Blog Post #1

Part 1:

I’ll be honest, I didn’t sign up for this class because it was a requirement for my major, but because I’ve always been a big history buff who’s interested in the little things in history. Learning about how the digital world we now know was created is something that isn’t taught in regular history classes. In the first week I learned a lot about the many inventions that would lead up to the internet, computers, and basic electronics. Things like the radiophones turning into silent raves, or a codex into a printed book into electronic books are very interesting to me, because the average person doesn’t think about all the steps we need to take to invent something amazing. There was rapid development across the board for technology, going from books to computers in the span of only one century. In the future, I hope to learn more about how tied our modern technology is to obscure or even well known old technology. I also hope to see how culture changed due to the evolution of the technology of old to our modern digital tech. The great depression was a horrible time to be alive, but the need to innovate and create is never greater than in times of severe need, so I think this semester will be quite interesting.

Part 2:

I was assigned to review project #7, titled “History of the National Mall” by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. To figure out what this project is about, I looked at the “Using the Site” tab. This project is meant to give a virtual tour of the National mall by using maps, people, explorations, and past events. It’s actually meant to be used while on the mall to give full explanations of where one is at and if anything significant happened there. Searching for the actual information, for instance the “events” tab shows us various past events that happened hundreds of years ago. It appears the site gets a ton of it’s information from places like the library of congress, so one can trust it’s good information. Moving on to the “maps” tab, one can see that they’ve used a map for the mall for the project sort of like google maps, where brightly colored circles locate important or interesting parts of the mall a tourist might enjoy. Finally, in the “explorations” tab, they use brightly colored boxes with questions on them to answer possibly common questions one might have about the mall, or small facts that people might find interesting. I believe these transformations add to the scholarship by giving it a bright and easy to manage way to gain information about the National mall.

Sources:

Posner, Miriam. “ How did they make that?” Miriam Posner’s Blog.Wordpress. Published 4/17/2014. http://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that-the-video/

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, “Histories of the National Mall.” Histories of the National Mall, http://mallhistory.org/.