In class I learned that there is no direct consensus as to what digital history is. There are many definitions, however through the course we will be developing our own definition to better understand. Moving on to technology, digital technology is always referential to something else. For instance, present day silent discos can be traced back to the Radiophone Dance in 1920 where teenagers set up a radiophone to listen to a nearby concert that they could not attend. Information technology can be traced all the way back to the codex, a bound handwritten book which was a revolution to bind information together and preserve it. The codex the moved onto a printed book which can be seen through the invention of the printing press. Finally in our present day, we see information technology in the forms of eBooks. In this class, I hope to learn more about the tools that have digitized history. The concept of them is very foreign to me as I don’t use technology to access history often. I am interested to learn more about the different cultures that have shaped these technologies and what is to come in the future for us.
The project I have been assigned to focus on is “Freedom Ring: King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech”. At first, I listened to it as a background noise because I was confused on how everything worked at first. When I listened a second time, I watched the animation and was blown away. Miriam Posner would most likely describe this project as a multimedia narrative as it uses a multimedia design along with text to illustrate Martin Luther King’s speech. With the design of the website you can see both the written and spoken speech, explore multimedia images, listen to movement activists, and uncover the historical context of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I found the set up of the website helpful in the sense that you could visualize and listen to the historical context. I think it helped me to visualize as it brought me to have a better understanding of the meaning of his speech.
Posner, Miriam, director. How Did They Make That?How Did They Make That, UCLA Digital Humanities, 4 Apr. 2014, archive.org/details/howdidtheymakethat.
Dauterive, Jessica. “What is Digital Humanities?” https://slides.com/jdauteri/what-is-digital-humanities#/1 . Date Accessed 3rd September 2019.
Bissel, Evan. “Freedom’s Ring.” Edited by Andrea Spero, Freedom’s Ring: King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech, freedomsring.stanford.edu/?view=Speech.
Going back to what you said about the silent disco and radiophone dance, I said the exact same thing in my blog post. It’s crazy that Silent Disco basically originated from The Radiophone Dance. Also, the project you were assigned sounds really interesting. It sounds like it’s making a piece of history much more interactive, which definitely would captivate an audience’s attention more.