I attended Laura Crossley’s presentation on October 29th, 2019. In her talk she discussed many things, all those things revolving around Digital Huminites. She her main goal was so discuss Text Mining Digital Humanities Blogs with APIs, Open Refine, and R. During her talk she used a lot of big words and terms that I didn’t really understand, but I did take away a few things from the talk that I thought was interesting.
One of the things I picked up on was how she was saying that nowadays blogposts on word press are belittling. She said it is getting harder for her and the program she uses called DH Now. This program takes blogs written on WordPress that were nominated to be on the homepage after being peer reviewed. These blogs consist of many different topics in Digital History. In her talk Crossley talks about how although she runs this website it was supposed to shut down this summer and now, she’s not sure what its future looks like. She then says that there aren’t enough blog posts being posted to WordPress in order for the site to keep promoting them. She later brought up that it seems to have been taking over by twitter.
This connection had me thinking, as technology advances is it possible that what is happening to DH Now is the same type of effect that happened to Theater in the 1936-era? Around 1939 theater was takin over by radio and movies, so it was hard to preserve the plays and such forth making the actors, directors, etc. lose their jobs. 1 Crossley was talking of a way to preserve DH Now instead of completely shutting down the website. What if instead of shutting down the website she “evolves” with the times? Maybe by finding a way to implement twitter into the equation, which I know she said that would be complicated. If not implementing twitter then possibly find a way to implement younger generations onto WordPress/Blog posts.
The way the FTP made people want to go to the theater was by making them cheaper, putting in a lot of time/energy into making them, employing people since jobs were scarce, by making people happy and distracting them from their current situation, and by spreading out to different states. It could be possible DH Now just needs a revamp like the theaters did to keep them going and preserve them. 2
Either way, I really enjoyed Crossley’s talk. It really put a new perspective on Digital Humanities, and how things are lost in each technological advancement. Everyone is so focused on the next phone, the next laptop, the next of the next, and so on. It really made me take a step back from our everyday experience of the “next and newest thing”. It made me think about things of the past and how the next thing effects the past.
- “Federal Theatre: Melodrama, Social Protest, and Genius: 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/federal-theatre-melodrama-social-protest-and-genius/.
- “Federal Theatre: Melodrama, Social Protest, and Genius: 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/federal-theatre-melodrama-social-protest-and-genius/.
