What I’ve learned thus far is that all forms of technology roughly improve but are always aiming to do the same thing. Virtually, all of the inventions we discussed over the 40 year span have had the goal of allowing users to explore the interface they’ve created, and to keep a digital record for the future or to preserve what has already been created. Overall, we know that technology is almost always working to make life more efficient and easier for the entire human population and preserve the past. But, similar to a lot of things, people have though that they could do it better than the last person. In the future of the class, I hope that we learn more about how these old pieces of technology worked or what they morphed into today. For example, something we discussed in class was the ability to “control F” to find whatever you needed in a digital document and that that tool wasn’t available for many documents so they began to try to create something like that. I always took “control F” to be like an added bonus and I had no clue people had started working on that before the first computer was produced. I also hope we learn about the people behind these projects, their motivations, and how they succeeded/failed to complete what they wanted.
My project was Mapping Early American Elections (MEAE). Their goal was to take the First Party System’s election returns and make them accessible as a history source in a digital form. Their website allows people to interact with maps, documents and other primary sources that they have scanned in order to understand what the early American people did in order to vote. They took the source: 1788-1825 election returns collected by Phillip Lampi for their parent organization called A New Nation Votes (NNV), and processed them by transcribing them into a dataset that presented from an Excel spreadsheet into a program called GIS. Similar to Green Book, it allows people to see what opinions were held in which regions of America. It also attempts to educate people beyond what their primary sources dictate. I think Mapping Early American Elections adds to scholarship because it is something that didn’t previously exist and NNV is parented by Tufts University. So, if people wanted to know about the first elections, they would have to go to Massachusetts and sift through NNV’s data. This website makes it universally accessible for anyone who has a link to the source.
Sources:
Mullen, Lincoln A. “Introduction: Mapping the First Party System.” Mapping Early American Elections, National Endowment for the Humanities, George Mason University, 2019, earlyamericanelections.org/essays/01-mullen-introduction.html.
Posner, Miriam, director. How Did They Make That? How Did They Make That, UCLA Digital Humanities, 4 Apr. 2014, archive.org/details/howdidtheymakethat.
