Author: Lillian Poole

The Clicker

Tony Guidone’s presentation truly reminded me of past research project I had done. When working with a cultural piece and its influence keyword searching just doesn’t cut it. Back when I worked on the Mason’s Legacies project with professor Oberle I encountered many issues regarding the history of mixed race individuals, but through text search I came to find some of my most useful resources and worked to engage with them in a far more in-depth way. 

Text searching broadened my perspective on the culture in a way that keywords just couldn’t.  Text searching is about understanding. Keyword searching is about information.

Digital projects instill the same kind of informational diversity to the internet that Google did for the accessibility of the internet. Text searching fertilizes this understanding and deepens an appreciation of culture, and keyword searches build knowledge. Since Digital projects are built on this complicated cultural understanding and knowledge Digital project are capable of creating a mass influence of social change. Digital histories have become more prominent than ever with the distrust of the media and the distrust of official governments. Digital histories also have great influence because they can spread faster than any other form of history.

Even though Digital histories do have great influence on the future it does have its drawbacks. It can lose its sense of reality. It’s easy for people to ignore a topic if the topic their seeing isn’t presented to them in a fun way. The digital age is fueled by click bait and it’s difficult to give an academically in-depth digital project a click-bait title. Even if you did get people to click on your project; would it be taken seriously? Not all traffic is good traffic, and not all viewership on the internet is good viewership.

The need for sparkly pretty digital content outweighs the readers need for raw digital knowledge. Digital media is the limitation to Digital Projects. 

Even with that sad truth it is more important to get the information out there than to bottle it up in the world of academia.  There may not be many people who are particularly interested in Projects like The Enslaved children of George Mason, The History of the Mall, or Sensory Maps, but to have that information available is more important than any click-bait gimmick out there.

Works Cited

http://masonslegacies.org/

https://ecgm.omeka.net

http://mallhistory.org/

https://sensorymaps.com

Blog Post #1: Pox and the City

As a history major realizing I played the very first game, Myst, to have a HyperCard royally blew my mind. Digital History is something I have lived even before I knew what it was. Art, Science, and Religion came together to add to a social academic structure that eventually developed a complicated necessity of computers and the internet. I really hope to delve more into the influence of art and the humanities on Scientific and digital developments within the 1930’s. A modern miss conception is that the humanities and the arts are unimportant in the modern age, but the influence of art and the humanities remains prominent in the digital age.
“Pox and the City, the Game”[1] is an Exhibit written by Lisa Rosner. In this Exhibition she reviews the online game called Pox and the City. She timelines the events of this history game and gives an over view of the point of the game. The game itself is based more upon the history of the small pox vaccination. However, the game doesn’t put enough stock in the history aspect for the player to really care or read documents. The reviewer, Lisa Rosner, doesn’t put much stock in the history side of it either. In fact her over all analysis of the game doesn’t make it appealing to historians or gamers. To historians the game is a poor attempt to history analogies, and to gamers it’s a boring game surrounded by unnecessary history. her use of Blog gives more people a chance to see it. Her use of pictures does give the reader a good idea of what to expect in the game. Her focus on the life lead by your choices as the virtual doctor undercuts the whole point of the game, and the whole point is to understand the history and impact of the smallpox vaccine. The post and the game don’t do the historical significance justice or the gamer world justice. If the writer wished to create a more focused post she should have done her own timeline of the history of the smallpox vaccine alongside the game’s preexisting process. Then used the social doctor aspect of it to go in-depth on the social issues that doctors faced. Its sub-par in its use of history, digital culture, and analysis. Her sources need work, her process needs work, but how she presented it was appropriate to her targeted audience of a general internet reader.[2]

[1] http://poxandthecity.blogspot.com/

[2] http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/fall-2019/dh

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