Category: Final Project

Reflection

Exhibit: Artistic Expression in the Great Depression

My exhibit, Artistic Expression in the Great Depression, explored the ways that the struggles of the Great Depression were reflected in creative works at the time, such as plays, music, novels, film, murals, and dance. Using the digital tools we’ve worked with in class helped me to discuss both the purposes and the impact of these works.

When discussing Clare Leighton’s art work, using image annotation helped to talk about the particular portions of the work in their own contexts. It also saved the trouble of explaining and describing where each component of the work could be found. Using Soundcite to provide an immersive experience into Mary Sullivan’s song, “Sunny California”1 helped to put one into the same perspective of someone hearing it at the time, someone who would hear their own story in the song and find comfort in solidarity. I prefer StoryMap over the other tools that we’ve used, as it helps you visualize different types of information at once. Using StoryMap helped me to show the location, description, and medium of several different kinds of creative works. Despite being of very different natures, StoryMap allowed the information for each topic to be shared in the same context, as a moment in history. These tools helped me to really make my point in explaining how the creative works of the 1930’s helped the nation heal.

Of course, I only found myself to be proving what we’d been learning all along this semester. We even read early on in the class, “The arts can be a lifeline as well as a pleasant diversion, a source of optimism and energy as well as peerless insight, especially when so many people are stymied or perplexed by the unexpected changes in their world. As our troubles worsen, as stress morphs into anxiety and depression, we may desperately need the mixture of the real and the fantastic, the sober and the silly, that only the arts can bring us.”2 Now, if not for this class, I wouldn’t understand the concept lying underneath that determination. We were quickly directed towards the concept of escapism; and to understand how a nation suffering hardship across the board needed revitalization and found it in a mix of avoidance and activism. While Federal One Projects sought to begin mending society by creating cultural stimulation,3 seemingly a distraction from the task at hand, they didn’t just provide a diversion from the present circumstance, contrary to initial belief. “The most durable cliche about the arts in the 1930s is that despite the surge of social consciousness among writers, photographers and painters (some of it supported by federal dollars), the arts offered Depression audiences little more than fluffy escapism, which was just what they needed. But that’s not the whole story.”4

What we’ve learned throughout this class and what I’ve tried to show through my exhibit is that by looking closer at those arts projects that were condemned as a silly waste of federal funding, those involved were inspired to use the works for  a bigger purpose; to seek out works that put issues under a floodlight. The nation was not only given back a sense of optimism through the “distraction,” but was motivated by the call to action that lie in so many of the arts projects being examined and produced at the time. It raises the thought of how often we may come into this possible paradox today, in getting caught up in entertainment news rather than considering pressing issues. Or can we justify that today by arguing that perhaps the news that entertains us sometimes points us back in the right direction, to the matters at hand?

Aside from what we’ve learned in this class in historical perspective, I’ve personally found a wealth of knowledge in understanding my relationship with the technological world. While I’ve considered how to navigate digital space carefully and safely, and take precautions in my usage, I hadn’t considered my duty to the digital world. Learning how to be responsible about engaging with suspicious information5 and possible bots6 has opened my mind to a different perception of the Internet. Everyone likes to wonder what the future will look like for technology, but I was slow to realize that all of us will really be the keepers of Internet safety, that we are all responsible for the future of the digital world.

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/

Final Blog Post

In examining the entire semester and the different topics we touched on as a class concerning the 1930’s, I found myself constantly going back to the idea of how FDR’s New Deal was to sort of be the reprisal of the America that existed before the Great Depression, (at least in terms of pride). But in thinking about that, I began to question how “great” that America really was, and if the New Deal was any better, and I realized it would probably depend on who you asked. America has never and still is not completely 100% equal for all, and it 100% was not equal during the 1930’s, at least in terms of the lives of black and white Americans. That being said, I decided to formulate my final exhibit question around this concept by asking “How was 1930’s America different for white and black people?”. I examined this question by utilizing certain skill assignments that we had used during the semester such as image annotation 4, story mapping, and glitching. I felt that these three skill assignments best corresponded with the topics I was going to more closely analyze which were the differences in art, everyday life, and travel. Each skill assignment allowed me to go more in depth with my analysis than I had previously thought I would be able to.

While doing this final exhibit, I was able to reflect more regarding the actual history of the 1930’s and how all the skill assignments we learned this semester actually helped me learn all of the things that I did. It helped me gain a better understanding of the impact that digital technology has, and how as ethical digital citizens, we have a duty to use technology and the information on it responsibly. For example, had it not been for the glitching article 7, I wouldn’t have been able to draw the conclusions I did regarding Augusta Savage, and the glitched image that I included in my final exhibit. In my final exhibit I also included a storymap that mapped a trip from New York to Missouri, and to do that I had to utilize the “Navigating the Green Book” project 8 so I could determine what stops an African American traveler would make during that time. All of these things, when utilized correctly, transform history and the ability to understand history, into a more modern thing. As a viewer, as a student, when you interact with history while using technology and new platforms you may have not previously known of before, you’re forced to get a better understanding of the content because you are actively interacting with the content. It’s far different from just reading a textbook or article about it. But with that ability to interact more with history through the use of technology, comes the responsibility of being professional and ethical when doing so. For our lecture on Digital Citizenship, we read an article about how a George Mason University professor had his students create a hoax on wikipedia 9 and that alone sparked outrage, even though it was a lighthearted assignment. So if anything this just cemented more the idea that what you say or do and how interact with online digital content is extremely important. Everyone needs to be ethical and responsible so as not to spread false information. In a general sense I feel like the more that digital humanities becomes a bigger place for scholarship and the more that people actually take digital humanities seriously, the more that we will see conversations concerning digital citizenship in the news.

In all, my ideas regarding digital humanities and 1930’s history have evolved and grown because of this course. By combing history with digital projects, I was able to interact more with the content I was learning, and able to gain a better understanding of both digital humanities and history all at once. Through using the two, I was able to formulate broad historical questions, and then closely analyze those questions with each skill assignment we were given. This course provided me a better grasp of the history of the 1930’s, but more so than that, it provided me with new resources that I will be able to utilize in future project and scholarship to come.

End of Semester Reflection

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/locked-boxes–how-mexican-amer

I believe, throughout this semester, I have been growing more and more adept at seeing history through another person’s eyes. That may sound like meaningless tripe, but our multimedia approach helped incorporate enough viewpoints, enough points of analysis, that I felt I had a reasonably well fleshed out picture to go about a juncture in history. I love history, but the periods I am interested in are long before the advents of sound and visual recordings. It was refreshing to know that there were real people behind the pages of the annals. I found the slave narratives fascinating to listen to, absorbing the “collective portrait of a historical population” and picking up just how casually, how disappointedly those century-old voices discussed bondage. I can now say that I finally understand what is meant by ‘living history’. 10

Never before, when I studied the Great Depression for school, did I have such a detailed and analytical view of the interaction between Roosevelt’s new institutions and the people. The Farm Security Administration seems just as real to me as Social Security or the Department of Defence in today’s news when I read the in-depth Library of Congress articles that witness “FSA camps [furnish] the migrants with a safe space in which to retire from the discrimination that plagued them and in which to practice their culture and rekindle a sense of community”, or when listening to the myriad recordings the Farm Security Administration made of folk songs. 11 Institutional racism– normally such an abstract topic– hits home when expressed by digital history tools. The message comes across so much rawer, so much more directly when you see racism classified into red and yellow circles– and how big those circles are. 12

The tools that aided the most in realising digital history would have to be the Knightlab services. Storymap and Timeline were intuitive, clean-looking programs that take long strides towards newer, better visuals. Though I found them to be a pain to work with at times, I delighted in the results, which encouraged me to be a consummate ‘visualiser’, putting into visuals what I wanted to say. Soundcite, in particular, excited me; ever since I can remember, navigating to a whole other page whenever I wanted to listen to what an article or song review was talking about annoyed me to no end. I never really noticed how annoyed it made me until the class was introduced to Soundcite, and now I have a name for an article that makes you navigate away from their page, just to get some context: badly designed. Storymap and Soundcite were crucial to my final project, allowing me to analyse in unique ways two big aspects of migrant culture: their music and their movement. Underpinned by a few nice photographs, I arrived at a project I was proud to have composed.

The Knightlab visual tools inspired me to think of the medium as the message you want to convey to audiences. This philosophy echoed throughout the course, and I felt it was declared most potently in Michael Hobbes’ ‘Millennials Are Screwed’. We know that millennials are screwed. We have read countless think pieces with the same premise and similar data. What makes Hobbes’ articles unique is that visuals not only punctuate his point, but they are the point, portraying the data in a way that is interesting to those familiar with it, but with a universal language that reaches those unfamiliar with it. Because the accessible graphics enabled such a universality, Hobbes’ arguments are significantly amplified. That’s the power of a good medium. 13

This applied equally to our discussions of historiography and how representation, sample sizes, contexts, down to even the tone and race of the historian conducting the history can seismically change our present-day understanding. As digital consumers and producers, a goal that should be constantly kept in the background of our Internet is how radically the media we express a message in impacts future viewings of that message, to the point of it becoming the message altogether. What we have of history today is a very mixed bag of disparate historiography quality. Hopefully, as more aware digital citizens, using keener and more accurate tools, we can mitigate that disparity.

Dream Radically: A New Deal

Coming into this class, I had very little knowledge on the New Deal. For instance, I had no idea that the government attempted to get artists back to work through federally-funded agencies. I also never gave much thought to the history of socialism in the United States, I simply assumed that leftist-politics weren’t prominent in the US until after the cold war. But that idea was dismantled when we learned about Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth Society” campaign.14 But what really intrigued me in this class was how in such a precarious a time, President Roosevelt challenged various cultural and societal norms in order to rehabilitate and create a stronger nation. Although the New Deal was not inherently radical in its intent, it created major structural change in American law, culture, and society.15 The history of the 1930s isn’t dead, and it should be used to envision a better future. Learning about the diverse ways that the “government assumed the role of protector” gave me hope for a possibility of a future where we can revert to the same, if not better, framework of progression; a framework based on collectivism and protection for all people, not just CEO’s and the top 1%, our modern-day robber barons.16

Screenshot from “Millennials Are Screwed”

For my final project, I named my exhibit “The WPA & The Reimagining of American Life” because through the WPA and FDR’s legislation on labor, there was a rethinking of what the standards of working and living should be in America. In the first segment, I use a timeline to help the audience better contextualize how President Roosevelt used a multifaceted approach towards changing the trajectory of labor. Using the timeline was beneficial because I was able to put each distinction, the legislation and the WPA projects, into its own layer. In the next segment, I used the image analysis to break down the significance of the WPA posters and how their individual campaigns- work safety, recreation, art, and education, affected working class lifestyles. The final segment mapped the infrastructure created by the various WPA agencies in Washington, D.C. The mapping tool allows the audience to see how extensive the WPA agencies were, the range and diversity of the constructed sites, and whether the establishments are still used today.

Overall, I hope this exhibit allows people to recognize that there are living, reoccurring themes in history. What seemed radical and unachievable to many people in the 1920s, is seen as socially acceptable and normal now; a minimum wage, restrictions on child labor, and the creation of a pension system were policies that Roosevelt had to carefully craft into success. By 1934, he had opposition from business-friendly republicans, democrats in the South, and various conservative justices in the Supreme Court.17 What I hope people recognize is that it’s not naive to dream of a radically better future, it’s achievable. And it’s also our responsibility. It’s our responsibility to be critical of the products of tech-capitalism, corporations, and systems that only benefit a few, over the exploitation of many. As Michael Hobbes beautifully crafts in his digital storytelling, we can let our economic infrastructure keep disintegrating and wait to see if the rising seas get us before our social contract dies. Or we can build an equitable future that reflects our values and our demographics and all the chances we wish we’d had.”18

Final Project: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/reimagining-american-life

Final Exhibit

The cultural New Deal was an incredible era for innovation. America was reinventing itself and picking up the pieces from the Great Depression. For my final exhibit I decided to discuss immigration regarding Hispano immigrants. My historical question being ‘How did Immigrants experience life during the 1930’s and what do their experiences teach us about America during this time period?’ However, I included Mexican Immigrant discrimination in the Farm Security Administration and then, the different ways the laws discriminated Mexican Immigrants.

I chose to use the glitching skill to showcase and present an argument. I used timeline JS to document the journey to America of a Cuban immigrant, this was used as a way to introduce my historical question. Upon arrival, cuban immigrant Gerardo suffered jobless time periods and starvation as an effect to the Great Depression. Lastly, I used Voyant Tools to analyze similarities or differences In the Manuscripts from the Federal Writers Project and immigration/emigration manuscripts within the FWP. Throughout my exhibit, I decided to leave the glitching gallery towards the end because I was most proud of my work. In Michael Kramer’s piece Using Image Deformance to Rethink Agency and Authenticity in the 1960s American Folk Music Revival, Kramer discusses how “glitching and deformance syncopate our source materials. They allow us to hear the fretwork of history’s complex chordal arrangements with more acumen”. 19 While glitching the photographs of Mexican children, it felt as though I was rearranging their lives, perhaps altering their experiences and all while shifting color qualities. Glitching seems loud, disturbing, and somehow made me think more critically as to how something as simple as a photograph could be altered through code.

The final exhibit assignment reminded me of Trevor Owens Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence where he states “We can choose to treat data as different kinds of things. First, as constructed things, data are a species of artifact. Second, as authored objects created for particular audiences, data can be interpreted as texts. Third, as computer-processable information.” 20 I felt as though this assignment did all three of these things because we gathered a primary source that we found interesting, catering to a specific audience (ourselves because we chose it) and as processable information because of our ability to make the source malleable and interpret it in different forms that include the skill aspect.

The history of the 1930’s and New Deal Era has taught me how dependent we are on the policies created by Roosevelt. Social security and welfare are still existent, with the exception that it is more inclusive and not discriminatory. One of my favorite interactive maps this semester was Navigating The Green Book because of the demonstrations depicted. This source made me think about discrimination in America and the changes in time periods. There is a quote in particular that speaks to me, “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment. But until that time comes we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year.” 21 This quote makes me reflect on the changes of America, and more importantly how much more culturally accepting we have become throughout the years.

I will continue to be a great digital citizen by not lying online, and learning to use a password manager. As stated in the article Three Essential Steps to Make Yourself More Hack-Proof it states that in order to protect your identity and important information, “All you’ll ever need to know is the master password. The rest of your passwords are encrypted, and can only be unlocked by that master password.” 22 The biggest takeaway from this class was the copyrights section. Content like twitter and facebook make it easy to reproduce content that it already created. Therefore, being more mindful of copyrights is a big takeaway from this course.

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/immigration1930

Thank you.

Final Blog Post

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/final-exhibitfr

My final exhibit combines the projects of the New Deal Era such as the Federal Writer’s Project and the Southern Mosaic Project of John and Ruby Lomax to explore the origins and impacts of spirituals and religions following the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War. The Library of Congress contains a wealth of primary sources focused on the lives of former slaves, narrated and documented in the 1930’s for folkloric preservation in the national archives, and although the topic itself is not centered on the Great Depression, I felt that it was a topic with incredible depth and complexity, which deserved attention, especially because the work of writers and folklorists in the New Deal allows for its study today. 

I chose to take advantage of the rich personal narratives of the Born In Slavery collection, and began my project with an overlapping timeline containing three different narratives. I chose to highlight biographical milestones, such as freedom from slavery and marriages, but also paid special mind to mentions of religious practice and holiday observance, as I noticed that while these subjects were noted by all three, it occurred in different ways. For example, Adeline Jackson’s testimony made her deep-seated spirituality evident, whereas Frank Adamnson seemed to view church attendance as a way of finding a wife moreso than as a spiritual calling. I feel that it is necessary to compare and contrast these kinds of experiences, especially when the focus of the exhibit is on religion and spirituality in particular. Secondly, I chose to use Soundcite to analyze two examples of traditional spirituals, and to open up a conversation in my exhibit about the important roles that spirituals played during and after slavery.23 Finally, I chose to do annotations of two images from a church congregation in Charleston, South Carolina, to facilitate a discussion of the emergence of Black churches in the American South following emancipation, and their cultural significance.24 All of my primary sources originate in South Carolina, from the songs and images, and even the personal narratives. This was a conscious choice (and a true hassle when it came to selecting sources that would fit my exhibit well), as I wanted to build my observations and conclusions around a specific group, in order to increase my own accuracy, and minimize the amount of generalizations I stood to make about a community to which I do not belong.

When first I entered the class, I had no idea that there was such a heightened initiative and interest in documenting American folklife during the New Deal.25 As I conducted my research and found primary sources for this undertaking, I was truly blown away by the sheer amount of material that was compiled during such a short period of American history, moreover the fact that there was so much pertinent information at my disposal for what I consider to be a somewhat narrowly focused exhibit. The push to immortalize American Folklore and Folklife at this point in history stands out to me at a personal level as well—as an anthropologist, I am impressed with the degree of attention the government and the country at large gave to aspects of culture that so often go neglected by the majority of the public.26

The action taken to preserve and compile folklore during the 1930’s was invaluable, especially as our culture continues to grow more and more homogenous as mainstream media takes over the collective focus of the country. Through the projects of the New Deal, we are able to access firsthand accounts of events from two hundred years ago, recorded in audio files and transcribed by ethnographers. It’s utterly incredible. I have never been interested in digital archiving—or any archiving, for that matter—before taking this class, but thanks to all of our work with the Library of Congress digital collections I have gained a deep appreciation for all of the work that goes into the compilation and digitizing of these sources. Accessibility truly is everything, and this class allowed me to see behind the scenes, and gain an understanding of how this accessibility is made possible.

Scared Since the 30s

The historical question that I focused on was “Why were ghost stories common across America in the 1930s? What does this say about the time period?”. Ghost stories were common across America in the 1930s because it was a way to bring communities closer together. Having a common topic, one everyone in the town knew about, that was a distraction from their current economic crisis would’ve been a relief to a lot of people. I’m sure many were scared, but as we’ve seen from how popular ghost stories are, people enjoy that kind of fear. Especially how not everyone who told a ghost story believed in it, many were skeptics. But it’s more about how ghost stories and scaring each other is a form of bonding, one that many communities take part in.

I got all of my sources from the Library of Congress Federal Writers Project interviews which meant that I only had what people talked about. We didn’t mention ghost stories at all in class because there isn’t much on it from the 1930s, but I’ve always been interested in ghost stories and I thought it would be a unique idea for my final project. I’d already had a corpus from our project on Voyant to go off of, but I decided to create a new list of ghost stories so I could gain insight into ghost stories from around America rather than random ones that I had chosen a month ago. I wanted to see if there were regional differences in the stories, and I had decided that along with Voyant, my project was going to have a map. I wasn’t really aware of how helpful maps can be to enhance a project until we read the introduction to Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s and had the accompanying website that marked Jonathan Daniels’ travels 27. The map allowed me to go on the journey with Daniels as he worked to document his travels and the general feelings of southerners at the time. The map gave me visuals and a brief description of where he was and why it’s important that he stopped there. A few weeks after going through Daniels’ journey, we created our projects on mapping, and with it read an article about how digital mapping has evolved to allow digital historians and professors to be able to teach in a more tangible way 28. These mapping projects give a real insight into what it was like to live as a black person immediately after emancipation or be able to understand how many lynchings happened in the South between 1877 and 1950. Seeing racism plainly shown, with data to back it up, can be very impactful, especially for students who don’t have much experience in learning about racism. I also included an image analysis in my project because I felt like the picture I found perfectly encapsulating what I meant when I talk about people enjoying being scared.

This class has really helped me understand the digital world and the 1930s in ways I hadn’t before. Many of the websites and ideas we learned were completely new to me but were still relatively simple to understand. I enjoyed when we had to go to a New Deal site near us, because not only did it give me an excuse to explore DC, but it also put the New Deal into a realistic context so that we could see that the effects are still around us in many ways. I had no idea how many parks and structures across the country came from the 1930s, and how much we use them in our everyday lives. The lessons we had on copyrights and data usage have been eye-opening into how complicated and restrictive they are 29. I was also fascinated by our conversation about how memes are completely changing how we interact, and how information gets spread 30. Both relevant and important topics today, and connecting them to the 1930s only enhanced the topic more in my mind.

Before this class, I didn’t know much about the 1930s, only that it was when the Great Depression happened and FDR was elected. I had no idea the New Deal included so much art, writing, and theater and wasn’t just infrastructure and economics. Being able to directly connect consequences from the 1930s to today’s world is a valuable skill and I’m glad this class was able to offer me the chance to do just that.

Final Blog Post

            When I used to hear the words “history” and “the Great Depression” I would instantly tune out any information following the matter because I have never been one to be interested in history. I never thought about history further than the word. I never thought about the process of digitization or how important archives are. I especially never thought to combine history with my major, criminology, and form a research project out of it. I think this class not only taught me the importance of digitizing history, but also many different ways (skills) in which we do so.

            My final project was an exhibit that was centered around the question “how did the New Deal influence crime rates?”. According to History.com, “During the Great Depression, with much of the United States mired in grinding poverty and unemployment, some Americans found increased opportunities in criminal activities like bootlegging, robbing banks, loan-sharking—even murder”(2018). When Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, one of the purposes was to deter crime in the slums through his housing plans. In my exhibit, I showcased three skills I learned over the course of the semester: image annotation, mapping, and image glitching.

            Image annotation is describing and illustrating ideas on a picture through annotations rather than paragraphs of analysis. I chose to use image annotation as my first skill as a way to address and introduce the historical argument of the fact that the New Deal had a positive impact on crime rates in the sense that it lowered them. The image I chose for my image annotation skill depicts a man of color being arrested during a protest. The image was taken after the New Deal was implemented. While the man is being arrested in the picture, no true crime is being committed. This supports the argument on the fact that the New Deal lowered crime rates. It can be concluded that while the New Deal can be seen to have lowered crime rates, it gave way to a rise in protests and therefore can be seen to have raised arrest rates.

            Mapping is a little more complicated than image annotation. Mapping is the use of pictures depicting historical events being placed in a geographic location relevant to their history and using these locations to tell a story or show a pattern of a broader historical event. I chose to use the mapping skill in my exhibit as a way to relate how the map showcases the argument/question through a pattern of location. The map I created showcases the impact of the New Deal through three different images. The pattern shown between these three images can be seen as the first two represent the attempt to deter and prevent crime while the third shows the great impact on the implementation of the New Deal as the image depicts no real crime being committed because there is nothing illegal about protesting.

            Image glitching, in my opinion, is more of an artistical take on the digitization of history in the sense that I believe it tells a story through the glitched image. How glitching works is you simply take any regular image and edit the code to where it “distorts” the image in a sense. I wanted to use this skill to show how the glitched image portrays the argument upon the question of how crime was influenced by the Great Depression. The image I chose is one of the slums behind the Metropolitan Police Department. The New Deal, as stated by the posters in the map, was partially set in place to “solve crime” in the slums. Therefore, the glitched picture of the slums is an artistic representation of the rebuilding and rebirth of a new “house” in the sense that it depicts the destruction and rebuilding process of these slums on behalf of the New Deal.  

            After taking this class, I have become more aware of the importance of digitizing history. I believe that by digitizing history, we not only make it more available to the public, but the fragility and limitation of it is eliminated entirely as it is made “infinite” in a sense on the internet. I find the many skills in which we use to digitize history artistically appealing and educationally appealing because it stimulates different learning styles through each skill and shows history from a different perspective as well.

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/hdietz/intro

Crime in the Great Depression—HISTORY. (n.d.). Retrieved December 12, 2019, from https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/crime-in-the-great-depression

Coping With Great Depression: Exhibit

I thought that I had my plans for my final exhibit so organized, until it was time to put them all down. Originally, the only topic that I had planned to focus on was religion and the role that the Depression played in aiding the rise of Conservatism within America, with a focus on which areas of the country remain to some extent still seized in that grip. Studying the greater pop culture movements, and unique art and storytelling mediums, that emerged out of the 1930s and reactions to the Depression made me realize, though: religion was only one fold of a much bigger picture.

The Great Depression was a societal tipping point for America, and had the call for massive social reform of “financial regulation, farm subsidies, public works, mortgage protection, union rights, Social Security, the minimum wage”[1] not been heeded, I don’t believe it an exaggeration to say that it could have been the beginning of the end for America. But even as the people and the government both struggled to find their footing after the upheavals of the stock market crash and the Dust Bowl, it’s not as though everyone was content to just make that existence their lives. They found refuge not just in religion, but in music, stories, film, and one another. Nobody wanted to spend their spare night out or free time stewing in their own misery. They set to work, to improve not only their own lives, but affecting the lives of those around them as well. Country preachers set out to call more sheep to their flocks. Ordinary Americans and displaced migrants used the music of their upbringings to spread the stories of what had happened to them. What was coming out of the film studios and the publishing houses brought about not only entertainment, but impactful social movement, as “when our society was most unstable and insecure, we somehow, as if by a law of compensation, produced the most buoyant popular culture that Americans had ever seen”[2].

What was I doing, thinking I was going to be able to categorize any of that, reducing it down to a cultural spreadsheet and not the lifeblood of a nation? True to the words of Trevor Owens, my data required “choices about what and how to collect and how to encode the information”[3]. The best that I could do was track patterns and pin down locations, although the preservation of that information would likely not have been thought possible at the time of its origin. Digital history is about more than just calling up dates, but examining how the evolution of media goes hand-in-hand with the hindsight of studying these events which happened over 80 years ago in the context of the present day, like finding out exactly how “a folk song collector wound up as the legal co-author of a Jay-Z diss track”[4]. Could the first audiences to watch Snow White in theaters have known that they were witnessing the origins of what is today the biggest entertainment company in the world? Could Bonnie and Clyde have known that their names would become an idea, an archetype, and for some even a goal? Could a Jewish man walking the streets of New York City in 1939 have known how much further reaching his fears of fascism would extend beyond the next decade?

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/coping-with-great-depression–

Sources Cited: [1] Boyle, Kevin. “The President Proposes . . .” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 Apr. 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/books/review/fear-itself-by-ira-katznelson.html.

[2] Dickstein, Morris. “Facing the Music.” The American Scholar, 11 Dec. 2014, https://theamericanscholar.org/facing-the-music/.

[3] Owens, Trevor. “Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?” Journal of Digital Humanities, 15 Dec. 2011, http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/defining-data-for-humanists-by-trevor-owens/.

[4] Hein, Ethan. “Jay-Z and Alan Lomax.” The Ethan Hein Blog, 7 Feb. 2015, http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2011/jay-z-and-alan-lomax/.

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