Robert Cook – The Digital Past Course Blog

Childhood and The Great Depression

Link to Project: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/robertcookfinal

In my project I used Omeka’s image annotation feature, Soundcite’s embedded audio feature, and my previous glitch project to try to explore how the Great Depression affected children’s culture and experience in that time period. I chose this due to there seeming to be little attention paid to children of this age, as so much politically and economically was going on.

I chose the image annotation feature because I find that annotation can really assist researchers in discovering new things about an image. Perhaps it’s part of a picture one might not have noticed before, or an idea that never crossed one’s mind that the annotation adds. Either way, annotation can be a very good way to get an audience thinking more about the contents of a picture.

By using Soundcite’s embedded audio feature, I assist the audience in listening to specific parts of the audio that I was talking about. Not only does it assist me in explaining my points made on the page, but it also helps the audience with listening to a, not so perfect recording. Parts of the audio was the performer talking to the people recording the audio, which I wanted to avoid as it doesn’t add much to what I wanted to talk about. However, I still included the full audio after the paragraph as a way to let the audience decide if they wanted to sit through it all.

At first, I didn’t really understand the point of glitching, as I’m not really into more “modern art”, however as I used it, I realized that it can be an excellent way to find new meaning in certain images as mentioned in an article we read. ¹ I chose the glitch project I did before as a way to connect the old with the new, an old photograph with a new art form. By doing this, I hope to get the audience thinking about how other photographs can be glitched.

The history of the 1930’s isn’t really one that has interested me much before this class. I’m greatly interested in history; however, I find that the closer to the modern age we get, the less interested I am in learning. Of course, after this class I find that the 1930’s is more interesting than I gave it credit for.

The age is filled with revolutionary new ideas, progressive thought and social movements that caused change for the modern world. Federal projects shaped American culture, and this is where we can really see a truly United States form. Thanks to FDR and in large part the Federal One project, we now have a much more unified idea of what it means to be an American, and a more powerful federal government.² Whether it be through song, theater, or photography, being an American was shaped during this age.³

Turning back to the modern age, being an ethical digital citizen is truly an important, yet seriously difficult task. So much of modern society is being shaped by fairly unethical means, such as algorithms and mega corporations slicing up parts of the internet. ⁴ From this class I can take away that we have a responsibility to protect the free flow and democratization of information and ideas.

In conclusion, we now live in an age with so much unprecedented knowledge spreading as insane rates, that it can be hard to realize how much is at stake at times. To protect what we have now seems more important than ever, and to make sure that it stays in the hands of the people, where it belongs should be a goal for everyone who calls themselves a netizen.

Folk Music and Square Dancing

Folk music in general began in this time period, or at least the recording of folk music did. In some FSA camps, the workers would bring their culture, like instruments and music, to help lighten the mood ¹ after a long day at work. One of these unique forms of music, was known as square dancing, which, in a way, incorporated the sound of the dancing ² with the music to create it’s beat. Not only that, but square dancing requires it’s dancers to dance with pretty much everyone, which can be representative of the theme of togetherness in the Great Depression.

This source was recorded by the Federal Music Project, within a Farm Security Administration camp. You can see how these two federal projects work together, as the workers in the camps would bring their unique flavor of music for the music project to record. The Federal Music project in general liked to focus on bring America together, usually through folk music. ³ However, there were critics of this, but president Roosevelt felt that this music would help unite America in it’s time of need, so he continued it. ⁴ It sort of, in a way, again connects to the theme of togetherness that these two federal projects would work together to better the culture and people of America. As times got harder, people began realizing that it’s easier to help one another rather than work for oneself.

By embedding the audio, an analysis in a way comes to life. Before, one could only imagine what a song, or person would sound like. By embedding the audio, we can now witness history as we read, by listening to the past and not just hearing about it. By listening to the audio, we can develop our own opinions about the piece instead of just reading about the opinions of the author of the article we read. In doing this, we allow for those reading to create their own view of history while also viewing our own, so they can compare what they think to what we think. This is how history is shaped, by historians comparing each other’s thoughts on pieces of history. Thus, by embedding the audio in the piece, we make the process a whole lot more convenient for the historians reading our articles.

A Guide to the Old Dominion

Trip: https://storymap.knightlab.com/edit/?id=virginia-a-guide-to-the-old-dominion-tour-1

When it comes to mapping out the racial stigma people might have in certain areas, it’s important to point out how Virginia doesn’t even have a heatmap for black people. This shows that people of color aren’t very welcome in many of any stops during this time. As discussed in previous reading, this was very important for people of color to know whenever travelling. ¹. This, compared to the trip I made, could show that it’s dangerous for people of color to travel throughout Virginia. This shows that the books written about the states, were probably not made for people of color to use.

Mapping and special history can teach us what the past thought about the places we now live in. For instance, in my tour I chose Virginia, since I live here and am familiar with a lot of the areas the book was talking about. This way, I can compare what the authors thought about the area back in the 1930s-40s and how I see the world today. It also gives good examples to how the state worked back then and what areas were important then that aren’t so important now. Spatial history can tell us where people lived, and how people travelled. For instance, back when the book was being written, many people travelled by bus instead of their own cars, so there are many stops where the bus would be able to drop people off or pick them up. It describes where the best tourist areas are as well, so it shows which areas might be considered more interesting for tourists.

By using primary sources, we can get better information about the states that we are travelling though in our research than if it were secondary sources. We can see exactly what the people were thinking and how they described states. Also, we can see exactly what they were seeing back when there weren’t many highways or much ease of travel. This way is better than a secondary source, because instead of getting what a historian thinks happened, or how they think a group of people thought, we can see exactly what the person was going through and how they travelled throughout the United states.

The Federal Theater Project

The archive contains numerous different artifacts that can be used to better understand the way people behaved and interacted with certain mediums. It can be from hundred-year-old posters about a play, to a doll that has had its strings tangled up from decades ago. It also allows the general public to be able to donate certain items that they deem important or interesting enough to give away to scholars to research or study. Some of which can be very important to the person donating, as shown with Kurt Schwitters in the article we read. ¹ Through these artifacts, scholars from all over have access to information that would otherwise be impossible to find.

Certain materials digitize better than others. For instance, the posters my group had which covered certain theatrical plays would be easier to digitize due to their two-dimensional nature, than the doll or jacket that require more than one angle to understand fully. They could attempt to emulate the physical object, as Bill LeFurgy mentioned in his article. ² It would be much harder to digitize something that has many fine details, both visually and physically due to the feel of the item not being able to be digitized. This affects our interaction of the materials by not being able to feel what the object is made out of or how heavy it is. Overall, digitizing can be useful, but not when feeling an object helps gain more information.

I didn’t truly understand how diverse the Federal Theater Project was until I witnessed all the diverse groups and plays that they were putting on. Not only white and black performances, but performances from Java, Japan, Eastern Europe, and India. It was a surprising amount of diversity in an age that I would suspect to be not very tolerant or at the very least ignorant of the cultures portrayed in those plays. This helps to show me how diverse things were even in the early 1900’s, or at the very least, shows how radical the Federal Theater Project was when compared to the other projects we’ve studied. However, it does change the way I look at this time period, as I expected it to be a bit more, homogeneous with the culture of the United states. In the end, I guess there was a lot more color, both racially and creatively, than I expected.

Average American Life Before the Great Depression

My historical question is in the title, “How did the average American live before the great depression?”. This seemed like a fairly easy question to answer, as many of the interviews I read focused on their life growing up, rather than life during the depression, or during the time of the interview. The initial ideas I had for this question, were that the interviewees would talk much about their family, their struggles, like familial deaths, and their high points, like marriage and raising a child. Pretty much, I was hoping that they would focus on the very highs, and the very lows of their life. I assumed that there would be talk about traditions, sprinklings of bigotry here and there due to the time period, and a focus on the good parts of their lives before the depression.

Since this was a very general question, my idea was to use most of not all of the sources gathered in the corpus. However, there would obviously be a lot of words inside the hundreds of interviews that needed to be taken out to better see the juicy bits. First, I filtered out words pertaining to the meta data, like the website URL, words “Library of Congress” and the like. Then I focused less on the most common words, as they were mostly, “Got, Like, and Said”, which are worthless not understanding the full context. I focused more on the words said a few hundred times, rather than those said thousands of times, as they were usually more telling of what the interview was about. Words like “father, mother, school, and children” helped me understand the focus of the interviews better.

Using Voyant tools wasn’t too hard, as we already went over it in class and thanks to Miriam Posner’s tutorial on it. ¹ I found the “Document terms” particularly useful, as it showed the exact number of times a certain term was used throughout the corpus. This helped me see the less than average terms better than in the cirrus tool which only really showed the most common terms. My main decision I made was to focus on not the most common terms, but the less than common terms which might have been buried under very common words. That way, I could find more context within words rather than general terms used in that time period.

I focused not on the most common that had thousands (Very common words) but rather terms that had hundreds of examples so I could gain more context for each.

Using the cirrus, it helped visualize the number of times a term was used.

My question stayed generally the same throughout the text analysis, as the terms I gathered focused on family and the struggles they may have faced. My assumptions that they would focus on traditions held in their family was a bit wrong, as many people seem to have talked about a very general idea of their childhood or life before the depression, rather than many specifics. This makes sense as the Federal Writer’s Project focuses on capturing as much of history as possible, rather than much specific details. ² Interestingly enough, it was more common for people to talk about their mother rather than their father, which shows me that mothers might be more important to these people’s lives than their fathers. With what I did with close reading, I found that the interviewees would commonly talk about general ideas about growing up, such as people they kind of maybe knew rather than any specific traditions or cultural backgrounds they had.

The final conclusion I have with my question is that many people remembered the past with a certain level of nostalgia or fondness of their past. They focused more on their mothers rather than fathers as well, which is interesting. They would talk about the people that were close to their family, and what they thought about them. Overall, life before the depression seemed simple, however it comes from a place of nostalgia so it might not be very reliable. Pertaining to close and distant reading, I conclude that both have advantages and disadvantages that can help and hinder one another. You can get a good general idea from distant reading; however, you should supplement it with close reading so that you can get a good idea of what’s going on.

The Life of Uncle Bob

Timeline: https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1SbRgpSwGXnD2fDx6yAOkQ6vB2j9EYmji74EQseFfeUs&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650

Uncle Bob was born during the beginning of the civil war, so his experience with slavery is very different from those older than him. As discussed in previous readings, slaves narratives can be of those who were very young or old during slavery, this is the case of the former.¹ He doesn’t really speak about being a slave, as he probably doesn’t remember it, but what we do know is that he later would work on a farm as a worker. This can tell us that those who grew up as a slave, or at the very least had slaves as parents, went for labor close to what they already knew, such as farm work.

The major intersection of the two layers of the timeline is the civil war beginning and ending, with Bob’s birth in between. Frankly, being a slave in the civil war was probably much more different than being a slave before the war, as there was probably a sense of uncertainty about whether you were going to stay that way. This can tell us that being a slave isn’t probably something Bob remembers much about, due to his birth circumstances. Other intersections include the great war and WWI that begin before the interview happens. This shows us that despite being born a slave, Uncle Bob was able to survive some of the worst times in human history.

I was surprised that they never talked about the civil war, as this seems to be a major event, especially for enslaved people. In a way it makes sense why they never asked, as he was probably too young to remember at all. Still, just asking him “Do you remember anything about it” would probably have been a good idea. I’m surprised that they focused more on the little details of his life, such as him joining a church, which seems like an odd thing to talk about.

This interview is useful to figure out how people spoke back then to one another. Now obviously, a former slave speaking to a white man is going to have different speech patterns, as discussed in previous readings. ² However, even understanding how slaves spoke to white people is important, because now we can better understand the culture between them. This is also the major limitation of the interview, as Uncle Bob seems very nervous or threatened in the interview. This could result in him telling the interviewers what they want to hear, rather than what actually happened. I held the belief that oral history isn’t always a very good source of information, due to human’s limited memory and social bias, and this interview seems to have justified that belief.

As mentioned before, the voice of Uncle Bob seems very nervous or threatened, like an animal backed up against a corner. He doesn’t seem very comfortable sharing his past, and rather tries to entertain the white interviewers rather than give them a definite history of his life. Thus, it becomes harder to transcribe their life and the source because of the social bias created by the relationships here.

This interview, and many slave narratives like it, can tell us of the relationships between white and black people a hundred years ago. Fear was the main characteristic between the two, and that creates a major bias when the two groups interact with one another. This makes it hard to trust a primary source when they’re talking to the other race, as a former slave will embellish the truth to make them seem funnier or more entertaining, rather than tell their white interviewer the truth about being a black person living in slavery.

Critical DH

Algorithms aren’t perfect, and scholars have been criticizing them for being too broad or biased to be relied upon as much as we do today. Cathy O’Neill mentions that algorithms can be described as “Opinions imbedded in math”. ¹ Due to this, opinions that are different to the one who wrote the algorithm or control the algorithm can be snuffed out and ignored. Some scholars have suggested that we push for understanding how the powers that control the algorithms work. This way, we as consumers can avoid using Google, and other search engines in a way that promote these racially or sexually motivated search terms, as mentioned in Noble’s paper on the subject. ²

In the 1930s, society was undergoing intense societal change due to the Great Depression, and because of this feminism and in general the whole popular front became popular. The popular front was made up of radicals that can range from communists to people advocating for racial desegregation. Some folk singers, such as Woody Guthrie were associated with the communists, and it’s reflected in their songs.

Feminists were also a part of the popular front, and they had their own impact on society back then. Due to the lack of money, women began to work for themselves instead of relying on their men for money. This in turn began to change the way society saw certain professions and allowed women to become more independent. Later, when the US joined WWII, women in the industrial sector became much more common, which shows that during this time, women working in clothing factories and farms changed the way America saw working class women.

There can be connections drawn between the WPA-era activists and modern activists in a couple of ways. For one, both activists are fighting for racial and sexual equalities in the US using art to express their ideas. Woody Guthrie is a great inspiration to many later artists that fight for civil liberties. Feminists are also still fighting today, what they had to fight in the 1930s. Gender norms are being changed, and workplaces are being filled with women, rather than just men. Women are no longer just stay at home moms, but rather they create their own businesses and careers, which seems to be a logical progression from what the feminists fought for back in the 1930s.

“Children of Unemployed Trapper” and it’s glitch

Link to Omeka Item: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/175

Link to Omeka Exhibit: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/robert-cook–children-of-unemp/robert-cook–children-of-unemp

When I went to find an image, I wanted to find an image that focused on the impoverished people of the great depression. I found it using the library of congress link for “FSA photographs” in our resource guide. The image depicts two small children, one girl holding her little brother while in a cabin in Louisiana. The fact that these two were photographed together might signify that family sticking together was important in the 1930s due to the great depression. The fact that this was documented at all, just two children being together shows that not only family, but the youth of the nation could be an important aspect to American life, which is an aspect shown in other famous photographs, like “Migrant Mother”. ¹

The historical question I was asking was “How can the government show the American people that despite being poor, they can still make it by working together?”. This is an important question to ask, especially in this time period, as keeping America together, and hopeful was a very important aspect for the government’s agencies. ²

The first method of annotating the image without glitching it or doing anything to it help me to think more critically of an image by really focusing on what the creator intended, what the audience perceived, and by the setting this photograph was taken in. Glitching the image on the other hand helped me interpret the image in ways that the average image couldn’t. For instance, by glitching it the way I did, it completely changed the meaning I saw in the image, from one that was hopeful, to a hopeless one. Personally, I like the first method more than glitching, as it can be very hard to find meaning in the complete randomness that is glitching.

To me, this photo helps to show off that even small children stick together when times are tough for them, and so if they can do it, then so can we as the American people. While after glitching the image, I saw separation between the two rather than unity. Basically, by glitching the image, I totally changed my view on how it can be interpreted.

My Experience With Text Searching

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been using text searching without actually realizing it. Google has become synonymous with looking up information, which in fact has become its own phrase to look up information, “Google it”. Text searching, and more importantly, keyword searching changes the way I engage with information in a couple of ways.

For one, when I need to look up information, I have to figure out which keywords are important for the information I’m looking for. When using JSTOR or other library databases for looking up articles, I don’t look up specific information, rather I use a few words that might give the database a general idea of what I want.

Secondly, due to the keyword searching, I don’t always get the exact kinds of articles I need for said information. Instead, I get information from the same resource as many other people. This can create a problem, which has been documented before in Ian Milligan’s article ¹, where numerous different people get the same information from one source. This can skew information towards what that one article had to say.

I believe digital projects can create social change, if that’s what the projects intended purpose was in the first place. However, there needs to be a balance of interactivity with the project, good UI to assist the user, and good information to garner interest. However, many projects seem to be ignored by the mass public, which shows that it can be rare for one project to have much effect.

While digital media can increase the ease of gaining information, you lose the ability of many of your senses. For instance, feeling an object can be much more effecting at showing how old it is, or what it’s made of rather than just looking at it. In the case of Tony’s presentation, the nazi coin is something we could feel the difference in, not just see. By losing the ability to sense an object fully, we lose the ability to gain all the information possible from that object.

Citations: Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997-2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 94 no. 4, 2013, pp. 540-569. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/527016.

Blog Post #1

Part 1:

I’ll be honest, I didn’t sign up for this class because it was a requirement for my major, but because I’ve always been a big history buff who’s interested in the little things in history. Learning about how the digital world we now know was created is something that isn’t taught in regular history classes. In the first week I learned a lot about the many inventions that would lead up to the internet, computers, and basic electronics. Things like the radiophones turning into silent raves, or a codex into a printed book into electronic books are very interesting to me, because the average person doesn’t think about all the steps we need to take to invent something amazing. There was rapid development across the board for technology, going from books to computers in the span of only one century. In the future, I hope to learn more about how tied our modern technology is to obscure or even well known old technology. I also hope to see how culture changed due to the evolution of the technology of old to our modern digital tech. The great depression was a horrible time to be alive, but the need to innovate and create is never greater than in times of severe need, so I think this semester will be quite interesting.

Part 2:

I was assigned to review project #7, titled “History of the National Mall” by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. To figure out what this project is about, I looked at the “Using the Site” tab. This project is meant to give a virtual tour of the National mall by using maps, people, explorations, and past events. It’s actually meant to be used while on the mall to give full explanations of where one is at and if anything significant happened there. Searching for the actual information, for instance the “events” tab shows us various past events that happened hundreds of years ago. It appears the site gets a ton of it’s information from places like the library of congress, so one can trust it’s good information. Moving on to the “maps” tab, one can see that they’ve used a map for the mall for the project sort of like google maps, where brightly colored circles locate important or interesting parts of the mall a tourist might enjoy. Finally, in the “explorations” tab, they use brightly colored boxes with questions on them to answer possibly common questions one might have about the mall, or small facts that people might find interesting. I believe these transformations add to the scholarship by giving it a bright and easy to manage way to gain information about the National mall.

Sources:

Posner, Miriam. “ How did they make that?” Miriam Posner’s Blog.Wordpress. Published 4/17/2014. http://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that-the-video/

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, “Histories of the National Mall.” Histories of the National Mall, http://mallhistory.org/.