Author: Simeon Washington

Looking Back: Mobility and the 1930s

Final Project: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/moving-on-up

Ever since we started learning about the different departments of the Cultural New Deal, I have been captivated by the idea of mobility. Throughout all of the New Deal, something was moving, something was happening and the people greatly benefitted from it. 1People came together and got things done. What really tipped this off for me was when we watched “It Happened One Night” for homework. There are so many examples of mobility within that movie that even I got excited or had to dance along to the music.

To me, this project was reminiscent of a 5-paragraph essay, so I handled it that way. I focused my argument around mobility being a major theme and result of the New Deal. I wanted to study the Federal Art Project as well, but I mostly just kept it to the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Theatre Project. Each one of them provided movement in a unique way.

The Federal Writers Project focused on making the American Guides series to help establish what a new America would look like coming out of the Depression. The guides would be a tool to codify what the nation now is and be emblematic of American patriotism. 2 To me, the tours got people moving and exploring and figuring out what America would be like. I focused on the touring aspects of the guides, specifically in Maine, discovering that some of the tours went through wilderness. I conveyed this through a story map, showing how the tours were not cyclical, but more linear, running predominantly in the cardinal directions. Using the map helps clarify the distance and vastness of the land covered.

The Federal Music Project, is, to me, the best project out of the four. I find it simply amazing all the songs they were able to collect and create. The way the FMP got people moving was through the gathering of folk songs. These became emblematic of American roots and where people came from, permitting a mixture of cultures. It provided entertainment for the American people and traveled with them when they eventually joined the war in 1945. It was able to thrive like this because it held no political partisanship. 3 There were not many high-profile figures in the FMP machine, just normal people wanting to make and collect music. For this project, the obvious choice was soundcite. With it, music and words can harmonize and good ideas can be generated. I mostly used it to show emotion that evoked movement or the desire to join in and sing.

The Federal Theater Project, complete opposite of the situation in the FMP, was very high-profile with the risk-taking Hallie Flannagan at the helm. Much of the movement the FTP brought came in the form of theater shows which shook up society. A great example of this is Orson Welles’s “Macbeth,” 4his debut stage play. It was a radical idea having African-Americans in major roles of Shakespeare as well as changing the location of the work. People gave it the connotation of “voodoo” thanks to this. The play got the gears moving for the FTP, bringing in lots of revenue. For this one, I used Omeka’s annotation feature to look at an image from Macbeth. I used it to explain how this was an up-and-coming time for various ethnicities, and African-Americans were finally being brought to the limelight of the stage. The movement here is the lifting up of others.

Much of the technology I used in this project is great. I feel that it can really help bring to light certain aspects of history we might be unable to see from just a cursory glance or reading. We, as digital historians, are able to look deeper into the subject and draw out new ideas to get a new perspective on things. Before this class, I barely knew much about the New Deal, but now I see the real breadwinner programs that helped solidify American culture. Trends like comics and social security still persists to this day, even the idea of popular “pop” music which resonates with the people. Ideas being remixed
5 for future use, like many of the songs Lomax collected are reused by modern day rap and hip-hop artists. 6 I hope to carry all this knowledge with me into future courses here at school.

Thinking about Mobility and Music

A lot of the music written during this time of the 1930s was gathered together from differing cultures. Together, these songs would come to make up the conception of the American folk tradition. These songs (passed down or home-grown) were sought after by the Federal Music Project’s Alan Lomax in order to not only preserve the culture, but its relevance as well as the songs could find new meaning in the future. 1

What most interested me about these times is the focus on mobility which seems to become greatly apparent. People moving West for better lives, or people traveling the states in order to see what America has to offer in the form of scenery. Immediately, my mind went to the songs collected about travelling. The collecting of these audio clips makes these songs easier to access as well as make them live on through a digital world, making them accessible in the future.

“I’m Goin’ Down The Road Feelin’ Bad” 2 is a song that focuses on this kind of movement in the states. The narrator mentions going to where the climate suits her clothes, bringing to mind the idea of travelling in loose-fitting clothes that someone might have to wear back then thanks to the Depression. Having to wander around in those clothes would not be great, especially in inclement weather. The narrator’s repetition of this notion in the song plays into that “bad feeling” that they have, not only having to walk around in poor clothes, but also having been pent up in prison for some reason.

A favorite of mine is “Back to Arkansas” recorded in the Arvin FSA camp in California. 3 The themes of the poem line up well with the idea of travelling West back in the thirties. 4 Many people were uprooted thanks in part to the Depression. Tag teaming with the Dust Bowl, it really hit the farmers hard. People from Oklahoma and Kansas and many other places packed up and started migrating around to find land suitable to work as well as good paying jobs. These same details can be found wrapped in the words of “Back to Arkansas.”

Themes of mobility being found within and around these songs and poems really shows how it played such a role at the time. People going out and looking for something new, be it because of their clothing or because of their lifestyle or someone going somewhere, be it for travel and touring or finding a better life.

Going off the Road

Beginning this assignment, I immediately knew what state I wanted to look at. Maine has always interested me, so I thought this would be the perfect time to get my feet wet. The tour I chose was Tour #4, From Fort Kent to Mattawamkeag. Now the focus of these tours was mobility and creating a good sense of the state for tourists. This tour intrigued me because it sounded mostly “off-road.” Trails and canoeing down rivers were always mentioned at some point along the way. This tour was not for the faint of heart; rather, it was for those seeking sport. There was no road to simply drive down and sightsee, this route went through the woods and often junction with State Route 11 at certain points. I interpreted this as the writers wanting to show off the wilderness of the state, show what fun it has to offer in lush scenery and hard-working people.

The interesting thing about the tour is that it runs north to south almost in a straight line. Marguerite Shaffer’s See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 states that the federal workers wanted the tours to not be cyclical, but to go in the cardinal directions from state border to state border. 1

This tour offered many surprises when compared to the Negro’s Green Book project which compiles data about trips blacks took to safe spots for them in the past. Being that this tour was organized by the government and carried out by the state and local governments, this tour was mostly in the hands of White Americans. This image, screenshotted from Google Maps shows the general path of the Fort Kent-Mattawamkeag Tour. While traversable today, White Americans would most likely have enjoyed the thrill of the sporting events (hunting game and fishing) and taking to the wooded trails and canoeing. This map, created from The Green Book‘s data in the year 1947, shows a path that does not line up with the tour. What I feel this shows is that they (the Blacks at the time) would not travel through the forest trail or down State Route 11 to get to Bangor. This shows that these small towns might not have held the same importance to White Americans as it did to Blacks. Here, I think a historical bias could be drawn, but something else needs to be looked at first.

Heat Map (Density Map) showing the prominence of safe spaces for Blacks in the year 1946. This view is specifically of the East Coast and Midwest.

Using this heat map, it is easy to see that Blacks in Maine was not a common occurrence. There was only one rest stop available for them in the city of Bangor and not much else. No matter how I planned the trip, everything always ended back up at Bangor. So, concerning the historical bias 2 of the tour, nothing really reflects a racist attitude towards blacks as they were not a heavy presence. A lot of the major cities like New York, Chicago, and Atlanta are more densely populated by such locations that it makes sense as Blacks were more common to those regions.

By taking these tours and analyzing them both digitally and spatially, the goals of the FWP in writing the guides become apparent. Maine is rich in wildlife and game, making it a choice place to visit for hunting, fishing or for beginning a lumbering industry. The concept of wanting quasi-linear tours is also apparent. Maine has it all to get tourists coming to its forested frontiers. In a similar vein, The Green Book shows the racism of the times and the places blacks could go. It evinces a sense of a broken nation that really clashes with the goals the New Deal Administration wanted to bring in.

Both Sides Now: Reflecting on the Special Collections

The Special Collections Research Center has archives full of data. Specifically, they put on display for us artifacts concerning the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). Across the tables lay various documents and objects. These objects and documents are very important as they help paint a picture, help develop the story of the FTP from what we, as scholars, already know. Scholars can take this information and rearrange to make varying arguments. Where the general public is concerned, I feel they are the consumers of the stories archivists make with their collection. Say, the archivists sits out a puppet, some pictures of dancers and notes on their designs. The public would interpret it however the archivist would set it up, and then begin to question or look into it further if the collection intrigues them. In this way, the archivists educate both scholars and the general public. The scholars being able to take the research a step further, while the public, I feel, would consider it more of a “national memory” or a facet of the past that greatly exemplifies the nation of the time.

The job of the archivist is to organize the data in any way they deem fit or suitable. When it comes to digitizing, there are two categories of how the item is interpreted: one is informational, the other is artifactual. Informational concerns the fixity and validation of the data or artifact. Does the information conveyed by the data remain the same as the artifact becomes digitized? Artifactual concerns interpretation. The archivist takes into consideration the materiality of the object. For example, in Artifactual Elements Pt. 1 1, the focus is on born-digital data being recovered from old-fashioned hardware. The archivist takes into consideration how data is stored, created and processed using this hardware. Then they consider the “environment” of the information and how that impacts how the source was created, altered or access. Desktops impact how we create and store records on our computer by a fixed screen. Another and final thing to consider is how word processing software, image editing programs, or how even operating systems can impact how contemporary records creators produce creative works.

Archivists struggle with trying to keep the meaning of their collections when digitizing them. Oft times, what is lost are the sensory perceptions. When you digitize an object, you can no longer smell it or feel it. All you can do is look at it interpretively and use various digital tools to analyze it that way. An Archivist, in this case, may prefer to digitize documents or pictures because a lot of the information can still be conveyed–digitally altered even. A three-dimensional object relies heavily on being “3-D.” When you digitize it, that already takes away its depth and makes it flat. You even lose the sense of touch which could key into how the object was made. Even though they are great to marvel at, these images and objects are subject to their own biases of the time. When we digitize them, that bias is carried forward through time. The scholar takes the time to parse through this bias and figure out who or what was omitted in order to get a good idea of the history being conveyed. 2 Simply, once these sources enter the digital world, many more challenges arise.

The SCRC FTP collection we saw involved a puppet, diorama and various forms of documentation. A lot of what they had put what we learned about the FTP into context. My group specifically got to see the Vaudeville and Negro Unit’s plays, stages, and costumes. In class, we discussed how the FTP did not use a lot of money for spending, but on salaries.3 The images painted a different story for me. Everything looked so lavish and exciting, made me wish I could have seen the pictures in their original context; rather, I wish I could see all the colors and see all the dramas in actions.

Living it up in the 1930s

What really captivates me about the past is people’s lifestyles. This desire to get a glimpse at their lives back then led me to my historical question: What were lifestyles like then, and how were they recorded by the Federal writers. I was immediately greeted by a flurry of words. The problem was that they all seemed very simple. Home and work, like and folklore. These words caused me to think a little more about what my historical question could be.

https://voyant-tools.org/?stopList=keywords-f4547f893cb245720fcc371d1768e931&whiteList=&corpus=a0d1dfae2c29f39d7cde744e33a7eb3b&view=Cirrus

My thoughts moved on to consider World War II, so I shortened the class corpus to any document that was recorded between 1939-1945. What I learned was that our corpus stopped in the year 1941 which is when America joined the war. This date could imply that the government turned from focusing on these writings and recordings to focusing more on the war effort.

Voyant was pretty helpful in getting me to visualize these lifestyles before America joined the war. In the word cloud (Cirrus Tool) above, the words work, good, old, time, like, house and came recurred very frequently. This gave me the idea that a lot of these people’s lives were more centered around work as that was what the New Deal set out to do, provide jobs and relief for the people in this time of uncertainty. “Like” and “Old” are words very reminiscent of jargon typically used to describe locations (Old) and forming comparisons or statements of “ought to” or “should” do something. These words being prominent showed, to me, that the interviewers were most likely very relaxed when it came to discussing these topics with their interviewees. They carried the valence of narrative and really felt like stories painting the picture of family life in the past. 1

The tool that helped me the most was the Links Tool. It really put these words into perspective by showing how they connected with words in similar documents. Using this, I could closely investigate the documents to see why the algorithm assigned these certain words to link. A good example was “family.” Links linked the word with “medicine,” “home,” and “Doughty” as the Doughty document discussed their life at home. This link conveys a sense of home being a place of healing and security as that was where the family was. A similar thing could be seen with “people” being connected to “folklore” as folklore was the story of the people which they passed down, holding meaning in their culture.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=a0d1dfae2c29f39d7cde744e33a7eb3b&stopList=keywords-f4547f893cb245720fcc371d1768e931&query=time&query=good&query=people&query=came&query=school&query=home&mode=corpus&context=3&view=CollocatesGraph

Distant Reading is a really fun tool for getting a broad sense of what a group of documents could possibly mean. I enjoyed getting to explore the tools and answer my historical question. During the time before America joined the war, they were very focused on home, doing good, working to support their families and trying to keep healthy. 2

The Question of Algorithms

Algorithms are the equations that helps us throughout our everyday lives. They can be used when we decide what meals to cook upon their reception or what resources to pick depending on how relevant they are to us. The problem with algorithms in this day and age is that they lack transparency. A lot of what algorithms “do” are hidden behind unknown rules and digital curtains which companies do not make us privy to. Louise Matsakis writes that, “…even the people who build them aren’t always capable of describing how they work. ”1 This statement gives credence to the situation; big companies can set up these algorithms, but they cannot determine how they will work. She later espouses the idea that no one really cares about the code the big companies use, they just want the algorithms to be fair. Algorithms can be “sexist” or “racist” because they have no context and adapt to the bias of user relevance and this ties into that question of fairness, how transparent can we make these algorithms and will people be willing to accept that?

It is for this reason that scholars like Cathy O’Neil and Matsakis caution us to become better in how we consume digital media. O’Neil cautions us to not put blind faith into algorithms.2 While Matsakis wants us to question the algorithms we use in our daily lives. I found O’Neil’s description of an algorithm to be particularly interesting. Simply put, you have a historical data-set and your definition of success. The historical data-set are the things your bringing together like the ingredients in a dish, you go over which ingredients you want to use, and those you don’t. Your definition of success can be if your family likes the meal you prepared, then you have succeeded. This process can then be repeated with your successes also being added to the historical data-set. This kind of algorithm works for you and around you. The algorithms companies use and have AIs run pull from the entire culture for the historical data-set, thus a lot of biases of the past can be impressed upon the present. 

Safiya Noble brings up this exact idea in terms of feminism and black people. This historical data-set has access to the data the entire culture can provide. Thus, these algorithms end up carrying the biases of the past into now. Her personal anecdote3 at the beginning of her writing details this effectively in the sense of the sexualizing of women and how that affected her search on Google. She simply wanted to do something with her nieces but was met with pornographic results. She later goes on to discuss how the Google search algorithm has no social context. It show something that’s biased, something racist or sexist and not even have a concern or programmed thought of the consequences. So, in a vein similar to O’Neil and Matsakis, Noble cautions us about how big companies use algorithms and about their biases and fairness, but she also she carries a sense of activism. Noble brings up topics about movements to get companies to change how these algorithms function and investigates their biases. So we need to take O’Neil’s, Noble’s and Matsaki’s accounts into consideration and begin questioning the algorithms too. 


The Meaning in the Paint

The Meaning in the Paint Exhibit inspired this blog post

Concerning digital history, a lot of images we see we take at face value. Say a portrait of a woman and her children or a picture of a man and his instrument. We see exactly those things: a mother of two and a talented musician. At least, that is what we assume we see. There is more to these images than what is on the surface and that is what I have discovered. “Screen essentialism” 1 is the name of the game and a wary one. Code can be looked at and interpreted in various different ways, but we only choose to see it in the one way it is displayed. 2

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WPA,_FAP,_pre-school_age_girl_painting,_Walker_Art_Center,_Minneapolis,_Minnesota_-_NARA_-_196149.tif

I stumbled upon this image when I was looking through my class resource list. Originally, I had wanted to find a mural or painting that looked at American culture or defined it in some regard. (The PWA (Public Works Administration) and FAP (Federal Art Project) were on my mind for a while.) As I was about to give up looking through the Wikimedia source list, I accidentally fumbled around the mouse-pad and clicked on this image. Honestly, could not have thought of a better picture!

Upon first looking at the image, it conveyed the information I wanted it to. It showed me a child painting; a representation of the idea of an American culture coming out of tough times and improving upon the arts that would focus on the American culture. I felt that the future was being entrusted to this young lady while she thought of what to paint. What she is focusing on is a pure white painting. Ideas of a vast emptiness waiting to be field came to mind; the possibility of making a new future and putting that in the hands of the little girl’s generation.


The glitching process, which involved removing and adding code to an image, was tough to go through as I had to find a way to change the file type in Windows. Successfully, I was able to remove some code behind this image and generated this image.

The meaning behind glitching is clear: to bring to the front information that is not necessarily seen. Here, the girl’s painting has become obscured. To me, the image resonated with the idea of censorship and the line artists had to toe in order to follow the government’s regulations as well as get their own ideas out there. While I would not expect radical ideas from a preschooler–then again, what can you expect–the splotch of stark white makes me think of how artists had to conform to what the government wanted in order to keep the public happy and inspire them in their time of need.

Behind the girl sits a mannequin. I interpreted this as the government watching over the artists work. Now that section has been jumbled up and mismatched, showing how the artists were able to get away with some things. Along with this, the color also fades from the grays, blacks and whites into a pure stark white, representing an uncertainty in the relationship between artist and government on what they could do. It could also point to the future that lay ahead for the nation.

Glitching is a very useful tool as it can show the instability of historical sources; rather, not everything is picture perfect and has another meaning that may lay hidden until someone makes a move to uncover that meaning. Another method mentioned by Michael Kramer is deformance (a portmanteau or combination of ‘deform’ and ‘performance’.) It goes hand in hand with glitching as something is being removed, except it is more intensive. 3 I find this method more appealing because it makes you really think about the image instead of looking at it and teaches the importance of every strand that an image has which leads to a piece of information. It is easier to look at the face blindly and say that you know the meaning, but I like having the extra insight and thought to put behind my interpretations and inferences.

Response: Digitization and the changes it brings

I found Guidone’s presentation to be very interesting. I appreciated all the examples of primary sources he brought into the class. Most of them were artifacts representative of the time period we are focusing on like newspaper clippings and ads and coins from Germany varying in feel. He discussed with us the digitization of those resources and the troubles historians often have as a result.~

In Ian Milligan’s “Illusionary Order” 1, he discusses the value of digitizing national newspapers in Canada and how they have become the most go to source. Basically, not a lot of information is made available in a digitized format beyond the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail digital databases which can hold a specific bias and not be good for getting the whole picture of the past. Another problem pointed out in this article that Guidone also touched upon is “what changes when you digitize a source?” Guidone mentions that you can lose context as many databases will use specific newspaper sections rather than the whole deal. He showcased the Readex database 2 which is full of newspaper clippings. Various pieces of the paper reveal their own parts of the story and not so much a complete picture. If these papers get smudged, then the transcribing technology 3 will not be able to read the document completely and we end up with gaps, leading to lost information. They could try to use the clippings together, but then it becomes an extremely long process, tying into Milligan’s point that databases can be a mixed bag of sources or data. Most of the downsides of digitization are the result of a learning curve that needs to be taken by historians in order to better improve their work and resources. Now, let’s discuss some of the benefits.

Easily, the best benefit that comes to mind is easy access to sources, and, with keyword searching in mind, an increase to research speed. The word Guidone used was “democritized.” This word means that the user has easy access to the sources they wish to find and use. Honestly a good word to use as it gives a since of “information by the people, for the people” and implies collaboration between users which in turn allows for more complete information gathering and collecting. Instead of scrounging through books, each of us can easily divide a subject into parts and look for sources based on our individual topics. If we need to, keyword searches will bring a lot of the information we need to the forefront, and leave out the stuff we do not necessarily need, making the searching process more efficient.

Digitization can also play a good role in social change, or rather, social awareness as well. At Mason, we have two projects: The Enslaved Children of George Mason 4 and Mason’s Legacies 5. These projects seek to illuminate the story of George Mason and look into his life, which there is not a lot too unless you do some good digging! Essentially, Mason owned slave children and may have been in dealings with his slave-trading brother. Bringing attention to this topic helps people to re-evaluate what they originally thought as well as consider something new. These new ideas would help feed social awareness overtime, but I feel social change might be a bit much. These archives can gain traction, but I believe it would take some time for people to wrap their minds around the situation before change can take root.

So, when looking at the big picture, digitization has really shaken up how we look for things. Sources are much easier to find and read through. A quote from Guidone that I thought was interesting was (paraphrased), “Keywords should not be your first choice, learn the primary source and read it first.” The quote here goes back to my point on the fact that keyword searches can be good, but you lose the full force of the information the source has to offer. You can get the info you wanted, but it comes at the cost of not seeing what the full document or source. There very much is a good and bad side to digitization of sources; and as Milligan suggests, we as digital historians need to take it upon ourselves to become well acquainted with the technology to preserve the original context and be able to glean fuller information from our sources.

Works Cited

  • Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, University of Toronto Press, 27 Nov. 2013, muse.jhu.edu/article/527016.
  • Marr, Bernard. “What Is Data Democratization? A Super Simple Explanation And The Key Pros And Cons.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 12 Dec. 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/07/24/what-is-data-democratization-a-super-simple-explanation-and-the-key-pros-and-cons/#7a6bd8126013.

Footnotes

Blog Post #1

From what we’ve covered so far about the New Deal and the Great Depression in class, it seems to me that the era was really a culmination of technologies. I like the similarities between the silent raves we have today and the silent radio dances people would have back then. It shows how cyclical history can be and how ideas are often re-purposed for new generations. In a similar manner, we had computers back then that gathered information through punch cards. Now, we have workable interfaces and a screen which hides all the background information. I am really interested to learn about the different forms of entertainment employed during this time to increase morale and how people reacted to such productions. What songs people liked, favorite singers, movies and actors and actresses. Just like with the silent raves, I would like to see in a juxtaposition of the modern era to then just what has been re-purposed or modified and developed from the 30’s that we use today as entertainment. As for Digital Humanities, I also find it to be a very interesting field of study. I personally like how Digital Humanities makes access to previous cultures much more digestible. Like with the Negro’s Green Book, it was interesting to see what places were considered safe for black people to visit at the time. We have also brought using the Library of Congress’s information in our work, so I am greatly interested to see how that will turn out.

The project I was assigned to parse and study was The Berkeley Revolution. This site is effectively and exhibit that shows off primary sources which influenced the articles created and is termed as a digital archive, boasting a collection of clippings of articles from the seventies based in Berkeley, California. I think the benefit of using this sort of setup allows for information to be easily digested by someone who comes to the site and they have access to sources which each individual writer used to help the stories they wanted to share about how important this city was in the seventies. Their sources include many newspaper clippings, letters and various photos of events and accounts from that time period of the city. The diversity of the sources really helps paint a big picture. In the About Page of the site, the creators want to show a communication between the sources, which I feel further proves my point of using the sources to paint a big picture of how ideals from the sixties were brought to the forefront in the seventies. Similar to how Posner described in her video with the Negro’s Green Book, data can be digitized. In that project, the creators likely geo-coded the points to show their information. What the UC-Berkeley students worked on was digitizing the information they uncovered from what they describe as “official and unofficial” sources, which lead me to believe they covered a variety of databases and maybe were able to get in contact with families and information distributing companies in order to complete their research. Digitization leads me into my next point: Presentation. The students created a digital archive, making this information web accessible. By means of digitization and using this presentation option, the students were able to make this information accessible to a wide audience. This is great because the topic they are focusing on is seldom heard of or discussed, even for me. What the students did that I really liked is making articles and putting their sources below which shows credibility to the source and makes for an easily digestible interface. They even had graphic design contributions and used www.flaticon.com  to generate icons through Google.

Sources

“About The Berkeley Revolution.” The Berkeley Revolution, revolution.berkeley.edu/about/.

Miriam. “How Did They Make That?” Miriam Posners Blog, 1 Feb. 2014, miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that/.

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