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.
