead to new possibilities and especially the use of data science in order to understand the NGA collection. Data scientists and historians can gather around three central criteria: analyze, centralize, and visualize.

When Greenwald looked at the NGA collection, she wondered “Does this export to a spreadsheet?”. The answer is yes. In Art history, there are simple bias. For example, the idea that “tall means healthy” was a belief in the old times but it is not representative. There can also be a disproportionate attention to some artists or medias. The Datathon teams decided to combine collection data with methods analysis. As a matter of fact, questions emerged mainly around diversity and inclusiveness.

The teams participating to the Datathon Talk were formed by professors, historians, data scientists, but also graduate and undergraduate students. Each team had a subject assigned.

Team 1 talked about “Diversity on display: who is on the wall at the NGA?”. It shows that most objects in the collection are from male and white artists. In addition, depends on the building (east or west), the objects are from different group of people, ethnicity, and gender. The representation of women becomes concentrated in some rooms of the museums as well. The team also noticed that when doing data research, they encountered difficulties with transparency, accuracy, and availability. For example, the painting “Girl on Globe 2”, is not linked to any location, the data is not available. Data mining can be challenging.

Team 2 talked about “Influence of women as donor in the Collection”. Surprisingly, there were many women, some of them famous, who influenced the collection. For example, Julia J. Noorell, a collector in the South, Kathan Brown, and Ailsa Mellon Bruce who donated 182 paintings. When the NGA received consequent donations, it reshaped the NGA’s perspective, sense, and aesthetic.

Team 3 talked about “Acquisition History”. The team noticed that volume of art created by men stabilized over the years, but women’s work is increasing. They also observed that American art is in expansion since the 1980s. They studied the proportion of works by gender and by media type in the entire collection. For example, most female representations are in photography and prints. The different NGA directors, for a total of five, also influenced the direction of the collection.

Team 4 talked about “Display versus Holdings”. Indeed, they ask the question “what should go on the NGA’s walls?”.  The biggest criteria for decision making is the artist popularity. This is something we can observe on Wikipedia pages for example and see how many times they were visited. For example, Van Gogh, Da Vinci, and Neil Armstrong. It is particularly interesting to notice that 97% of the page view correspond to 20% of the artist. There is a huge concentration of interest on a few famous artists.

Team 5 focused their research on a software called “Inception V3 Neural Network”. The idea is to see abstract art to be representative of life. They gathered thousands of pictures together in a visual goal. The result is surprising, and many interpretations are possible.

Team 6 analyzed spatial evidence. There are different scales of space. For example, widener Artworks Exhibition locations over time, relationships, building level, room level.

What should be the conclusion of this Datathon Talk? According to Greenwald, we should remember that the NGA evolves depends on taste and institutional priorities. Data research brought up questions related to curatorial work. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Is it worth collecting? Curatorial work is socially bounded and changes overtime. Data research should be playing a main role in understanding and reshaping the NGA or even other collections of museums. Data research can bring a new dimension to the curatorial work through the use of diverse and useful data tools.

A Glimpse Into Oral History

The WPA Slave Narratives collection and in general oral history regained interest within the scholars’ community only after 1972. There is much more to explore within this collection. Listening to the story of former enslaved people, through the interview of WPA’s employees, adds emotion and human sensitivity to history facts.

We rediscover the life of enslaved people through their own feelings. We will analyze the “Interview with Uncle Bob Ledbetter, Oil City, Louisiana, 1940”. Bob Ledbetter, a former slave in the fields of cotton helps us understand what it was to be born black in 1861, not far from Oil City, Louisiana.

We learn that they used to sing in the fields, hollered and sang reels. At least Bob did. He never went to school, but he learned writing and reading thanks to his father. He also taught himself.

Throughout the interview, Bob Ledbetter makes us imagine his life in a positive way. It is true that he was enslaved for twelve years by Mr. Norris, but he also got married and his master always treated him well.

Bob tells us a different experience of enslaved people. His life seemed to be calm and peaceful. Learning with his dad, singing, going to church, getting married, and always leading a law-abiding life.

Does it sound too good to be true? After being enslaved, people would prefer to remember the positive side of their life and bury anything that would hurt and haunt them.

It was interesting to notice that the birth of Bob Ledbetter corresponds to the same year Louisiana seceded from the United States. While Bob was enslaved, in the 1880s, plantation owners pulled worker wages down, and created an unfair scrip as their pay. In October 1877, Duncan F. Kenner increased inequalities by holding the workers’ pay until harvest to keep them working.

The same year a sugar strike started. While Bob was enslaved, all those events happened in Louisiana and ended as the infamous Thibodaux massacre in November 1887.

Bob Ledbetter mentioned during his interview that at the age of 61 or 62, corresponding to 1922 or 1923, he had already lived a peaceful law-abiding life. By 1923, Louisiana established the all-white primary.

Many major historical events coincide with Bob’s life events. As we can see, sometimes lived experiences of people can be far from the way historians categorize or define the past.

For example, much happened in Louisiana after Bob’s birth, from the Louisiana secession and the Thibodaux massacre in 1887. Bob does not seem affected by those events, at least he does not mention them at all. He even says that he was telling people in 1923 that he lived a peaceful life with no troubles while the same year the all-white primary was established in Louisiana. In 1940, the same year that Bob Ledbetter is interviewed by Lomax, Roosevelt won the election for his third term.

There is a big gap between the lived experiences of people versus the way historians define the past. On one hand, the first mentioned helps us define what real life was at the time, sharing emotions and feeling, up to the point that we can imagine the scene. On the other hand, the second mentioned brings the main key historical events, drawing the big lines of the centuries. Both styles are important contributors to history, and they are both complementary.

I was surprised that the interviewee barely spoke about when he was enslaved. He did not mention the conditions of work neither of living. He only said that he was treated well. This was definitely unexpected.

This interview can be extremely useful if properly researched. Through the small events of Bob’s life, we can dig into the past and associate it with bigger events. This leads us to better grasp what happened at the time, and also explore and discover historical clues and artifact we would not have thought of otherwise.

Of course, the interview is short, hard to hear and understand. We sometimes have to extrapolate and guess a little. This could lead to misinterpretations and confusion.

I actually changed my opinion about using oral history as a primary source. While it is not a strict science, oral history does abound of clues from the past useful in the field. Oral history contains records of voices from the past, and they must be heard, as much as books must be read. Through a small interview that I heard, I explored and discovered much more than what I expected. Oral history must be considered as a primary source.

On one hand, Lomax seems a little insistent on Bob Ledbetter. He is trying to make him repeat things said off record. From what I could hear, it seems that Lomax was trying to set up the conversation, as a film director would, and Bob would be the actor.

On the other hand, I could hear a real conversation between the famous Lomax and a former slave. This is a piece of history and I have the chance to listen to it and build my own opinion out of it. I could hear the former slave’s perspective on his life without any filter.

Interviews were transcribed from memory and field notes and then revised by state and national editors. FWP writers flattened regional variations into a single speech style. 1

Indeed, Lomax supported the idea that the writing style of the narratives was a source of authenticity while Brown thought it would marginalize voices by signifying their position as second-class citizens. The dialect is understood as a regional identity and a cultural geography. The dialect connected to people who were rural, uneducated, and southern.

This means that the transcript is already an interpretation of the primary source. When I will read the transcript, I will already be using a secondary source. The way the former slave talks, the moments of confusion which are hard to understand or to interpret, will already be processed and thought within the transcript.

Oral history and ethnographic work lead to a voluminous social knowledge. It put to light historical knowledge from the 1930s. 2 For example, the southern life histories project changed people opinion about the South. Indeed, it helped them see social and economic challenges, and inequalities. 3

Some scholars argue that the Ex-Slaves Narratives isolated slavery to a southern problem. The dialect positioned interviewees in the “bottom socioeconomic and education strata of southern society”.

From what I could hear, Ledbetter lead a poor life, but he tried to keep the moments of happiness in his heart and mind. His passion for singing, his righteousness, and his humor made him cross slavery with pride and strength. The interview depicts a different vision of social history from the 1930s.

While most scholars and transcripts insist on the terrible human conditions under slavery, this interview reminds us that those people had a life, like everybody else. Former slaves had great obstacles and pain for sure, but also moments of happiness. Those moments are as important as anything else, and we must remember them thanks to oral history.

Between Past and Present: From WPA-Era Activists to Contemporary Digital Activists

Algorithmic criticism is the concept of looking at algorithms with a critical perspective. Scholars studied the idea that algorithms go beyond mathematic and impact race, class, and gender. Scholars adopted intersectional critiques to understand algorithms.

The transition from the old traditional medias and the new digital medias has been adopted by most of us, but it is not necessarily understood. We are framed and driven by algorithms in our everyday life without knowing what it exactly implies. Algorithm in marketing is seen as an objective fact; it is actually an opinion embedded in math. 1

The public is in need of algorithmic literacy 2 In other words, people are unaware of the impact of search engines, digital medias, their mechanisms, and how they are part of it.

Search engines are part of our life and most people believe that it “provides access to credible, accurate, depoliticized and neutral information”3. In fact, a search engine is a “symbiotic process”: it informs, but we also feed it with information which it will measure for our next search.  In other words, we are acting a major part in the evolution of digital media. We both feed from each other.

Unfortunately, search engines use a rank system where paid advertising creates inequalities. Indeed, the negative representation of women through the ranked brings back to life women’s discrimination of lack of status. As a matter of fact, scholars noticed a “direct mapping of old media traditions into new media architecture” 4

Search engines algorithms can lead to racism and sexism. Noble mentions that the “pornification of black women” appears as a top search result. How can this be a top-ranked research? Who decides that this was the best information to be top ranked?

We have to understand the way algorithms are built. We first curate our data. Then we should define “success” 5 We embed our values into an algorithm.

This leads us to understand that a group of people created algorithm which allowed the “pornification of black women” as being a top search result.

As a matter of fact, if we create this artificial intelligence, this means that we can change it. It is not only math. The latter is the tool to apply the will of a human.

We should remember that many algorithms have been created to satisfy a neoliberal capitalist society with profits in its center. The system leads to misrepresentations and hypersexualisations of black women 6. Search engines have commercial goals first, and “labortainment” is a main source of benefits for digital media.

In other words, the latter defines “users who consent to freely give away their labor and personal data for the use of [a private company] and its products, resulting in incredible profit for the company”. 7 Users give their agreement to share their private information with digital media for profit use. Most people accept the agreements and policy without reading them.

We must be careful when using search engines, when signing online documents and much more. From commercial use, marketing targets, advertisements purposes, profits, selection, and discrimination, digital media is full of obstacles for us and we need to understand that there is more at stake than what we thought until now.

There is bias in search. It is a fact. What is even more shocking, is that norms reflect racist and stereotypical ideas. Content is screened and assessed using those norms. As a result, racism, sexism, and abuse of humans is normalized in a way that it is considered as perfectly acceptable.

We must learn from algorithm literacy and change the “consciousness embedded in artificial intelligence”, to become better consumers of digital media (Noble, 2018).

The 1930s were also marked by their own challenges. They were years of movements and dynamism, when the Long Civil Rights Era (LCR) was fighting to take the place of an old feudal system.

The New Deal helped to make the LCR era a subject for political debate. Roosevelt himself name women in key positions within the administration. Frances Perkins was the first female cabinet secretary. Mary McLeod Bethune was an African American advisor in the National Youth Administration. The First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was herself the key advisor of the president and a major voice for economic and racial justice. 8

It was difficult for women to attain economic autonomy. While the New Deal programs helped to raise a debate about inequalities in the society, it also kept gendered assumptions. For example, “men serve as breadwinners” and “women serve as mothers, homeworkers, and consumers”.

The emergence of the LCR era was the sign that the nation was turning slightly left. Americans started to favor socialism and movements like the Popular Front brought a left-liberal cooperation with the Socialist Party of America and Communist Party USA (Ritterhouse, 2017).

Before being a party, the Popular Front was also a historical bloc. The Popular Front was an insurgent social movement forged from the labor militancy of the fledging CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

The LCR era was marked by expanding democracy and guarantee the rights of citizenship to a broader segment of the American people, including people of color. 9

The Long Civil Rights Era throughout the New Deal and even later, helped to raise debates and fight inequalities. We live in a place today where we take for granted rights which were acquired thanks to people who fought for them at a time in the past. We shall always keep in mind this because we can lose our rights faster than we can obtain them.

There is actually a great parallelism between WPA-era activists and contemporary digital activists. While observing through the critical lens within algorithmic criticism, scholars put in excerpt the idea of the 1930s where we have to fight inequalities in a system where racism, sexism and much more have been normalized.

Scholars are now facing algorithms and the discrimination embedded in mathematics. Contemporary techno and algorithmic critics are working on developing tools to fight against inequalities in algorithms.

Open-source software are one of the ways found to fight against private interest of big companies who seek profits. The algorithms are public, and anyone can have access to it for free and modify it.

While Open-Source software can be a great weapon against inequalities in algorithms, scholars and algorithmic critics are still working hard to point out how we can be manipulated by this era of numbers, controlled by profits, and willingly or unwillingly mapping the mistakes of the past.

A word about Morris Dickstein opinion – Extra Credit

“What a hard week! Let’s go to the mall this week-end, eat at the food court and get some goodies!”. This is what you can hear nowadays when the economics atmosphere is down. On the other hand, we heard measures like the one of President Obama who “preserved a $50-million increase in arts funding” back in 2009 when the country was sinking in the crisis. We can wonder, where should we stand regarding those two calls?

Let’s take a look back in the 1930s. When the Great Depression sunk the economy and peoples moral. Roosevelt and the New Deal lightened the path for most people in difficulties.

The projects created in Music, for example, through the Folk movement, in writing and much more in the Art field thanks to newly created agencies like the FWP (Federal Writer’ Project) or the FTP (Federal Theatre Project).

What art would bring to the nation is not “escapism, as we sometimes imagine, but speed, energy and movement at a time of economic stagnation and social malaise.” 1

Is it still true today? Is Morris Dickstein right about his comparison between the 1930s and the 2008 recession? Maybe not. We have heard in the news about some people bringing about the idea that we need another “New Deal”. The real question is, do people need a New Deal package to feel better?

If you recall the idea in the 1930s that there was a contrast between a “feudal system” trying to survive against the emerging Long Civil Rights era 2. Nowadays, developed countries have already won this fight. Many rights that people fought for were adopted, from the right to vote for women, same rights for all citizens, opening borders for immigration, rights for immigrants, and more recently gay marriage.

There are two main ideas that appeared through the last decades. Firstly, since the creation and progress of the new technologies of information and communication, Art has never been as developed and present than ever. Art is now accessible and democratized. People can express themselves on social networks too.

Secondly, people nowadays find comfort in the consumer society. Buying consumer goods, watching the television and its ads, spending the money in junk food are the new ways of “feeling good”.

Everybody has in mind one of the most famous advertisement by the McDonald’s Company “I’m Lovin It” where the concept is that you can buy inexpensive (junk) food to make you feel good any time you need quickly and easily.

Among the most famous singers in the world, some of them managed to gather many people together and make them feel happy, special and important.

The first that comes in mind is Michael Jackson or the “King of Pop”. He managed to make people feel better. The day he left us, the world mourned his death. He was a symbol to the eyes of millions of people in the United States, but also internationally. He was regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest entertainers.

Whitney Houston, another African-American artist, singer and actress, marked her time in R&B, pop, soul and gospel.

Nevertheless, music became a huge industry. For example, there is a website dedicated to Michael Jackson with an online store selling goodies and tickets for new events even after his death.

While people want to feel better in times of recession like in 2008, they are being sold a fake comfort through the society of capitalism who itself brought the economy down. It is paradoxical.  

Maybe people do not need another New Deal, but they should remember what it was to fight for rights, what is the essence of Art and how to appreciate simple things of life, like the Folk groups on the railroads bringing instants of joy to the people.  

Sidney Robertson Cowell for a Folk Music Project

I was searching for a picture that would be related to the WPA in the 1930s, but also where I could see the use of new technologies. I was expecting a combination of both.

I decided to focus on the Folk Music. I found this photograph, a portrait of Sidney Robertson Cowell, copying California Folk Music Project recordings for the Library of Congress. Cowell convinced the Northern California WPA Office in San Francisco that her project was one that was appropriate for WPA consideration 1

She was passionate by Folk Music as she said, “The first ingredient was an itching heel”. Throughout her portrait, we can perceive her hard work and strong will to create one main collection of California Folk Music recordings.

This image emphasizes the use of technology. Indeed, she was using a recorder and an engraver in order to accomplish her task. Those were heavy machines at the time, one must be courageous and applied to create good result.

Like I explained in my annotations, this portrait of Cowell working in the project office on Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, California in early 1939, intentionally justifies her work to her sponsors (co-sponsored by the Music Department of the University of California, Berkeley and the Library of Congress).

The picture was taken in an angle which propels us in the room and in Cowell’s hard work. The photo is black and white, but it depicts the use of new technologies. It brings an atmosphere where new challenges old. This is a good representation of the 1930s when the New Deal hustles the former era.

There are piles of recordings on the table next to Cowell. It shows the work getting done, but more importantly, a growing collection of gathered Californian Folk music and preserved for many years to come.

Cowell had a great journey collecting Folk Music for her state-based project. How did her journey influence her? She met Folk groups and learned about their life 2. What was Cowell’s motivation for building her project? What is the importance of technology within Cowell’s work?  

Not so long ago, I remember using transparency paper to annotate images and interpret them. If the light bulb was dead, then I could not project any image. If I did not have the pen to write on the transparency paper, then nothing could get done. Using a digitized photo, annotating it thanks to a software and being able to share it on the web is a great step forward. It is also extremely useful in order to get feedback at any time, comments, and ideas about the image in question.

The glitching method is new to me. It is surprising for sure. Humans have always evolved following another human’s idea. Since we created artificial intelligence, we can wonder what it could bring us. As a matter of fact, the glitching process is a kind of pre-step in the artificial intelligence interpretation. We still need to interact to understand what the glitch could bring us, but it helps us to have a different perspective.

In the glitched image of Cowell’s portrait, it is interesting to see that half of the frame was covered by a white band. It brings the audience to focus on the engraver, the recorder and Cowell herself. We can see on her face how focused and passionate she is with her work.

It also helps us not to think of the sponsors, because the glitched side of the image makes the university office room blurry. It also removes the interest of showing her work for the sponsors and instead, we can appreciate her work for itself.

The annotation and glitching methods were efficient in order to interrogate my historical questions. It brought a dynamism and bounced me between resources, readings, and the image. It brought a better understanding of the atmosphere and environment in which the photo took place. It felt like we could dive-in the scene and be taken on Sidney Robertson Cowell’s journey.    

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