Author: Natalie Farrey

Mapping, Farrey

Creating this map was a very interesting experience. Reading the book was quite difficult as the print was very small and it just wasn’t what I expected. Most modern guide books have a lot more notable tourist attractions, these books didn’t seem to exactly do that. Yes they went into the history of the town and area, but they give little recommendations on what to do there or what there was to see.

Although this assignment wasn’t exactly what I was expecting it definitely was a very interesting learning experience. I definitely agree with Sarah Bond after doing this project. Mapping these historical locations or any point of historical importance can be extremely useful for preserving and teaching history. If anything, these maps are becoming even more important as some of these locations no longer exist due to various causes.

Mapping and Spatial history are extremely important when developing land, by having access to these primary sources we can be able to tell if the land needs to be assessed by an archeological team first to preserve the history of the land. I believe this important skill can really help us to avoid situations that many European countries often face when building. Often times we hear of European countries accidentally unearthing historical site and destroying some very interesting finds, I believe more interest in spatial history and mapping primary sources could prevent that in the United States.

The projects encased in the Green Book collections are only the tip of what we could accomplish with the plethora of primary sources we have. People could even make these maps with online tools like I had done for this assignment. Of course the maps made by the people on the Green Book Project (as seen above) looked much better compared to mine.

The Green Book version of my tour definitely looks more professional then mine and didn’t take the exact path I did, but both versions could be useful. There was one thing I did notice while looking over the Green Books maps though, there was a lot of segregation going on during the times these were made. Most guide books probably won’t take into account that fact and would most likely cater to white Americans.

Travel must have been so much more difficult for people of color during that time. I never even thought about that possibility until I looked over these maps. It really goes to show how different things were back then. Of course black and white travelers could probably take the same route but they might not have been allowed in the same restaurant or get the same quality of service where they went.

That is another reason I appreciated the opportunity to look at the Green Book project, it opened my eyes to that factor. That is something I never would have noticed without looking at those maps, and I think it’s important to recognize the struggles people went through and learn from them. That way we don’t end up repeating the past.

Citations:

 Bond, Sarah. “Mapping Racism And Assessing the Success of the Digital Humanities.” History From Below, October 20, 2017. https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/10/20/mapping-racism-and-assessing-the-success-of-the-digital-humanities/.

“ILLINOIS A DESCRIPTIVE AND HISTORICAL GUIDE : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive. A.C.MCLURG & CO., January 1, 1970. 

“NavigatingThe Green Book.” Navigating The Green Book. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://publicdomain.nypl.org/greenbook-map/.

Timeline, Natalie Farrey

This timeline was created based on the life of Mr. George Johnson, an ex-slave once owned the president of the confederate states of America, Jefferson Davis. His interview provided a plethora of information about how enslaved people were treated and about music on plantations. However, as illustrated in the timeline, most of what he considered notable life events came after he left the plantation in 1884.

This was very surprising to me since I expected the interview to mostly focus on his life while enslaved not on his life afterwards. On further examination of the timeline you can also see that Mr. Johnson claimed to have left the plantation almost 20 years after the Civil War ended. This raised two questions: was this simply a matter of an elderly man having difficulty remembering dates or was this a matter of history?

I’m sure many slave owners were reluctant to give up their slaves and held on to them as along as possible. Though I can’t remember being taught anything like that in my history classes. I’m still unsure if this is just a simple mistake made by Mr. Johnson himself, or a problem with the way historians teach us this period in history. This question of how accurate the dates given were made the interview a little less useful than I had hoped.

Making a timeline relies on knowing about when an event happened, but Mr. Johnson was frequently unable to provide a date or gave a range for most events that happened in his life. Most of the time I had to calculate and give the most likely year for the timeline. So, in this aspect the interview was not all that useful, but it was extremely useful when it came to understand the person who was telling their life story.

Mr. Johnson spoke so proudly; he was obviously very proud of what he had accomplished in life. You could hear how passionate he was when he spoke about music. This ability to hear his tone and exact words was amazing. Although I’ll admit I had a hard time understanding what he was saying at certain points. I wasn’t the only one either, when reading the “Note on the Language of the Narratives” I discovered that the people conducting the interviews were also not able to understand the people they interviewed a good amount of the time. This is extremely evident in the transcriptions of the interviews that are missing many things Mr. Johnson had said.

Though the fact that they made an effort to preserve these people’s stories speaks a lot to the social history of the U.S. at the time. As stated in the Slave Narrative Collection opening essay, these interviews were collected during the years 1936 through 1938. To me this shows that people are genuinely taking an interest in what these people went through and want to preserve their stories. I think this really shows the United States effort to preserve our history.

Citations:

“A Note on the Language of the Narratives  :  Articles and Essays  :  Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938  :  Digital Collections  :  Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress. Accessed January 22, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/note-on-the-language-of-the-narratives/#note.

“An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives  :  Articles and Essays  :  Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938  :  Digital Collections  :  Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress. Accessed January 22, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/.

Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 1 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04777a/.

Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 2 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04777b/.

Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 3 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04778a/.

Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 4 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04778b/.

Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 5 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04779a/.

Lomax, Alan, Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz, George Johnson, Lewis Wade Jones, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and John W Work. Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Septemberpart 6 of 6. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1941. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1941002_afs04779b/.

Image Analysis, Natalie Farrey

For this assignment my historical question was what did Oklahoma look like during the Dust Bowl and how did it affect the people living there? I specifically wanted to focus on Oklahoma because of how much it had been brought up in the readings and in class. I found this picture in the Library of Congress database and knew I had to use it. This image really shows how important documentary evidence is when teaching history and reveals so much about the 1930s. My great grandfather always told stories about the Dustbowl, but I never felt like I could see it in my head just right. By seeing photos from the time period, it makes it feel more real and I feel like I got a better sense of what was happening.

This photograph makes you realize that in the 1930s’ people had to abandon the lives they made due to something they couldn’t control. It not only showed what the Oklahoma land looked like in the Dust Bowl, but it also captured the despair people were feeling at the time. I used two methods that I used to realize that: image annotation and glitching. Both are very useful tools when it comes to analyzing historical images, though I did prefer image annotation to glitching.

Annotating the image was extremely helpful for me personally. I felt like it made me think more about what the photo was about and what Dorothea Lange was trying to say with it. I also felt that it’s much easier than glitching an image. Although glitching seemed fairly easy after I had read Trevor Owens’ article, I found it very difficult to understand the code and not render the image completely unrecognizable.

Once I figured out how to properly glitch the image, I learned how useful glitching could be. It can be used to make a statement using a historical photograph. For example in an article written by Michael J. Kramer called “Glitching History”, he shows a picture of an important folk artist named John Hurt during the 1960s folk music festival. Using the glitching method Kramer shifted Hurt to the center of the photograph. He did this to make a statement about how influential Hurt was in the folk music revival.

Glitching also taught me how simple it is to change a historical image; it really makes you wonder how many people have digitally edited a historical image in order to make it look like something it wasn’t. This thought makes you think more about where a photo on the internet is really coming from and what changes have been made to it.

Link to image analysis exhibit: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/image-analysis–farrey

Link to Omeka item for orginal photo:http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/472

Link to Omeka item for glitched photo: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/473

Citations:

Dana Cochran et al., “The Great Depression,” Matthew Downs, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Kramer, Michael J. “Glitching History: Using Image Deformance to Rethink Agency and Authenticity in the 1960s American Folk Music Revival.” Current Research in Digital History, January 1, 1970. https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-08-glitching-history/.

Lange, Dorothea. Worn-out Land and Abandoned Cabins near Newport, Oklahoma. Photograph. Library of Congress . Library of Congress. Accessed January 21, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017770101/.

Owens, Trevor. “Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps.” Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps | The Signal, November 5, 2012. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/11/glitching-files-for-understanding-avoiding-screen-essentialism-in-three-easy-steps/.

Final Exhibit Blog Post

Creating this exhibit was a stressful experience, I constantly felt like I was doing things wrong or not doing enough. Now that I’ve finished it I’m very happy with how it turned out. I felt like I was able to create exactly what I wanted, an exhibit that not only answered my historical question: how and why the Great Depression era was harder for Immigrant Americans, and make it feel very personal.

I wanted my exhibit to not only answer my question but to also tell a story. I wanted it to feel personal and like you were listening to the people talk about their own experiences. That’s why I choose the digital tools I did. I choose to make an image gallery so the viewer could see the faces of the people whose stories were being told. I feel like being able to see someone’s face makes you relate to them easier. That is always why I choose to use sound cite, that way you could see their faces and hear their voices. It makes it feel more personal and really gets the message through to the reader.

I choose to use a geo-location map to tell the stories of immigrant Americans for multiple reasons. The first being it was a great way to compile multiple stories from many people for the viewer to easily access, but it also demonstrated how widespread the problems immigrant Americans faced were. I think my choices of digital tools added a lot to my exhibit and really transformed my sources. They changed them from just photos and stories to something much more personal and relatable. Besides that they really helped me display what I’ve learned in this class.

The main thing I learned in this class was the importance of learning how to use technology in matters relating to history and record keeping. One of the articles we had read stated that the National Archive and Records Administration won’t be taking records on paper anymore starting on December 31st, 2022. I’ve always been someone who preferred traditional pen and paper over reading something on my computer. So, this class has been extremely helpful in getting me prepared for that.

Besides preparing me for the future this class taught me about digital citizenship. That had always been a topic in high school that I never really paid much attention too. That was until the article about how someone was able to create an internet hoax and the guest speaker who talked to us about how he and a class of college students here at George Mason were able to create a hoax online. This information shocked me and made me much more aware of what I’m reading. I really believe that lecture made me a better digital citizen as I’ve become a lot more critical of my sources of information and I’ve stopped retweeting what I’ve now learned are fake news. I definitely feel like this lecture specifically helped me become a more ethical and productive digital citizen.

I also learned a lot about the 1930s in this class. We talked a lot about the Great Depression and its effects on the American people. I learned a lot about the politics in that time, especially about President Herbert Hoover. I also learned about the Dustbowl and how it caused so many people to leave Oklahoma in search of a better life in California. I’m certain that these lessons that I’ve learned about the 1930s will stick with me through life because of the lessons they carry.

I’m a firm believer that when you don’t learn about history it’s bound to repeat itself, so that is a big reason why these lessons will stay with me, but I have another reason for why I believe these lessons will stick with me. The 1930’s leaves a legacy of American resilience. We went through such a hard time and emerged better than we were before. It’s a reminder that no matter how hard things get we can always get through it and possibly emerge better than we were before.

In the end I’ve learned a lot throughout this class and during the process of making this exhibit. It was a long process that caused a lot of stress but in the end, I am extremely proud of what I’ve created. I think my exhibit does exactly what I wanted it to and I feel like I was able to learn a lot not only about the 1930’s but also about digital citizenship and how to use the digital resources that are available to me.

Citations:

Appelbaum, Yoni. “How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, May 15, 2012. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/.

Dana Cochran et al., “The Great Depression,” Matthew Downs, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Milligan, Ian. “Historians’ Archival Research Looks Quite Different in the Digital Age.” The Conversation, August 19, 2019. http://theconversation.com/historians-archival-research-looks-quite-different-in-the-digital-age-121096?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitterbutton.

“The Migrant Experience”, Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940 to 1941, Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/articles-and-essays/the-migrant-experience/

Dustbowl Soundcite

When thinking about the Dust Bowl or Great Depression my mind always goes to the iconic 1936 photo taken by Dorothea Lange titled Migrant Mother. This photo depicts a middle-aged mother and her young children, all dressed in rags, the mother with a look in her eyes that makes you feel her pain and worry. I had always known what this photo looked like, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned the story behind it.            

Like many others during this time, this mother of seven was migrating west from her home in Oklahoma where the dust bowl had made life almost impossible. She and so many others traveled to California in hopes of finding a better life. These people were nicknamed “Okies” and when they arrived in California were probably saddened to find that it was not the land, they thought it would be. The Great Depression had taken its toll their too and jobs were not as abundant as they had originally thought.

This made me wonder how the Okie’s much have felt before and after this journey. I wondered if they ever regretting leaving the great plains. I found my answer in the Library of Congress’s Collection of Voices from the Dust Bowl in a two-part interview with a man named Tom Higginbotham. Higginbotham was also an Okie who spoke about his experience both in Oklahoma and California. He spoke about how he left Oklahoma because he didn’t want his family dying of starvation like his livestock. He didn’t exactly want to leave his land but he listen. It seems like Higginbotham and so many others saw life in California as hard but nowhere near as bad as living on the dust covered plains.

My research brought me to think that although life didn’t get much easier the Okies were incredibly grateful for the opportunities they were given in California. Higginbotham himself had said listen. Life was rough in Oklahoma and it wasn’t too much better in California, but these people were so appreciative of the government FSA camps. They were grateful for the opportunity to work hard and try to make life even a little better for their families.

Citations:

1.  Dana Cochran et al., “The Great Depression,” Matthew Downs, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

2. “The Migrant Experience”, Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940 to 1941, Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/articles-and-essays/the-migrant-experience/

3. “Interview about life in Oklahoma and how and why he came to California part 1 of 2”, Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940 to 1941, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000198/.

4. “Interview about life in Oklahoma and how and why he came to California part 2 of 2”,Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940 to 1941, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000199/.

Text Searching and Databases

Text searching has drastically changed how we interact with information. It makes finding exactly what you need and gaining access to those pieces of information much easier. Text searching has made doing research papers so much easier for me and I’ve been completely unaware until the guest presentation in class. It’s strange to think that I didn’t appreciate such a great tool until it was brought up in a lecture. This tool is a fairly simple way of finding the exact information you need regarding a certain topic, you just need to know how to search for it.

I say that because as someone who does a fair amount of research papers for school, I’ve found that text searching is only as useful as you make it. Searching the same key words over and over again is not going to get you anywhere. You need to adjust the words you use to get to certain answers and sometimes you have to be extremely specific to get exactly what you want. Besides that this is an amazing tool that brings you to so many digital resources that can help you in so many ways.

However, this information is only digital. By only being able to use this tool on digital media you miss out on human interaction with the primary source. You don’t get to feel the paper a letter was written on or look at the physical object. You can only interact with what can be digitally uploaded into the computer database.

Milligan’s article brought up a good point that I found relevant to the topic of text searching. Text searching is often used with databases such as the collections in the Library of Congress, as discussed in the article titled “WPA Publications in the Library Collections”. Milligan brought up a good point about these databases that said they give us a false sense of completion. They make us feel like all the information is there when there is an extremely high chance that some pieces of information are missing.

Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, University of Toronto Press, 27 Nov. 2013, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/527016.

“WPA Publications in the Library Collections  :  Amassing American ‘Stuff’: The Library of Congress and the Federal Arts Project of the 1930s  :  Articles and Essays  :  Federal Theatre Project, 1935 to 1939  :  Digital Collections  :  Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-theatre-project-1935-to-1939/articles-and-essays/amassing-american-stuff/wpa-publications-in-the-library-collections/.

Blog Post #1

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.

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