Author: Madison Wade

The One that Finishes it all – How Sad!!

Link to Final Project: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/the-over-throw–of-the-govern

My final project is about the things during the popular front like communism, the Slave Narratives, The Ballad of Americans, and the comic Wonder Woman. Although there were ways that they were subdued or manipulated for them not to show up in our history they did. Not only did they show up but the government was called out for trying to tamper with them. This spread talks about these difficult things in our history and evolved them to what we know now. 

In my final project, one of the things I wanted to include was the Slave Narratives. I’ve discussed them in the most recent blog post I’ve posted; however, I thought it would prove my point even more about things being hidden from us. The fact that they tried to change the story of these people’s lives after all they’ve been through just to make them sound better is scary to me. 1

Then just to included that the narratives were not the only thing intrigued me even more. For my first tool, I chose soundcite. I picked this tool because what could be better than to “hear it from the horse’s mouth” and have the things you’re talking about explaining your point itself. Just like in the last blog post, I think this is great supporting evidence. The second skill I used was picture annotation. This was one of my favorite skill assignments as well as the pictures I used also very clearly shows the viewer real-life examples of what I’m trying to convey to them. The third skill was Voyant tools. When we first did this skill assignment I thought my grade was going to go straight down because it looked like complicated computer programming stuff. However, after seeing how simple it was I loved it!! I loved the different types of graphs it could make and once I became more comfortable with my historical question I wanted to try and implement some clear data. 

When I first came to the class I wasn’t thrilled. History isn’t my favorite subject and before this class, I honestly thought “if it’s in the past leave it there”, not anymore. Now I’m excited to fully understand the New Deal 2. This short decade that I often looked over was filled with so many moving parts I was blown away. Before coming to this class all I knew was that Franklin Roosevelt was a president but I couldn’t tell you when he was one. Now I can tell you that he as president in 1933 and reran and got selected for another term. He also created the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Art Project. Those projects then went and made things of their own. The Federal Theatre Project make The Revolt of the Beavers that 1930’s wasn’t a fan of but the class loved 3 . The Federal Writers Project made the American Guide Series which preserved each states individual history while also helping the nation feel more united If those weren’t enough, he also organized the New Deal which helped so many citizens even if it wasn’t an easy task during the time 4. 

I also took from this class that we preserve history in so many ways with the ever-advancing technology we have access to. We can preserve it through archives like George Masons. We also can preserve it through memes like the “absolute unit” sheep 5  No matter how we preserve our history, the most important thing I took away from this class was that our time and history is precious. Time is forever ticking away and monumental things are happening every day. We should use what we have to our advantage and preserve as much as we can because before we know it those moments could get lost. Even though I’m not a history type of person, I’m very thankful I took this class. Thank you Professor Jess for giving me new perspectives. 

Are Slave Narratives Useful?

Back in 1937 President Roosevelt created the Federal Writers Project. He told the people working in the FWP to interview every former slave they could, before they all died, to capture our countries history better. Although it was not a simple task, in her book titled Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers Project Catherine Stewart states: “Competing visions of the past and conflicting views on black identity and black citizenship offered different prisms for interpreting the remembrances of former slaves.” Some ex-slaves were scared to tell the full truth in these interviews, some thought they would receive some benefits if they did not tell the full truth, and the interviewers would even change the story to make the government not sound so bad. 6 In this blog post, I want to investigate that idea more based on two narratives one by Charlie Smith and the other by Fountain Hughes. 

Charlie Smith and Fountain Hughes seemed to have similar lives. They were both interviewed in their late 100’s and they both went into slavery when they were in their early teens. In Charlie Smith’s interview, there seems to be nothing wrong with his life. He was bought by a man who raised him as one of his own children. Later in life he worked as a mason, then a state officer and helped hunt the man who killed President Garfield. Then he moved to Florida and lived out the rest of his days there. Fountain Hughes went into slavery at the same time as Charlie but stayed with his family. Although he does not go much into his childhood, when he does talk about it he contradicts himself 7a little. He talks about how the masters treated them well and how he did not have shoes until he was twelve, then at the end of his explanation he says “Yes, many time I’ve stump my toes, and blood run out them. That didn’t make them buy me no shoes.”8

Another instance in Fountains interview he says that they were treated like cattle and as soon as he finishes his sentence it seems the interviewer, Hermond Norwood, changes the topic9. Later on in the interview Hughes then talks about the bidding10 process. In his explanation of the bidding process he says “But if you was bad and mean and they didn’t want to beat you and knock you around, they’d sell you”. Right after he’s done explaining how the bidding works Norwood asks him if he was ever sold and Hughes seems to hesitate but said no that he was never sold because he was too young to sell. 11

Throughout the interview it seems that Hughes wants to talk about what happened in his life as a slave but is heisting to say something or when he starts to the Norwood asks him another question. In Charlie Smith’s interview he never has these moments; however, he only says the same things in his interview. Smith brings up that his dad treated him like his own and that he helped him on the farm, then when his dad died he was free, later in life worked as a state officer, and lastly moved to Florida. Smith never hesitates or dive more into it like Hughes did.

As I mentioned, in the beginning, many slaves were scared to say something to the interviewers in fear of backlash. Many writers wanted to shape the way the stories were told. 12 That could be what is going on in these two cases; however, Charlie has a better way of hiding it. At the end of Hughes interview Norwood asks if he goes to church. Then Hughes says “Ill tell you why I don’t go to church” then stops. Norwood asks him: “You rather not have this on? Hm? You rather not tell me or you rather not have this on when you tell me?” and Hughes replays: “It don’t make any difference. I ain’t going to say nothing wrong. I ain’t going to [tape cuts out] If I, I, I, I say…” and it ends there.13 I’m not sure if he was referring to the church or his life in general, either way I feel that shows that Hughes could not say all that he wanted to.

I think using audio in blog posts really shows the reader what your talking about instead of having to explain everything. I know that in this argument it would be hard for me to explain the point Im making if the reader never listened to the audio and interpreted it for themselves. Either way it is hard to close this argument fully since we cant talk to Fountain Hughes or Charlie Smith themselves. Finding a different interview similar to Charlie Smith’s defiantly shed a bright light onto this topic for me.

Down with the Beavers – Special Collections

On November 6th, 2019 the class met in the Fenwick Library to talk about the things Mason has archived. It was actually a pretty fascinating topic. My group looked at the “Revolt of the beavers” play, it was later discarded because beavers sharing somehow leads to children believing in communism. Besides that, it was interesting to see something that was supposed to be erased time, because of it leading to communism, was still somehow saved. 

Archivists are the people who preserve these types of things so that other people can later find them. One huge part of their jobs is to take things and preserve them to the best of their ability so that later when someone needs that artifact for a paper, presentation, etc they can use it towards their work. No matter if they actually want the artifact or not (the donor situation), if the artifact will be valuable or not, or the stance it supports on politics, gender, race, etc. these people preserve them. Each artifact they preserve is like a time capsule in our history – for instance, The Ballad of America. Once that song was connected to communism the writer was blacklisted (for other songs aswell), and the song was ripped out of every schoolbook. The government wanted it to be completely hidden. Now in later times since it was well preserved, and we can look back on it as a big part of our history. 8

These Archivists have to: Identify the artifact, determine if it is worth preserving (if a donor offers lots of money, the item is really valuable, if it’s on a topic well known throughout the school, etc). Next they have to decide how they are going to preserve it. That might be keeping it in their storage/library, making the item available online, putting it in a display, etc. Then preserve that item and make it available to the general public. These types of things, in a way, serve as a memory of the United states. Although over time somethings may seem little or pointless its sort of a way of saying “Hey I was a thing that existed, you can’t just forget about me”. 9

Another tough job Archivists have is determining if to make something digitally available online or not. Majority of the time the papers they have are stored in a library, which they want people to come to. The whole point of a library is for people to come, check out a book, do some research, and check out these documents/artifacts. One of the plus sides of putting the documents online is its more accessible to more people, but as I said before that might make less people come to the library. Another plus side to putting it online is if the document is in really bad shape it might be better for people not to come and touch it. This digitally preserves it. 10

I’ve never been interested in theater, but to be able to see a play that was supposed to be destroyed years ago and be able to hold the original in my hands was fascinating. To look back on the past it makes no sense to us that these things would want to be destroyed and hidden from us. Back during those times everything was rocky, everyone was always looking behind their back with things like the depression happening, WW2 on the brinks, just anything bad you can think of. People needed ways to unite but those things uniting them were being taken over the people “looking behind their backs” and being scared. I’m glad that back then even though everyone might be scared of it, someone still realized these things needed to be saved as a “time stamp” in our history. 

Text Analysis – Drug use in the 1930s?

My historical question is “How big of a problem was drugs in the 1930s?” and the things relating to that like how they handled the drugs, what drug was the most popular, etc.  Since I’m a Criminology major with a concentration in Homeland Security I focus a lot of my studies on drugs and how drugs get into the US. So what batter topic to study than how drugs were evolving in the 1930s? 

Based off my knowledge of the Great Depression, before doing research on this topic, I assumed that since the Great Depression was a really hard and upsetting time that drug use would be heavy. I assumed this because the Depression was a very sad time for everyone, so why not take some things that helped “distract” them and give them a high? The government was trying to find things to distract people like theater and folklore. 11 I also thought maybe since the government was trying to find things to help people take their mind off struggles, maybe drugs were a big problem. 13

I found my sources by searching for very basic keywords that have to do with drugs and the usage of them. Keywords such as: Drug, addict, Morphine, Heroin, Snuff box, addicted, dealer, doctor, etc. It was not easy to find sources, but with using different terms and phrases I was able to find my 10. The sources I found said very little about addiction or drug use, which I was surprised to find. They all lightly touch on the subject enough for me to get an understanding but the topics of each source as mostly about other things with the touch of drug use. For example, Drug store clerks stealing some drugs and selling them, Doctors selling drugs on the side, a few war victims being addicted to the pain reliving drugs they were given, etc. 14

I noticed while using Voyant tools that my 10 sources had a lot of similar words and topics which is good. Not just similarities describing drug use but the fact that many of the interviews were actually similar even with different stories, which is something I was worried about. I then made it so that very basic words were not included in the poll, words such as: just, said, says, got, it’s, congress, library, etc. I chose to keep these words out because they did not help my topic at all since, they are just very basic branching words. After that I was left with this:

The first picture shows me that a lot of these sources come from 1939 which could possibly mean that I need to narrow down my topic to that year since it shows up the most. I also concluded that with all the documents in the corpus not a lot of things regarding my topic show up unless you specifically look for my 10 sources, meaning there’s not a lot of talk on the question I’m asking. On the next picture I made a graph of the keywords that I was looking to find my sources to see how much they actually showed up in the corpus. The main ones are Doctor, and Drug. This shows me that majority of my interviews talked about people getting their drugs from a normal doctor. If they became addicted to those drugs or over proscribed I’m not really sure.

Based off all this I think the question I’m asking is to broad, so it would benefit me to narrow it down more. Something like “why were people addicted to drugs in the 1930s?”. Also since there is not a lot of information on just drugs in general maybe it would be a good idea to explore the other topics in my field but ones that possibly relate more to this topic. 

Extra Credit – Thinking of the next thing.

I attended Laura Crossley’s presentation on October 29th, 2019. In her talk she discussed many things, all those things revolving around Digital Huminites. She her main goal was so discuss Text Mining Digital Humanities Blogs with APIs, Open Refine, and R. During her talk she used a lot of big words and terms that I didn’t really understand, but I did take away a few things from the talk that I thought was interesting. 

One of the things I picked up on was how she was saying that nowadays blogposts on word press are belittling. She said it is getting harder for her and the program she uses called DH Now. This program takes blogs written on WordPress that were nominated to be on the homepage after being peer reviewed. These blogs consist of many different topics in Digital History. In her talk Crossley talks about how although she runs this website it was supposed to shut down this summer and now, she’s not sure what its future looks like. She then says that there aren’t enough blog posts being posted to WordPress in order for the site to keep promoting them. She later brought up that it seems to have been taking over by twitter. 

This connection had me thinking, as technology advances is it possible that what is happening to DH Now is the same type of effect that happened to Theater in the 1936-era? Around 1939 theater was takin over by radio and movies, so it was hard to preserve the plays and such forth making the actors, directors, etc. lose their jobs. 15 Crossley was talking of a way to preserve DH Now instead of completely shutting down the website. What if instead of shutting down the website she “evolves” with the times? Maybe by finding a way to implement twitter into the equation, which I know she said that would be complicated. If not implementing twitter then possibly find a way to implement younger generations onto WordPress/Blog posts. 

The way the FTP made people want to go to the theater was by making them cheaper, putting in a lot of time/energy into making them, employing people since jobs were scarce, by making people happy and distracting them from their current situation, and by spreading out to different states. It could be possible DH Now just needs a revamp like the theaters did to keep them going and preserve them. 16

Either way, I really enjoyed Crossley’s talk. It really put a new perspective on Digital Humanities, and how things are lost in each technological advancement. Everyone is so focused on the next phone, the next laptop, the next of the next, and so on. It really made me take a step back from our everyday experience of the “next and newest thing”. It made me think about things of the past and how the next thing effects the past. 

Blog Post #4 – How I feel about Digital History

Algorithmics are something the everyday person overlooks all the time. We have become oblivious to them, most of the time not even realizing they exist. However, there are some people who do and point out the many problems with them that the average eye over looks. Those people are the Algorithmic Critics, they criticize the everyday algorithms and see if they are actually benefiting us. There are many different things that use algorithms some are: Google, Corporations, Banks, Mathematics etc.  Even though algorithms are most of the time made out of good intentions they tend to leave out the minorities or overlook really important aspects all because of one thing that doesn’t follow the programming’s guide lines. Many things are taken into account when making an algorithm but majority of the time its what the person making it thinks will lead to success and profit. 16

In her book Algorithms of oppression Noble talks about how when she searches up “black girls” results referring to pornographic things showed up. 17 Althought back in the 1930’s there was not Google women we’re often objectified as the reason why men are so weak because of how sexual they are. This goes back to the Greek-Roman times where women were seen as evil because of this, often depicted as monsters that lore men to their death with their sexual appearances. 18  Although women were not seen as evil sexual beings like in the Greek roman times they have always been underestimated. That does not help if you are also a woman of color, who tend to be treated worse. In the 1930’s women were expected to always look pretty, keep the house clean, not bring any money in or being in control of the bills, and bare/take care of the kids. The man of the household was supposed to work, then come home, eat the dinner that the wife prepared, pay the bills, and sleep. 19

 To an extent it is still like this today, although I feel throughout the years we aren’t as extreme about it as we used to be and tend to have very good support in the community when someone is mistreated. The WPA actives are close to the things we have in the present, in regard to people fighting back against women being treated unfairly. Today we still have protests of women fighting against the anti-feminists, women not being paid the same as men, and so forth. As I said before in todays age it is not as extreme as the 1930’s and I our community has a better understanding of how women are as equal as men there are just a few things we are still fighting for. However, you would think after almost 90 years we would have more equality stablished.

Extra Credit #1 – Madison Wade

Everyone in the US wants to have the best of the best. The best car, the bet house, the best job, the best everything. Once someone hears that there is a better life somewhere else the world will spread and everyone else will follow.  An Example of this is during the Dust Bowl when every farmer started moving to California. They did this because they heard there was more and better farmland plus more jobs. They all migrated there even though they saw signs saying not to come because there being to many people coming at once. There later became camps made for the people who were migrating because of the abundance of them. In these camps they sang songs, did chores and random odds and ends to take their mind off of their poor situation. Because of the lack of jobs people demanded that the immigrants in the county give up some of the jobs since they weren’t actually Americans.20 This related to today because immigration is still an issue in the United States. There are songs written, articles written, and many discussions being had about it. People are still being split form their families and everything they have worked for in the US only because of the process of a Visa takes forever. The United states still has employment problems, but instead of more jobs becoming available they still tend to blame it on the immigrates that are in the US. It is even required by many employers for you to be a citizen to even be considered for a job. I have a feeling this isint going to end any time soon whether a wall is built or not. Although it is at a higher extent than it was back in the 1930’s it still effecting our culture, our economic, and political problems today. 

Blog Post #3/Skill Assignment #3 – Roosevelt’s Hard Times in the Press.

I picked my image because I thought it would be a little bit challenging since it is just a newspaper stand on the side of the street, and because there isn’t much going on in it at first glance. If you look at the newspapers closely it has many bold headlines about big things that were going on in the 1930’s. For example, one headline says, “Roosevelt Asks Ten Billion; Urges Taxes, Spending be Kept Up”, another one states, “Chamberlains Roosevelt’s Attack on Dictatorships”, then another that stood out the most to me was “Olson Spending Plan Blocked”. All these are on the front of the newspaper in big bold letters for anyone walking by to see. These newspaper headings tell us a lot about the history in the 1930’s because it touches on the many plans that Roosevelt would try to put in the New Deal, or even just the government itself, and that it would be shot down because it would go against what the Democrats wanted. 1 The Olson plan was a plan to put government spending down so that the people would be taxed less. One of the many reasons we went into the depression was being taxed so much, although it was not the main cause it played a part in the Depression happening.2 For this picture I wanted to know how this photograph was used to document the things going on the 1930’s. Although it seems like just any newspaper stand and there is nothing popping out or happening its just sitting there. However, if you really look and annualize the picture and read the headlines you can see there was a lot of things going on in the 1930’s (manly focusing on 1936 when the newspaper in the picture was published). The method that intrigued me the most was the Site of production of the creator of the pictures point of view. If I was a photographer back then, walking around with my crazy big camera, I wouldn’t stop and think to take a picture of a newspaper stand. I thought it was interesting to see that photo in a collection with other pictures like Roosevelt signing the declaration of war and giving a farmer a grant for him to farm again, etc. I’ve come to the conclusion that even though things to us now might seem minor back in the 1930’s they were a big deal. The newspaper to us is nothing, but to them it was their form of Social Media. With these methods and trying them out on this picture it really showed me that history has a whole new prospective rather than just something that happened in the past. The new prospective of actually experiencing it in the past.     

Below are my two links to the exhibit and the items:

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/madison-wade—san-francisco–/annotated-image-and-glitched-i
http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/admin/items/show/180

Blog Post #2 – Advancements of Digital Media

Before we had laptops, We had huge cinderblocks for computers. Before that we had entire rooms dedicated to holding bigger computers and all of their parts. In today’s age everyone has minicomputers in our hands everyday! Now instead of going to the library to find answers, we touch a few buttons on Google and there it is! In his article “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character, and Canadian History, 1997-2010” Ian Milligan states “Why the focus on keywords? While digital date-by-date searching has its advantages over traditional analogue microfilm searching – the ability to consult sources from home without travelling to a library”21 Meaning since everyone has access to a library in their hands what’s the point of travelling to one anymore? 

Since technology is forever advancing the public is trying to make everything digital so we have access to it through the internet; however, Ian later continues that implementing older documents into our newer technology won’t really help us. He states “The most expensive OCR routines, finely honed on legal and corporate documents, choke on unique layouts…Even in a best-case scenario, OCR technology will necessarily produce a less-than-ideal situation in search integrity. The obvious way to improve accuracy is with direct human intervention.”22 This is like the Turning test. Although technology is so advanced and fine toned in today’s age, when a computer is put up against a human the computer won’t be able to perfectly replicate the human. Thus, since the computer won’t be able to comprehend or fully replicate these very old, important documents we will struggle trying to look at them and understand them. 

For example, let’s say we are trying to copy the whole original paper of the Declaration of Independence onto our website. We want the whole layout of the paper, same handwriting, everything to be on our website. We want it to be interactable with facts on it, so on and so forth. We can take a photocopy of it, but then we would have to type everything from it to the website still. We tell the computer to scan it and implement it to the website for us, but the computer doesn’t understand the handwriting, the paper is old so some of it is faded, etc. making it so we would have to intervene. If we let the computer do it by itself a lot of pieces of that paper would be lost. 

Martin, Kim & Quan-Haase, Anabel. (2013). Are e-books replacing print books? Tradition, serendipity, and opportunity in the adoption and use of e-books for historical research and teaching. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 64. 10.1002/asi.22801. 

Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 94 no. 4, 2013, pp. 540-569. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/527016

Blog Post #1

The New Deal, Great Depression, Stock Market Crash, etc. have always been huge topics in history, I have heard a lot about them before this class. Originally when hearing we were going to go over them again, I wasn’t very enthused about it. However, hearing about these events from a Digital History aspect instead of the usual History aspect was way more intriguing than what I thought it would be. For instance, I found it especially fascinating how things back then are actually “ideas borrowed and reused” from the past. How music was originally hard for everyone to hear through a radiophone so they wore headphones and now there are events such as silent discos where everyone wears headphones and listens to a DJ play music. I also think it was interesting how symbols on computers now were everyday things we used to use in the past. Instead of changing them we just implemented them onto technology ie. The save icon, the search icon, and folders. Another thing I connected to was how the Turning Test was a human and a computer both “trying” to be humans and the Evaluator had to determine which was the real human. In today’s world we have to compete a series of tests to tell the computer that we aren’t a computer. I think that is a crazy example to show how technology has evolved and taken over in our lives. This test was also the start of AI’s which have advanced so much already. Although they have yet to fully be able to replace humans we have things like Google Home, Alexa, and such where they can speak clearly and have responses like normal humans; but that’s just the baseline! There are still many different types of technology that can do more things like humans all because of Alan Turning cracking the Enigma Code and then creating things such as the Turning Test.

I was assigned to analyze Virtual Tourisms. In this the writer, Megan Kendrick, describes a virtual tour through Los Angles in the 1880’s-1890’s. She is trying to reconstruct Los Angeles during this time frame to give the viewer a real-life experience of what someone would be experiencing this time. Her main focus is the landmark hotels. How this project is displayed uses the mapping concept according to Miriam Posner’s Framework. Although in the video Posner states that the 3D imaging would take place on an artifact, I feel for this project would be better fully comprehended as multiple 3D images put together seamlessly for the viewer to experience these hotels like they are walking though the buildings. In the writing of how Kendrick explains the project it would be better than a map, I feel the 3D concept would be a full on virtual step into the past. However; from viewing the project there are pinpoints on the map as to where the popular hotels are. In each pinpoint you can view documents of that explains the history of that landmark hotel. 

Sources: 

Dauterive, Jessica. What is Digital Humanities? Retrieved from https://slides.com/jdauteri/what-is-digital-humanities#/1.

Kendrick, Megan. Virtual Tourisms. Retrieved from http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=94&thread=AuthorsStatement#

Posner, Miriam. “How did they make that?” UCLA Digital Humanities.Retrieved from http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/fall-2019/dh

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