The One that Finishes it all – How Sad!!

Link to Final Project: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/the-over-throw–of-the-govern

My final project is about the things during the popular front like communism, the Slave Narratives, The Ballad of Americans, and the comic Wonder Woman. Although there were ways that they were subdued or manipulated for them not to show up in our history they did. Not only did they show up but the government was called out for trying to tamper with them. This spread talks about these difficult things in our history and evolved them to what we know now. 

In my final project, one of the things I wanted to include was the Slave Narratives. I’ve discussed them in the most recent blog post I’ve posted; however, I thought it would prove my point even more about things being hidden from us. The fact that they tried to change the story of these people’s lives after all they’ve been through just to make them sound better is scary to me. 1

Then just to included that the narratives were not the only thing intrigued me even more. For my first tool, I chose soundcite. I picked this tool because what could be better than to “hear it from the horse’s mouth” and have the things you’re talking about explaining your point itself. Just like in the last blog post, I think this is great supporting evidence. The second skill I used was picture annotation. This was one of my favorite skill assignments as well as the pictures I used also very clearly shows the viewer real-life examples of what I’m trying to convey to them. The third skill was Voyant tools. When we first did this skill assignment I thought my grade was going to go straight down because it looked like complicated computer programming stuff. However, after seeing how simple it was I loved it!! I loved the different types of graphs it could make and once I became more comfortable with my historical question I wanted to try and implement some clear data. 

When I first came to the class I wasn’t thrilled. History isn’t my favorite subject and before this class, I honestly thought “if it’s in the past leave it there”, not anymore. Now I’m excited to fully understand the New Deal 2. This short decade that I often looked over was filled with so many moving parts I was blown away. Before coming to this class all I knew was that Franklin Roosevelt was a president but I couldn’t tell you when he was one. Now I can tell you that he as president in 1933 and reran and got selected for another term. He also created the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Art Project. Those projects then went and made things of their own. The Federal Theatre Project make The Revolt of the Beavers that 1930’s wasn’t a fan of but the class loved 3 . The Federal Writers Project made the American Guide Series which preserved each states individual history while also helping the nation feel more united If those weren’t enough, he also organized the New Deal which helped so many citizens even if it wasn’t an easy task during the time 4. 

I also took from this class that we preserve history in so many ways with the ever-advancing technology we have access to. We can preserve it through archives like George Masons. We also can preserve it through memes like the “absolute unit” sheep 5  No matter how we preserve our history, the most important thing I took away from this class was that our time and history is precious. Time is forever ticking away and monumental things are happening every day. We should use what we have to our advantage and preserve as much as we can because before we know it those moments could get lost. Even though I’m not a history type of person, I’m very thankful I took this class. Thank you Professor Jess for giving me new perspectives. 

Final Blog Post

This past semester, in this history class, I have attempted to learn about the history of the Great Depression era as well as some of the digital tools used to capture some of that historical knowledge. Coming in with a certain amount of knowledge for the early 1900’s, I expected most of this class to be learning about the IT aspect but there was plenty to learn about the era, like the WPA and New Deal, that I did not expect. I was, personally, pleasantly surprised by the amount of knowledge obtained from this course.


This exhibit felt like a culmination of all the tools we had learned throughout the semester. I chose the timeline and glitching tools initially because they were, for me, the most useful tools of conveying the information we learned this semester. The timeline was great for laying down background information on the Great Depression era by detailing the major events and including the progression of unemployment as well. It allowed me to take the information from the American Yawp chapter on the Great Depression and present it in a way that conveys the important events of the Great Depression. The chapter states multiple important events such as the stock market crash, the Dust Bowl, and FDR’s New Deal. 6 The glitched image was my favorite skill assignment this semester as it surprised me as to how influential it can be. It feels like an abstract painting where you can take away different meanings from it based on how you look at it. As Kramer said in the glitching images reading,’Glitching was an unlikely candidate for historical inquiry’. 7I used an old exhibit from earlier in the semester that I thought conveyed the attitude of the Great Depression as people worked to get back on their feet. The last exhibit for my project took more thought as I eventually chose to use a poster from the WPA collection. I thought the WPA collections hold so much information and images like posters that I could find something pertaining to employment. They have collections on ex-slave narratives and folklore as well as work related posters. 8 I chose a work poster that had a confidence boosting message to it because it felt like it conveyed the idea that finding new jobs was important for the times but that the morale of people and the country was important as well.


I learned plenty about the Federal Projects in the WPA through the various readings this semester. The preface from the Bindas reading offered the most information on the Federal Arts Projects. I was most surprised to learn how much money was actually allocated to these projects that I had not heard of before. FDR gave over 27 million dollars to these projects. 9


I’m a firm believer in ‘those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’ so I believe history always has a significant place in the present day decisions. I think if we were to experience problems like those from the Great Depression then funding the arts’ projects could be a viable answer. Going forward, I am definitely more aware of myself as a digital citizen especially after the class with the fake pirate professor. I know what it takes to be a contributing part of the digital world and feel prepared to do so in the future.

Final Exhibit:

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

Final Project

This semester I learned a lot. I was able to learn about aspects of the New Deal that I hadn’t covered in my own studies. I was a bit on the fence about the integration of certain aspects of information technology and historical study, (specifically when we learned about glitching10) but I’m glad to say that I understand the possible functions of all the skills we learned. I became very interested in what I feel is an underrepresented group in discussions about the Great Depression, and decided that I would do my final project on women and how their positions within society changed. 

Something that I hadn’t heard before were statistics for female employment during the Depression, and how they changed. 10.5million women were in the workforce in 1930, and that number rose 24% to 13million by the time World War II began. 15% of married women were employed, and 50% of single women were working. In order to show all of these wonderful accomplishments (and a few disappointments), I chose to use image annotation, image glitching, and timeline creation for my project. I used image annotation because I’m a visual learner, and I find that it’s often easier for me to learn and focus when there are images present. It also gives you a sort of ‘hands-on’ way to view information attached to photos11. 

I chose image glitching because it was the skill I struggled with the most. I honestly didn’t see how it could be useful when we first discussed it in class. However, I’m glad to say that I do understand the purpose now. It literally forces you to look at images from a different perspective, and introduces new ideas in your mind. Glitching is also completely random, so you can’t manipulate it to prove your point. I found it to be an interesting way to look at images of working women. 

Finally, I chose to create a timeline because it was the best way to show the changes within the government and within society in a linear way. I think over the course of the semester, the timeline tools were my favorite. Using the timelines to study the ex-slave narratives was extremely helpful, and it was extremely raw at the same time12. Listening to casual conversation about a period of time that is still so painful, but they’re almost relaxed about, and reducing it to a timeline is incredibly intense. 

I found myself confronting the way that I consumed information on the internet as well. The presentation in class about fact-checking resources was extremely interesting. I’ve always been very careful about the sources I use, but after I learned about Professor Kelly13 and his class that centered around building a fake Wikipedia page, and story to go along with it, I’ve been nervous. I’ve not cited Wikipedia in academic papers for a long time, (probably since elementary school) but I have used it as a resource in casual research before. I’ll definitely double check everything I read on there from now on!

Overall, I learned a lot in this class. I’m a history major, and the 1930’s was my main interest for a long time. I was mostly focused on the Dust Bowl, so learning about other aspects of it was incredibly interesting. I learned a lot of digital skills that I hope to use in my studies in the future, and I had a really wonderful experience learning about the different cultural projects introduced in the New Deal. 

Here is the link to my final project: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/the-working-women-of-the-1930-

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”14 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.”15 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,16 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.”17

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 information18 and possible bots19 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 17, 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 18, 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 20 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 21 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’. 22

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. 23 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. 24

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. 25

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.26 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.27 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.28

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.29 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.”30

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”. 31 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.” 32 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.” 33 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.” 34 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.35 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.36 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.37 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.38

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.

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