Blog Post #1

Part 1:

The first thing I learned in this class was that it is going to be a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. I never gave much thought to how we got to modern day computers, and how information processing and presentation have played such an impactful role in that journey. In addition, the first week of this class also shed light on the historical relationship that governmental institutions have on impacting the democratization of technology. More specifically, I’m wondering how much of a role technology had in nurturing the modern-day American surveillance state. Hopefully throughout the semester I can learn more about this topic, but also, I hope I can become more technologically adept at creating historical scholarship.

Part 2:

I got assigned project #21, the Cleveland Historical. The Cleveland Historical is a project that has digitized Cleveland’s history, people and places. At first glance it looks like an online news edition, but it actually has map-based, multimedia presentations and a “tour” of Cleveland. This scholarship not only fits into the digital edition type in Miriam Posner’s framework, but it also involves the mapping type in Posner’s framework. The digital project makes use of various sources, but most often it uses photographs. Photographs can be seen in almost all of the stories and in the tour section. For example, in the story about “The Cleveland Buckeyes” there are photographs of the players and their jerseys.[1] And in the article about the Riverside Cemetery there are multiple photographs of the cemetery, the land, headstones, and photographs of maps.[2] The project processes the sources by digitizing the information and photographs and making it accessible to the public. Lastly, the presentation of the website is fairly interesting. The creators used a platform called “Omeka” and divided the website into one section on stories and one section on a “tour” of Cleveland. By using Omeka, the website is accessible to the public and made interactive. This digital project adds to the scholarship because it organizes the primary sources in ways that have not been done before. Specifically, the project makes use of oral history in a digital manner, and at least in my eyes, that is very unique and uncommon. Oral history has been neglected for centuries, so it’s interesting to see this website make use of it.

---

[1] Cory Ross and James Blockett, “The Cleveland Buckeyes,” Cleveland Historical, accessed September 4, 2019, https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/867.

[2] Toni Berry, “Riverside Cemetery,” Cleveland Historical, accessed September 4, 2019, https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/866.