Tag: Final Project

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.

Depictions of African Americans

At the start of this semester, I was mostly unfamiliar with the history of the 1930s. The things I did know were painted using a broad brush in vague terms. I knew that the Great Depression occurred, as did the Dust Bowl and the New Deal. These were things I had obtained in previous history classes, but were mostly an afterthought, as discussion of the time period was relegated to describing the 30s as the period between the two World Wars. While this is accurate, I’ve since learned that it’s far from the full story. Hopefully, my exhibit accurately conveys the skills and information that I’ve learned.

For example, I had almost no knowledge of the folk culture that developed and exemplified the decade1. The nature of the Federal One Project was an interesting discussion, and the content that was created then seems just as relevant now. The extravagant theater productions that created new perspectives on classic works of art laid the groundwork for the many remakes that we see nowadays. Orson Welles thought he could make a version of Macbeth that would appeal to his audience2, just as Greta Gerwig is trying to make Little Women apply to a modern audience with her recent adaptation.

The digital tools we applied and learned about were incredibly practical, in a way that I wasn’t expecting in a history course. At the outset of the course, I was unsure what exactly an examination of the “Digital Past” would look like, or how it would apply to my work and studies. Even as a Journalism major, I had no idea how helpful many of these tools are, whether they help visualize information and data or they simply create new ways of thinking about older sources.

To start, image glitching was a helpful introduction to these digital skills, as it is in many ways a thought exercise. The results of image glitching can be used to reexamine what we think we know about the past, and look at it new ways or perspectives3. By transforming the nature of a source firsthand in a skill assignment, we were able to reassess the different values and limitations of sources that may not have been otherwise considered. Later in the semester, we also saw image glitching used to make a point, to emphasize the shifting nature of our culture and exemplifying the destruction of the myth of the nuclear family4.

For my exhibit, I tried to use the skills that I am most likely to keep with me as I pursue a career in journalism. Soundcite was the first skill that I selected. In traditional journalism, you are limited in the number of senses that you can engage. One is limited to telling a story through written words, without being to fully convey the sounds or smells or feelings associated with an event. Through the Soundcite tool, an extra sense can be added to the storytelling. I also used Voyant’s distance reading tools to create word clouds and links, because word choice is more important now than ever. Finally, I chose to use image glitching because I believe that the content that is omitted or rearranged in an image can be incredibly effective.

At the beginning of this semester, I had no real opinion on the 1930s, and did not know of any real connections between that decade and our current culture. Now, I know that the 1930s’ concept of a definitive American culture5 has permeated our public consciousness for decades. The escapism in films and the accessible nature of folk music are the lasting legacies of the 1930s.

At the end of the day, the digital nature of the course will stick with me. As a young person, I had a passing knowledge of algorithms and how they’d infiltrated our lives, especially as Netflix continues to recommend shows that I have no interest in. Obviously, that algorithm isn’t perfect, but that’s because of how it was programmed by humans. Just as no human is without bias, there is no perfectly neutral or just algorithm6. With the functioning understanding of algorithms I gained through our discussions, I can be more mindful of what information I am feeding algorithms and how they are using that information. Even if I can’t avoid the algorithms, at least I can be aware of how they are created and their effects.

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