Category: Digital History/New Deal

I learned a lot from our first week of class discussions. I think one of the most interesting things that stuck out to me was the Radiophone Dance in 1920 because I always heard of Silent Disco, but knowing that the general idea of that goes all the way back to the 20’s was very interesting to me. Another thing that was really interesting to me was people’s amazement at the very first Mac computer. The reaction people had to something so simple was insane. Looking at the old Mac gave me a bit anxiety because I feel like I wouldn’t know how to use it compared to what Macs are currently. Nowadays, Macs are so easy to use vs. the way computers used to be. I never knew about all the commands people had to put into their computers to make it do specific tasks. I must say I am very relieved those coding/commands don’t exist anymore. Comparing digital technology back then to what it is today is mind blowing. I’m sure the people alive in the 20’s would have never dreamed of something such as “facebook” or “twitter” to take over their lives. I really hope to learn more about social media’s role with digital humanities along with cell phones such as iPhones. There’s so much to discuss when it comes to the cellphone, especially iPhones and Samsungs, etc. Learning how apps came to be would also be something I hope to learn this semester as well.

My project I was assigned was “Virtual St. Paul’s Cross Project” by NC State University. It will allow people to experience events that happened in London during the early seventeenth century. As of now, there’s only one phase completed for the project, which allows people to hear John Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day on November 5th, 1622 in the courtyard of St. Paul. The main goal behind this project is to show people how preaching used to be in London during the seventeenth century. As described by NC State, this project is”enabling us to experience a Paul’s Cross sermon as a performance, as an event unfolding in real time in the context of an interactive and collaborative occasion”.

The project was created by using architectural modeling software and acoustic simulation software, two kinds of software I’ve never heard of. Using Miriam Posner’s framework of sources, the way it’s processed, and presented, I was able to identify that the main sources of this project was using pictures from the seventeenth century of St. Paul’s Cathedral and also looking at the old documents of the specific sermons/events that happened there. The way this project was processed was it was very organized because of the many sections the website had along with many explanations. Finally, the project was presented by being web-accessible along with maps. My thoughts on this project is I think it’s an excellent way to engage people in history especially with the very interactive/realistic tools.

Works Cited:

“Virtual Paul’s Cross Website.” Virtual Pauls Cross Website, vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/. Date Accessed, 3rd September 2019.

Posner, Miriam. “ How did they make that?” Miriam Posner’s Blog.Wordpress. Date Accessed, 3rd September 2019.

During this first week of class, I have learned many useful and interesting topics surrounding digital Humanities. First, many ideas surrounding technology are just copied from previous ideas in history. For example, in the 1920s, the radiophone dance centered around people surrounding a radiophone and listening to music or speeches. They were required to wear headsets because it was too loud to be able to hear from the radiophone. In class, we discussed the photo about the radiophone in which the dance was held at an Atlanta social club in May 1920 to listen to a band that was playing across town (Dancing by Radiophone). This idea has been carried on in recent years through the new phenomenon known as silent discos. This requires people to gather together and each person has an individual radio and headset. They all dance together, but each person is listening to different genres of music, so the idea is that they are together but each person is happy because they are listening to what they like. Additionally, another interesting topic is in the 1950s when Alan Turing cracks the enigma code and designs the Turing Test. This ultimately leads to the end of World War II, because we were now able to break the German code and understand their movements and goals. Lastly, I find it quite interesting that the New Deal saved IBM from going bankrupt and made the company millions of dollars because now all government jobs were using their products. 

            I hope to learn more about the unique technological ideas that we copy and reuse from our history. For example, the idea of silent discos and eBooks. Secondly, I would like to learn about the effects that Bonnie and Clyde had on the government during the Great Depression and if the people saw them as role models or criminals.

            For this project, I was assigned “Historypin: Connecting communities with local history”. This project focuses on storytelling by partnering with organizations and sharing over 365,951 stories across 2,600 cities (About). They pride themselves in bring people and communities together through the stories and shared experiences of people. I followed Miriam Posner’s philosophy and started at the “about” page to understand the website and ideas it is trying to create. Personally, I feel this project focuses on the map aspect in which people can enter their address and find out the stories about the area and connect to their community or other people. Their process is connecting, equipping, and measuring. First, they use cultural heritage institutions, civic organizations, and community groups to connect people and communities. Secondly, they equip organizations to increase their impact by knowing their area and people. Lastly, they measure and keep statistics for their partners, so they can gain support and knowledge about their project.

(n.d.). About. Retrieved from https://about.historypin.org/about/

(n.d.). “Dancing by Radiophone”. Retrieved from 

            &profile=default&search=1920s+radio&advancedSearch-

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            holds_radio_dance_wearing_earphones_1920.jpg

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.

One tends to categorise the Internet– and on a broader scale, technology– as an innovation of recent memory. In the history of technology as in conventional history, it’s customary to attribute sweeping innovations with the works of one man (like Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell) and their teams and predecessors are left by the wayside. The history of the Internet as we’ve been covering in our class was not the result of the Great Man high school history covets. When we covered the manifold players in the creation of the Web, it was a refreshing reminder that innovation– like the Internet– is long, complex, collaborative, messy– and beautiful. I look forward to gaining the tools to become a better scholar and process history more thoroughly.

I had the pleasure to peruse the Mapping Inequality Project this week. Never has the systemic racism of 20th-century America been so fun to scroll through. The entire project comes chiefly from primary sources: the records of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. The authors of the site optimise HOLC reports to their localities in an organic way, compiling the data from the reports into visual and textual media. The quantification of the data is simple; HOLC officials divided their cities into neighbourhoods with letter grades, so the authors translated the letter grades into concentric rings of colours representing each city. It’s difficult to discern the significance of these rings even after becoming acquainted with the legend, but they do the job and you’ll never have to stare at many numbers or percentages. The presentation of the visuals is clean and easy to grasp most of the time– though the site’s zoom tool is obscenely laggy.

The Mapping Inequality Project is a fascinating glimpse into what exactly segregation means and its forms. The authors endeavour to show that the poisonous racism so talked about in public discourse, so devastating to communities, manifests itself as a calm, calculated banker’s lexicon. The loan evaluators use code words such as ‘blighted’, ‘infiltration’, ‘heterogenous’, or ‘subversive elements’ to express their prejudices; an evaluator derides an East Los Angeles neighbourhood as ‘a “melting pot” area… literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements’ and thus grades it poorly, excluding the area from much-needed loans. HOLC was a success, ‘seen as both a savior to the housing sector and a force for racial segregation’ (Nelson et al).

One extrapolates from this that a generation is made from their weakest moments, and because the Great Depression was such a low point for that generation, the New Deal’s weaknesses reverberated all the stronger. Because housing loan appraisers deemed certain neighbourhoods certain letter grades, those neighbourhoods were not eligible for the redemption of the New Deal, precluded from prosperity.

Sources:

Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed September 2, 2019, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining//#loc=13/32.067/-81.105&maps=0&city=savannah-ga&area=C12&text=intro&adviewer=sidebar.

Posner, Miriam, director. How Did They Make That? How Did They Make That, UCLA Digital Humanities, 4 Apr. 2014, archive.org/details/howdidtheymakethat.

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.

Within the first week of class, I’ve learned a lot more about the 1930s and FDR’s New Deal programs. I remember learning about this topic during 6^thgrade history, but it hasn’t surfaced in my mind since then. I always admired FDR’s New Deal because I was impressed as to how one man could think of so many generally positive programs and pull an entire country out of a Depression. Through the readings, I’ve learned what specifically some of the programs did, as well as the fact that in order to get some of them passed, FDR had to ignore some of the racial inequalities in the South. This hasn’t clouded my views of him and the belief that he was a great and successful president. However, I think I would’ve just admired him even more if he didadvocate for African Americans during that time. One could argue that this advocating was done through the form of his New Deal projects; though, I’m referring more towards civil rights initiatives. Then again, according to the readings, the civil rights movement as we know of today came out of FDR’s lack of action in the 1930s/1940s. So, I suppose, everything worked out positively in the end.

I’ve never taken a class that’s mixed history with technology, so I’m excited for what’s in store for the rest of the semester. Just from this past week, I’m excited to learn more about the 1930s decade and what the country looked like beyond the Great Depression. I’m also not technologically savvy, other than knowing more about social media and my Apple products than my parents, so I’m interested in learning more about the history of technology. How did we get from giant, million-dollar computers to me typing this blog post out on my Mac? More important, why is technology so important to society in general? I think I take for granted going on websites and retrieving information, but it’s rarely that I think about how a website or a technological system is made. Even when I do, I feel like it’s too advanced for me to understand. I hope that through this class, I’ll no longer feel that way and be confident in the fact that I can be a successful, informed creator of technology, too.

The digital project that I analyzed was titled, “Virtual Harlem,” an interactive, visual representation of what Harlem, New York looked like during the Harlem Renaissance. The source is the Harlem Renaissance, “circa 1920 – 1934.” The process included sorting information using radial, index, path, and media visualizations to show connections between prominent figures and their works. Dr. Bryan Carter and students at the University of Arizona presented the website by numbering artists, musicians, and writers vertically down the left-hand sidebar, and providing biographical information, pictures, and/or videos when clicked on their names. They also created the “Virtual Harlem” demo using the Virtual World Web. Additionally, all the website was created using Scalar. I think this was a creative way to show this research because it creates a digital environment that lets students who have no connection or knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance really imagine themselves there, interacting with the times, in a way that I don’t believe a textbook, lecture, or movie can.

Johnston, Jessica. “Virtual Harlem.” An Archive for Virtual Harlem, Scalar, 29 Apr. 2015, scalar.usc.edu/works/harlem-renaissance/title-page. Accessed 2 Sep. 2019.

Boyle, Kevin. “The President Proposes . . .” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 Apr. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/books/review/fear-itself-by-ira-katznelson.html. Accessed 2 Sep. 2019.

Blog post 1

I have learned a lot this week about the New deal, great depression, and digital history. The stock market crash in October of 1929 was the major cause of the great depression. During the great depression, people were leaving in areas called “shanty towns” are “Hooverville’s”. These areas had horrible living conditions, and many did not survive. The term Hooverville’s comes from the president during the great depression and his name is Herbert Hoover. Obviously, as you can tell from the name “Hooverville’s” many people did not like what he was doing to try and help the great depression. The New Deal was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New deal was a series of programs that were able to help respond to the needs for relief, reform, and recovery from the great depression. It was also able to provide jobs for millions of people. I have also learned that digital humanities are the use of digital technologies and tools to ask questions, do research, hypothesize and analyze. I also know how humanities computing and digital humanities relate to each other. Humanities computing was the shift from computing with an emphasis on humanities. This led to digital humanities which are humanities that are inherently digital in design, form, and publication. I am looking forward to learning more about digital humanities and how it affects our technology today.

For this project, I was assigned “The garden of earthly delights” by Hieronymus Bosch. It is a modern title given to a triptych by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch during the Northern Renaissance. Using Miriam Posner’s framework, we can understand the sources, the process, and the presentation of this digital project. “The garden of earthly delights” used sources from Northern Renaissance such as paintings by the painter Hieronymus Bosch. The main interest in this project is breaking down the painting “The garden of earthly delights” and understanding each part of the painting. In presenting this project they made an interactive version of the painting. It was visualized very well. There is a total of 9 panels they can click on and find out what that section is about and what it represents. Overall, they made this digital project very enjoyable, knowledgeable, and attractive to the public.

Works Cited

Dauterive, Jessica. “What is Digital Humanities?” https://slides.com/jdauteri/what-is-digital-humanities#/1 . Date Accessed 2^nd  September 2019.

Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” – StoryMapJS – Northwestern University KnightLab. https://storymap.knightlab.com/examples/bosch-garden/. Date Accessed 2^nd September 2019.

Posner, Miriam. “How did they make that?” UCLA Digital Humanities. http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/fall-2019/dh Date Accessed 2^nd September 2019.

Throughout last week, I was able to have a better understanding of the importance of revolutionary technology throughout the early 20th century. Radios, televisions, and computers were starting to become more advanced which sparked a rapidly growing communication of ideas and knowledge. I learned that even though the technology that we have today seems very different from that of the early 20th century, technology was all built for the same purpose and the only difference is that in the modern era, it’s more advanced. Something else I learned that particularly piqued my interest was the advancement of AI. I was not aware that the advancements of Artificial Intelligence stemmed back all the way to the mid-twentieth century! Today, we have common AI’s such as “Siri” and “Alexa,” but back then Artificial Intelligence was not yet out for commercial use. The technology we have today has been tested and improved for decades and it’s inspiring to see how far AI’s have come.

I hope to learn more about how much technology has improved throughout the decades and I’d love to learn why some changes to technology have been made. I’d like to learn about why certain kinds of technology become obsolete and how people have learned to improve technology.

For this project, I was assigned “Performing Archive” by Jacqueline Wernimont, Kim et al. This digital humanities project takes pride in the fact that it is the “first to use an experimental new interface for Scalar” (Wernimont). In using this platform, viewers will be able to explore the website as a gallery, thus enriching the experience of the information. “Performing Archive” is an online exhibit that aims to display and analyze the photographs in the set the “Vanishing Race” shot by Edward S. Curtis. The photographs were taken by Mr. Curtis whereas the analytical excerpts of his work, most notably from newspapers and journals, have been collected from various scholarly libraries.

This exhibit was processed by categorizing one to three photos of similar nature along with the critiques about the photos and Curtis’s work as a whole, which included morality and authenticity. Along with this, the chronological life of Edward S. Curtis is explained throughout the entirety of the exhibit starting with his birth in the first section of the exhibit, and ending with his death in the last section.

“Performing Archive” is presented as an exhibit with a very straightforward pathway as it numbers off the links to go through in the Introduction. It allows for a very museum-like feel because of how you can only look at 1-3 pictures and the background story of those pictures on each page. Each page of the gallery has its own name in order to emphasize the subject of that page. The website is relatively interactive which allows for the brain to be more stimulated compared to if one were just merely scrolling through the pictures and articles.

Works Cited:

Wernimont, Jacqueline, et al. “Visualizing the ‘Vanishing Race’: the Photogravures of Edward S. Curtis.” Performing Archive, scalar.usc.edu/works/performingarchive/visualizingvanishingraceexhibit?path=intro.

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

The American nation went through many obstacles, cycles and events. The country evolved and built its own story. “The Digital Past” course focuses on main episodes of the History of the U.S.A in the 1930s, from the Great Depression, to the New Deal, and the digital history. This course brings the audience to a different approach of history. This original perspective leads to a unique vision of the use of digital between past and present. For example, it was interesting to understand how humanity went from the Codex to the printed book and finally to the Ebook, and how it allowed to democratize literature (Dauterive). I look forward to understanding how the digital field evolved and impacted the past century in the United States. We are using digital tools, which are new to me, to do history. It will bring an interesting outcome. I also hope learning about cultural, political and social movements from the 1930s and how the digital tools of this period influenced them. Using WordPress, Slack, Dropbox and Omeka, I would like to deepen my knowledge and understanding in digital humanities and the history of the U.S.A.

I will analyze a digital project titled “New Orleans Historical” by Niall Mitchell, Mary et al. It is a project from the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies in the History Department of the University of New Orleans and the Communication Department of Tulane University. The concept is to democratize historical scholarships. The idea is simple and extremely efficient. Using Miriam Posner’s framework, we can understand the sources, the process and the presentation of this digital project. “New Orleans Historical” used sources from New Orleans History. The idea is to gather “[h]istorical photographs sourced from archives, in addition to oral histories and videos created by scholars, community members, and students.” The main interest in this project resides in the connection in between historical stories. Indeed, the process they used consist on attaching stories to particular sites in the city. They found the best way to present them: a map. This interactive map allows to navigate through the city and from a simple click, enjoy a different a historical story. The idea is smart and it does invite the audience to discover and learn more about New Orleans. It also answers the need to make historical scholarships freely and publicly available. I think they overpassed their goal and made this project attractive and exciting for the new generation.

Works Cited

Dauterive, Jessica. “What is Digital Humanities?” https://slides.com/jdauteri/what-is-digital-humanities#/1 . Date Accessed 1st September 2019.

Niall Mitchell, Mary et al. “New Orleans Historical”. Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies in the History Department of the University of New Orleans and the Communication Department of Tulane University. https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/browse/ . Date Accessed 1st September 2019.

Posner, Miriam. “How did they make that?” UCLA Digital Humanities. http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/fall-2019/dh Date Accessed 1st September 2019.