Although I have learned about the Great Depression and New Deal in previous classes, I can’t say I’ve ever thought about these events through the lens of technology and digital humanities. Our first week of class definitely left me more confused than when I went in, but after studying one of the projects and completing the readings, I do feel slightly more confident and I hope to see my confidence only grow throughout the semester. I do not have much prior knowledge of digital humanities, but I am eager to learn more about it and how it impacted the 1930s and beyond. In last Wednesday’s class, I found the slideshow of different technology developing through time very interesting. I was especially surprised that the silent disco/dance idea came far earlier than my time. I never would have thought or believed that in the early 1900s anyone could even fathom that idea. I’m curious to know what other ideas we had originally thought were new, were actually thought of before. It was interesting to see how ideas that seem specifically relevant to our time were just as relevant nearly 100 years ago.
The project I analyzed was Papers of the War Department 1784-1800. This is an ongoing digital editorial project that is seeking to reconstruct and transcribe documents of the War Department that were destroyed due to a fire in November 1800. Since this a collection of primary sources and historical artifacts this project would be classified as an exhibit according to Miriam Posner’s framework. The Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 project is pretty straightforward in that its goal to restore historical documents that were once thought to be lost and allow these sources to be easily accessible to the public and allow the public to participate in transcription. They provide digitized images of all documents and many have transcriptions that makes understanding and reading these documents easier. This project uses sources, such as such as letters and maps, from the 1784-1800 time frame which are then processed through reconstruction and digitized to allow users to transcribe documents that can be easily presented for public use.
Sources
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and George Mason University. “Papers of the War Department 1784-1800.” Papers of the War Department, wardepartmentpapers.org/s/home/page/home.
Posner, Miriam. “How did they make that?” UCLA Digital Humanities.
I agree with you about the silent disco parties. I feel like that would’ve been such a hassle trying to do in the early-mid 20th century because of the fact that technology wasn’t as developed as it is today. We can use AirPods and other wireless headphones now, which makes it easier to dance, whereas back then, they had to wear huge headphones (which I think were even connected to a central location). However, I do think about fashion a lot. Fashion seems to be the one business where something that was relevant definitely comes back into prominence years later – sometimes vocabulary, too.
I can relate to the first paragraph of your post where you speak on not knowing what this class would entail. From what I understand, its not about the technology in the past, but it is more of using the digital platforms we have today to allow us to examine the past in a new perspective.