You will post all of your blog assignments on this WordPress site. Please make sure all blogs are written with good grammar, spelling, and organization. In each post, you are expected to write 350-500 words with at least two citations from the readings in class. Make sure to post your blog into the category for that assignment. Each assignment will have further instructors and/or criteria. 1
Blog Posts will count for 30% of your grade. Each post will be graded on a 3-point scale based on the following criteria:
3 points: You have met the word count and citation requirements, engaged meaningfully with the course material, and offered your own perspective or argument on the subject matter rooted in our class discussions.
1.5 points: You have met the word count and citation requirements and have engaged somewhat with the course material but have not offered a strong perspective or argument.
0 points: You either did not meet the word count or citation requirements, did not engage with the materal or make an argument, or both.
Creating this map was a very interesting experience. Reading the book was quite difficult as the print was very small and it just wasn’t what I expected. Most modern guide books have a lot more notable tourist attractions, these books didn’t seem to exactly do that. Yes they went into the history of the town and area, but they give little recommendations on what to do there or what there was to see.
Although this assignment wasn’t exactly what I was expecting it definitely was a very interesting learning experience. I definitely agree with Sarah Bond after doing this project. Mapping these historical locations or any point of historical importance can be extremely useful for preserving and teaching history. If anything, these maps are becoming even more important as some of these locations no longer exist due to various causes.
Mapping and Spatial history are extremely important when developing land, by having access to these primary sources we can be able to tell if the land needs to be assessed by an archeological team first to preserve the history of the land. I believe this important skill can really help us to avoid situations that many European countries often face when building. Often times we hear of European countries accidentally unearthing historical site and destroying some very interesting finds, I believe more interest in spatial history and mapping primary sources could prevent that in the United States.
The projects encased in the Green Book collections are only the tip of what we could accomplish with the plethora of primary sources we have. People could even make these maps with online tools like I had done for this assignment. Of course the maps made by the people on the Green Book Project (as seen above) looked much better compared to mine.
The Green Book version of my tour definitely looks more professional then mine and didn’t take the exact path I did, but both versions could be useful. There was one thing I did notice while looking over the Green Books maps though, there was a lot of segregation going on during the times these were made. Most guide books probably won’t take into account that fact and would most likely cater to white Americans.
Travel must have been so much more difficult for people of color during that time. I never even thought about that possibility until I looked over these maps. It really goes to show how different things were back then. Of course black and white travelers could probably take the same route but they might not have been allowed in the same restaurant or get the same quality of service where they went.
That is another reason I appreciated the opportunity to look at the Green Book project, it opened my eyes to that factor. That is something I never would have noticed without looking at those maps, and I think it’s important to recognize the struggles people went through and learn from them. That way we don’t end up repeating the past.
Citations:
Bond, Sarah. “Mapping Racism And Assessing the Success of the Digital Humanities.” History From Below, October 20, 2017. https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/10/20/mapping-racism-and-assessing-the-success-of-the-digital-humanities/.
“ILLINOIS A DESCRIPTIVE AND HISTORICAL GUIDE : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive. A.C.MCLURG & CO., January 1, 1970.
“NavigatingThe Green Book.” Navigating The Green Book. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://publicdomain.nypl.org/greenbook-map/.
This timeline was created based on the life of Mr. George Johnson, an ex-slave once owned the president of the confederate states of America, Jefferson Davis. His interview provided a plethora of information about how enslaved people were treated and about music on plantations. However, as illustrated in the timeline, most of what he considered notable life events came after he left the plantation in 1884.
This was very surprising to me since I expected the interview to mostly focus on his life while enslaved not on his life afterwards. On further examination of the timeline you can also see that Mr. Johnson claimed to have left the plantation almost 20 years after the Civil War ended. This raised two questions: was this simply a matter of an elderly man having difficulty remembering dates or was this a matter of history?
I’m sure many slave owners were reluctant to give up their slaves and held on to them as along as possible. Though I can’t remember being taught anything like that in my history classes. I’m still unsure if this is just a simple mistake made by Mr. Johnson himself, or a problem with the way historians teach us this period in history. This question of how accurate the dates given were made the interview a little less useful than I had hoped.
Making a timeline relies on knowing about when an event happened, but Mr. Johnson was frequently unable to provide a date or gave a range for most events that happened in his life. Most of the time I had to calculate and give the most likely year for the timeline. So, in this aspect the interview was not all that useful, but it was extremely useful when it came to understand the person who was telling their life story.
Mr. Johnson spoke so proudly; he was obviously very proud of what he had accomplished in life. You could hear how passionate he was when he spoke about music. This ability to hear his tone and exact words was amazing. Although I’ll admit I had a hard time understanding what he was saying at certain points. I wasn’t the only one either, when reading the “Note on the Language of the Narratives” I discovered that the people conducting the interviews were also not able to understand the people they interviewed a good amount of the time. This is extremely evident in the transcriptions of the interviews that are missing many things Mr. Johnson had said.
Though the fact that they made an effort to preserve these people’s stories speaks a lot to the social history of the U.S. at the time. As stated in the Slave Narrative Collection opening essay, these interviews were collected during the years 1936 through 1938. To me this shows that people are genuinely taking an interest in what these people went through and want to preserve their stories. I think this really shows the United States effort to preserve our history.
Citations:
“A Note on the Language of the Narratives : Articles and Essays : Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938 : Digital Collections : Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress. Accessed January 22, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/note-on-the-language-of-the-narratives/#note.
“An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives : Articles and Essays : Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938 : Digital Collections : Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress. Accessed January 22, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/.
Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 1 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04777a/.
Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 2 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04777b/.
Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 3 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04778a/.
Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 4 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04778b/.
Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 5 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04779a/.
Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 6 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04779b/.
For this assignment my historical question was what did Oklahoma look like during the Dust Bowl and how did it affect the people living there? I specifically wanted to focus on Oklahoma because of how much it had been brought up in the readings and in class. I found this picture in the Library of Congress database and knew I had to use it. This image really shows how important documentary evidence is when teaching history and reveals so much about the 1930s. My great grandfather always told stories about the Dustbowl, but I never felt like I could see it in my head just right. By seeing photos from the time period, it makes it feel more real and I feel like I got a better sense of what was happening.
This photograph makes you realize that in the 1930s’ people had to abandon the lives they made due to something they couldn’t control. It not only showed what the Oklahoma land looked like in the Dust Bowl, but it also captured the despair people were feeling at the time. I used two methods that I used to realize that: image annotation and glitching. Both are very useful tools when it comes to analyzing historical images, though I did prefer image annotation to glitching.
Annotating the image was extremely helpful for me personally. I felt like it made me think more about what the photo was about and what Dorothea Lange was trying to say with it. I also felt that it’s much easier than glitching an image. Although glitching seemed fairly easy after I had read Trevor Owens’ article, I found it very difficult to understand the code and not render the image completely unrecognizable.
Once I figured out how to properly glitch the image, I learned how useful glitching could be. It can be used to make a statement using a historical photograph. For example in an article written by Michael J. Kramer called “Glitching History”, he shows a picture of an important folk artist named John Hurt during the 1960s folk music festival. Using the glitching method Kramer shifted Hurt to the center of the photograph. He did this to make a statement about how influential Hurt was in the folk music revival.
Glitching also taught me how simple it is to change a historical image; it really makes you wonder how many people have digitally edited a historical image in order to make it look like something it wasn’t. This thought makes you think more about where a photo on the internet is really coming from and what changes have been made to it.
Dana Cochran et al., “The Great Depression,” Matthew Downs, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).
Kramer, Michael J. “Glitching History: Using Image Deformance to Rethink Agency and Authenticity in the 1960s American Folk Music Revival.” Current Research in Digital History, January 1, 1970. https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-08-glitching-history/.
Lange, Dorothea. Worn-out Land and Abandoned Cabins near Newport, Oklahoma. Photograph. Library of Congress . Library of Congress. Accessed January 21, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017770101/.
Owens, Trevor. “Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps.” Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps | The Signal, November 5, 2012. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/11/glitching-files-for-understanding-avoiding-screen-essentialism-in-three-easy-steps/.
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. 2People 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. 3 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. 4 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,” 5his 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 6 for future use, like many of the songs Lomax collected are reused by modern day rap and hip-hop artists. 7 I hope to carry all this knowledge with me into future courses here at school.
For this final exhibit, I used some of the tools that I’ve found most useful throughout this class which resulted in me using Voyant Tools, TimelineJS, and soundcite. These tools allowed me to interact with the material in an engaging way and I was able to better visualize the historical content from the 1930’s. Not only was I able to learn how to work with different tools on the internet, I was able to both see and hear the content of the 1930’s.
I’m not much of a history person myself, but once I had to learn history along with the online tools, the history aspect became much more interesting. Being able to incorporate history into online tools makes it easier to understand the material. The digital humanities taught me that the content that is being put online is not completely unbiased because the person who created the source or even just the algorithm8has created it in a specific way based in their own personal beliefs and bias9.
Throughout the class I learned that coding is actually pretty fun, even if it is just using shortcode for footnotes. I never thought that I would enjoy using coding so much, but it’s actually really helpful in understanding how websites work and online tools work and can be beneficial to understanding things such as history. With that being said, I truly feel like I have a better grasp on what life was like during the 1930’s. The ex-slave narratives 10alone actually helped me understand how important the New Deal Projects were in America. Americans had a cultural revolution in the 1930’s. The Great Depression 11 was an awful event that impacted Americans all over the country. However, this prompted them to create and develop American culture at a faster rate than ever before. They had folk songs and new projects that encapsulated the lives of Americans. The ex-slave narratives shed light on how different some Americans lives were to one another, yet we’re all blended together to make this country.
I chose to write about the ex-slave narratives because it seemed to impact culture more than others from the Federal Writers Project, or even from the other New Deal projects themselves. It allows those whose voices were unheard for so long to be heard. Racial stigma against African Americans were still prevalent during the 1930’s, but I feel as if the ex-slave narratives helped step overcome racial bias in America because it was giving African Americans a voice, one that had previously been taken away from them.
America has developed its culture over and over again since the 1930’s, but I’d say that one of the most revolutionary times is during the New Deal era because it was not only a cultural revolution, but a technological revolution as well. Audio recordings were used for the ex-slave narratives which allowed us to actually hear what the interviewers as well as the interviewees sounded like. We have access to folk songs and good photographs. Because of the technology, the present day can understand what life was like in the 1930’s we are actually able to witness, visually and audibly, the change in culture during that time.
My exhibit goes over the social division in America prior to the Great Depression, and how those divisions were considerably withdrawn after the economy collapsed. I wanted to focus the exhibit on how the primary missions of FDR’s New Deal were to rebuild the American economy by creating new jobs for some 15 million unemployed. Through this, social classes were lessened, and minority groups were given more opportunities since discrimination for work could not be so strictly enforced 12. Some projects within the WPA, especially the Federal Writer’s Project and the Federal Theater Project also provided openings for women, and African Americans to be involved in the arts, and to give light to stories of theirs which had been largely repressed and undocumented before 13.
The 1930s were a period of massive change and rebuilding, and seeing American society emerge from the ruins of the Great Depression by bonding people together in their experiences and building a sense of community. Analyzing the events and projects of the 1930s is by no means an easy task, partially since few people are alive today with the memory to recount, and partially because there were so many things taking place at once. One of the many jobs of modern historians when looking back and getting a firm understanding of the 1930s, is to be able to somehow narrow down stories and experiences of the individuals who lived, breathed, and worked during the time. Thankfully, this job is made easier, and much more effective with the use of digital tools. For my exhibit, I chose a simpler approach when using my digital tools to analyze my questions. I built my exhibit heavily off of images and items that the reader could look at or listen to as they were reading simultaneously. I employed image annotations, in order to convey my thoughts on a specific piece and how it related to my question and statements by giving the image it’s own place within the exhibit. I also used the Soundcite tool to build in audio clips of an interview detailing one woman’s personal life history. I feel that this would have made the experience reading my exhibit feel more personal in bringing to life the way that many Americans lived during the early 1900s, especially in comparison to how life was during the Depression. Finally, I took a bit more of a symbolic and artistic approach to representing the conclusions I came to during my research. This was in the form of glitching an image. Being able to glitch an image allowed me to put a spin on what was represented and made it more effective when conveying the idea that many preexisting boundaries of societal discrimination were lessened during the Depression and recovery works.
From an anthropological standpoint as well, it was incredibly interesting to be able to dive into the lives of nearly forgotten people, and not just read interviews, but to hear their stories and see their art as well. One of the most interesting things about American culture and society is that it’s a vibrant blend of so many different cultural backgrounds, which are all somehow transcribed in people’s daily lives. Many people see American as a “melting pot” of cultures nowadays, and I think that was also a very important facet of American culture in the 1930s as well. One of the most invaluable things about the work the WPA did, and the collections of work and projects that are held in the Library of Congress and in the National Archives, is that we are now given the lives and stories and experiences of people who would never have been documented otherwise. That is a massively important contribution to our historical understanding of the American culture and allows us to perhaps understand deeper historical connections between history and present day.
I will openly admit that coming into this course, I knew virtually nothing about digital humanities or the ethics of research in the digital age. I also knew possibly even less about the New Deal and the 1930s, but several of the articles we read in class made me much more aware of not just the happenings of the 1930s, but the way historians go about their research, and the importance of ethics in the digital age, and verifying the validity of some information 14. Being able to influence my research in the future, and make it more accessible to public consumption, and making it easier to understand is also a significant portion of what I learned in this course. While not employed in my exhibit per se, the Voyant text analysis tools I think will be incredibly helpful in deciphering overarching themes of texts, especially since we are moving towards an age where virtually nothing will be on paper anymore. Digital humanities is an ever-evolving field, and while the history we study stays the same, the ways in which we analyze it are continually changing.
References:
“About This Collection: Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938: Digital Collections: Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress. Accessed December 13, 2019. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/.
Appelbaum, Yoni. “How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, May 15, 2012. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/.
“Working Together.” Living New Deal. Accessed December 13, 2019. https://livingnewdeal.org/working-together/.
“23. The Great Depression.” THE AMERICAN YAWP, June 7, 2013. http://www.americanyawp.com/text/23-the-great-depression/.
The Federal Theatre Project was not as
glamorous, or as long-lasting, as some of its other New Deal programs. However,
during the short four-year period that it existed, the FTP made waves. My historical
question was: what impact did the Federal Theatre Project have on the culture
of the United States?
Even before the onset of the Great Depression, theatre was struggling. Movies had grown in popularity, and traditional theatre found itself more and more pushed to the side to make way for cinema. “Unable to compete with the motion picture industry, actors, stagehands, technicians, musicians, and vaudeville performers found themselves displaced by technology even before the depression” 15. Naturally, this forced theatre workers to look for employment elsewhere, and the onset of the Depression made this search all the more difficult.
The president at the time, FDR, started the New Deal in an attempt to ease the unemployment throughout the country, and also revitalize the arts. Through this New Deal, many different projects sprang up to deal with the issue, and one of them was the Federal Theatre Project. Some of the other projects, such as the Federal Arts Project and the Federal Music Project, gained success and a positive reputation. The FMP especially. The president and first lady “sponsored a series of nine concerts… in the White House between 1934 and 1942” 16. However, unlike the other projects, the Federal Theatre Project did not succeed as a project in the long run, and it is considered “the least successful of all the projects in this artistic/political endeavor” 17.
Even thought the Federal Theatre Project was ultimately considered unsuccessful, the project still made an impact. It put theatre workers and actors to work again, and it produced many different plays and productions. One of the most notable productions of the FTP was the play Macbeth, which was altered to have a 19th century Haitian background, and an all-black cast. The play was very successful in drawing an audience, and it “ran for 10 sold-out weeks at the Lafayette” 18. The success of the play encouraged an interest in more African American versions of classical tales.
I chose to focus my final project on the
Federal Theatre Project because the subject of theatre interested me. As a
child, I had always enjoyed being a part of my local school and church play
productions, and, later on, I developed an interest in musicals and opera. I
was lucky enough to see renditions of “Les Miserables” and “Phantom of the
Opera” in person in Washington DC, and I was awed by them. Since then, I have
always had an interest in theatre.
For my exhibit, my first skill page is a
couple of image annotations. The images are photos taken at the outside of theatres
in which the “Voodoo Macbeth” was shown. They depict the large crowds and
enthusiasm of the people at the play. The second skill page is a timeline of
the Federal Theatre Project, and it lists the major events of the FTP. The
third skill page is a storymap that illustrates a few of the major cities that
the popular “Voodoo Macbeth” toured. These three skill pages help to illustrate
the impact that the FTP had through visual means.
The history of the 1930’s is interesting, and many different things happen within that decade. It was a time of great change. I’ve found that the digital humanities is a useful tool for studying history, as it allows for a more in-depth and personal view of peoples’ lives through time. There is value in that, and I intend to look for more digital humanities projects when I do historical research again.
To begin, let me say that I think this exhibit was challenging in many ways. I think that to create an essay with so much citation work behind it using three different methods and analyzing each at every step is no small feat. I knew heading into it that it would be a lot of work, but I didn’t really know. However, if I wasn’t so passionate about my topic, I would not have stuck with it with the diligence that I did. But, I soon learned that a lot of the deeper information surrounding the FTP was not available to me.
A huge obstacle I encountered was using just the resources we were provided. There’s only one on the Federal Theater Project. I started with the reading that intrigued me the most which was about the all-Black cast of MacBeth
. I read for a day before I started the project which I thought set me back but in reality, I do not think I could have completed it without that knowledge. With any government program, there is a lot of secrecy involved and it is our job to be informed digital citizens and understand what websites are summarizing and which websites are telling the truth and then some
More than my struggles with researching my project, I learned that the 1930s were far denser than I had been taught in my 7th grade social studies class. There’s a vast history due to its unique placement in between world wars and racial riots are coming to the surface. The 1930s was the brewing pot for revolution in so many ways.
I also had struggled executing my project. I’m not very technologically inclined and I knew that from the start of this class. The most important thing this class has taught me is to save and record my work.
This class was one of the comprehensive classes I have taken in my entire life. There’s so much information to be packed into a semester and so many different aspects that are covered in a day that can be covered for a whole semester in an entirely different class. Overall, I kept coming back to the class because I was so interested. The readings were amazing, and I learned so much about a time period that I could not have told you anything about before the class started. All I knew was that it was the start of the Great Depression. The projects were insightful and demanded that I used a different part of my problem-solving brain to deconstruct the technology I was working with in order to process the problem.
I also learned a lot about the history of research on this campus. A lot of our readings were from George Mason students, professors, programs, and buildings
. I had no clue that there was so much one-of-a-kind work being created by our university. This class also reminded me how fun and interesting studying history can be. I am not a history major, nor do I ever intend to be, but I do think history is essential to the world’s understanding of the future, socially and culturally. In this class, we got to go so many fun places and explore history in something that was still around today but had deep roots from almost a century ago. I really enjoyed glitching and the copyright discussions. They were really modern ties in both topics that also had very interesting conclusions to be made about respecting art and the creator
. I really loved it when we had discussions in class like on the last day. To me, history is a lot about how we draw conclusions about primary sources that we are given and so it was so cool to see how everyone responds to them in their own way. This class was very resourceful and finishing each assignment left me feeling more accomplished and empowered about studying history.
My final exhibit is focused on how the perspectives of women have changed throughout the 1930s. I chose this topic because a lot of things happen during this time that allows women to start working and becoming involved in the economy. Several things I will talk about in this post are women in the industry, migrant women, and how they became involved in employment along with many other topics. This post will also include multiple secondary sources that give me background information on my historical question. Lastly, I will go over the digital tools that helped shape my historical question.
The first page of my exhibit, not counting the introduction, is titled “women in the industry”. The digital tool I used on this page was annotated image. This was an important tool for me because I am able to explain my topic to the audience through an image. The picture I chose shows off the women’s skills and how they are capable of doing complex jobs. However, back then it was much more difficult for women to become noticed. During the great depression, women had to try and find jobs because they needed to have enough money to support their families; their husbands could not be the only ones working. The “American Yawp” does a great job of explaining the great depression and how it affected these families. ” the most desperate, the chronically unemployed, encamped on public or marginal lands in “Hoovervilles,” Poor women and young children entered the labor force.” 23.
My second page is focused on migrant women and what their roles were as women during that time. Glitching was the digital tool that I used for this page. I used the famous photo titled “Migrant Women”. In my opinion, this photo was detrimental to this section of my exhibit. I chose glitching because it allows you to look at an image in a way you never thought you could. Through the glitch, I was able to focus on her face which showed great desperation for the future. She looked as if there was no hope left. Many of these families had to migrate to California because of the effects of the dust bowl. They also believed farming in California was more successful which allowed them to make more money. ” This increase in farming activity required an increase in spending that caused many farmers to become financially overextended.” 24.
On the third page of my exhibit, I used text analysis with the digital tool voyant. “Voyant is a web-based tool for text analysis that is designed to combine ease of use with a sophisticated array of visualization methods.” 25.
I analyzed several interviews of women working in New York after the great depression. I wanted to be able to get an idea of what their careers were like before and after the great depression. However, when I looked at the cirrus it was missing some keywords that I thought would show up, such as women and careers. One word that I did find was “Mrs” because they were mainly referred to as their last names. Since the cirrus was not much help I had to try and look closer into the interviews. I was able to find a pattern that was quite unfortunate. I was able to conclude that several of the women struggled to find jobs because they did not hold as much value as men did at the time. A few of them even got into prostitution just to help support their families. At that time we can tell that the perspective of women then was not positive or uplifting. Once the New Deal was established, more jobs became available for women. “the New Deal encouraged a widespread effort among Depression-era Americans to work together to improve their situation and to recognize that America was, a “nation of nations.”. 26.
In conclusion, I learned a lot about the history of the 1930s in this class and the importance of being productive and ethical digital citizens. Before this class, I was uneducated on all the tools we used and learned about. Now I am able to understand the history of the 1930s with a digitized background. I believe that everyone should be educated on the tools we use because they are able to provide a lot of information and increase our knowledge as digitized citizens.
For my final project in this course I asked the historic question of ‘How does exploring the New Deal through the five senses portray the work it took to rebuild America? “. Through research and building an online exhibit I was able to find answers to my question. During the Great Depression “Unemployment peaked at 25 percent in 1932. With no end in sight, and with private firms crippled and charities overwhelmed by the crisis, Americans looked to their government as the last barrier against starvation, hopelessness, and perpetual poverty” (American Yawp). With people unable to work can a sense of hopelessness and unhappiness swept the country. When the New Deal took action many programs were implemented to get people moving again and back to work.
My first page of my exhibit explores the importance of sound during the New Deal. I explain how President Roosevelt used the radio to broadcast his live “Fireside Chats”. This took work, people had to get a radio to listen in, be home at a certain time to listen or go somewhere if they did not have one. I incorporated a clip of Roosevelt speaking into this page using soundcite. Being able to hear the sound of Roosevelt’s friendly voice speaking to his people makes you understand how the citizens also began to trust him. The trust is what helped immensely in the success of his New Deal programs.
The next to pages of my exhibit focus on touch. For touch I incorporate the Federal Art Project image and annotated them. This project came about because of the idea that “Investment in art would be ‘in material wealth, contentment and well being’”(Park & Markowitz). I used annotation here because I wanted users to have to physically touch their mouse and click on the annotation so that while they are viewing my exhibit they are using their sense of touch as well.
I grouped together the last three senses and formed my page on the American Guide Series. I used a map because “Digital mapping and database construction can allow us to reconstruct, preserve, and visualize vestiges of the past “ (posner) I wanted people to move through the map I added and feel as though they were actually taking a trip from the book. Envisioning the new sights they would see, smells and even tastes. I also added in a few sentences about America Eats which was a book that was never fully published Writers still “ collected amazing stories: interviewing cooks and eaters” and “ transcribing recipes”(America Eats).
After finishing my project I can conclude that exploring the New Deal through your senses does in fact make the work it took to succeed more prominent. I wanted to be able to” illustrate ideas and movement, not necessarily data points as we’ve been discussing them “. My point to this whole exhibit was that Americans had lost their way because of the Great Depression. When the New Deal arouse and Americans were given the opportunity to do something about it they jumped right to it. They were put to work. If nobody had made artwork, got a radio or traveled the country the success would not have been so great. They wanted to work to make America better and that is exactly what they did.
