One of the first slides that was shown during our last lecture contained a quote by Mark Twain which said, “There is no such thing as a new idea”. At first, I didn’t fully understand this quote and was unable to agree or disagree with it. Since we’ve gone through the slides exploring the technological advancements from the 1930’s onward I have begun to understand what that quote means. That quote helped me to understand and learn that there really is no such thing as a new idea. We simply recycle old ideas and make them better, more efficient, or more appealing. We rearrange the pieces to create something that accomplishes the same task as its predecessor but in a somewhat new or more efficient way. For example, the codex paved the way for the modern-day eBook.
Looking into the assigned readings I found what I believe to be an example of that quote. In Cody White’s article titled “The CCC Indian Division” I learned about the creation of the CCC-ID which was based off the CCC. They were both created with the same end goal in mind but achieve it in different ways. Much like how the Codex and eBook were both meant to compile information and make it accessible, but they achieved it in different ways. I hope that over this semester I’ll be able to learn more about the original ideas that evolved into the technology we know now.
I was assigned to review project number fourteen, the Valley Project, also called the Valley of the Shadow. This project is a collection of primary sources dating from the Fall of 1859 to the Fall of 1870 and gives voices to hundreds of people who were forgotten during the civil war. This project offers very different perspectives on the war by providing us with the primary sources from one northern town and one southern. Miriam Posner would most likely describe this project as an exhibit as it presents a collection of primary sources in a very similar way a museum would. The sources are divided into different groups or sections based on the time period from which they originated, they have also been sorted into a timeline and into databases if you dig around the website a bit. Looking at this project as directed by Posner we find that this a collection of primary sources, it contains things like diary entries, letters, newspapers, speeches, church records etc. from the two towns (Sources). They have been digitized, made searchable and organized into a sort of online museum that is easily accessible by the general public (Processed and Presented).
Citations:
White, Cody. “The CCC Indian Division.” Prologue Magazine, vol. 48, no. 2, Summer 2016,. National Achieves,. Accessed 3 Sep. 2019.
Posner, Miriam, director. How Did They Make That? How Did They Make That, UCLA Digital Humanities, 4 Apr. 2014, archive.org/details/howdidtheymakethat. Accessed 3 Sep. 2019
Dauterive, Jessica. “What is Digital Humanities?” https://slides.com/jdauteri/what-is-digital-humanities#/2. Date Accessed 3Sep. 2019.
Last, First. “The Valley of the Shadow.” Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in The American Civil War, University of Virginia Library, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/, Accessed 3 Sep. 2019.
I like that you say the creators of your project organized their platform in a similar way to a museum. As we move in to a tech-central world, I think this is a cool way to bring a stationary concept to the rest of the world at a second’s notice. This website is also able to bring the rich history of the Civil War to the eyes of people outside of this country.