End of Semester Reflection

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’. ¹

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. ² 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. ³

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. ⁴

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.

1. Yetman, Norman. 2000. “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.” Web page. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. 2000. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/.
2. Fanslow, Robert. 1998. “The Migrant Experience | Articles and Essays | Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941 | Digital Collections | Library of Congress.” Web page. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. April 6, 1998. https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/articles-and-essays/the-migrant-experience/.
3. Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed December 13, 2019, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining.
4. Hobbes, Michael. n.d. “Generation Screwed.” The Huffington Post. Accessed December 13, 2019. http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/.