Posts

Reflections on City of Apopka History Harvest

      Every History Harvest I have a unique experience. This is technically my third History Harvest that I have been a part of. The first one, which I don't remember where it took place, I was actually really late for and was only their at the tail-end to help the RICHES team pack up everything. I was able to talk to some of the local people in the community. The harvest was also for a colored school that was being demolished to build a community center, and the people there were giving oral histories and telling stories about their time, or siblings time, at the school.     My second history harvest I also forgot the name of until I started walking around the Apopkans Museum where our History Harvest took place. It was in Zellwood, and I made sure to arrive bright and early to make up for missing the first History Harvest while I was an intern at RICHES. At that Harvest, I was working on scanning things. Unlike the Harvest at Apopka, where there was relatively few people that I s
Post a Comment
Read more

Worlds Turned Upside Down Podcast

      The Digital History project that I would like to review is the World Turned Upside Down podcast which is narrated by Jim Ambuske and is produced by Jeanette Patrick. This podcast is about explaining the events leading up to the American Revolution through the perspective of the British subjects living in the American colonies. The podcast starts around the Seven-Years war and goes over events such as Pontiac's War, the different taxation acts, which its latest episode that released on October 22nd going into detail about how the Sons of Liberty and other patriots were doing acts of resistance to the British Crown.      This podcast is affiliated with George Mason University, and is one of a series of podcasts that are connected with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Some of its major supporters have been The McCormick Center for the Study of the American Revolution, The John Carter Brown Library, and it has also received a grant from the National Endowment
Post a Comment
Read more

Reviewing Digital History: An Introduction

      This assignment had me looking through mainly the American Historical Review (AHR) and see their evolution regarding reviewing digital projects. The first few "background" readings set the stage for these reviews. One of the articles was an interview with Dr. Jeffrey McClurken, an editor for the Journal of American History, and the other was more of a blog post by Dr. Cameron Blevins. While the two articles go into varying topics regarding reviewing digital history projects, I believe the main similarity is that these projects cannot be reviewed like how traditional history research is done. Dr. Blevins does a bit of a better job articulating what he means by giving different categories to reviewing a DH project, which is by pedagogy and public engagement, academic scholarship, and data and design criticism.      These categories by Dr. Blevins set a good guideline for what to look for in the later readings, particularly the reading which was one of AHR's first atte
Post a Comment
Read more

Handbook of Digital Public History

     This week (or rather last week's) reading was on The Handbook of Digital Public History. It is clear after reading parts of the book that it is one of the premier text if you want to dive into digital public history. The authors provide a great overview of both public history and digital history, and how these two separate fields were wedded together with the development of newer technology. The book also outlines how digital tools and media are redefining historical research, both technically and methodologically. The book, however, is also very transparent. It also highlights the challenges that DPH faces, such as the lack of preserving long-term digital resources because of the everchanging available technology, the lack of training or adaption of some historians to use digital tools, and ethical concerns of digitizing sources ( see this article for one example of the ethical problems with that ).     The chapters I read from the book, however, highlight the historiography
Post a Comment
Read more

Historical GIS and the Spatial Turn / Geographies of the Holocaust

      It has been a few weeks, but today I will be talking about historical geographical information systems (GIS), the Spatial Turn, and some examples of historical GIS in action. Historical GIS is a very important tool in digital history. It has allowed historians to look at data in new ways to find different patterns across different scales, both geographically and temporally.      It would be a disservice to not talk about Anne Kelly Knowles while talking about historical GIS. In 2000, Knowles wrote and article for the Social Science History journal and talked about how in the 1998 and 1999 Social Science History Association sessions were buzzing with academics excited about historical GIS. This was a new way for people across different fields to use technology in new ways to do historical research. In this article, Knowles defines historical GIS as "... a spatial database that integrates map-based information about the historical location of certain entities... with quantitat
Post a Comment
Read more

The History Manifesto and Its Critics

     This week's reading of The History Manifesto read a lot like an overview of history as a discipline. One of the main points of the book is about how historians in the mid-1900s began writing long, overarching histories called "longue durée". This approach to historical writing, as Guldi and Armitage point out, are individuals that are looking back in the past to get a better understanding of what to expect in the future (26).       The "longue durée" approach was not used just by historians, but also political scientists, political activists, psychologists, biologists, etc. These people, who were not originally trained to look back into history like a historian would, had their own agendas for doing so. Some people might be looking back into the past to try and influence political policies of the present, others may be trying to find connections to make the argument of climate change strong. the main factor was that "longue durée" was as much a h
Post a Comment
Read more

Arguing with Digital History / Current Research in Digital History

      This week, I focused on two digital history projects and brought up the main question posed by the 2017 White Paper and by Stephen Roberson and Lincoln A. Mullen, what were these two projects trying to argue?     The first project that I analyzed was Scot A. French's Notes on the Future of Virginia: The Jefferson-Short Letters, 1787-1826 . I chose to reach this article and learn about this project because my current professor is Dr. French and I thought it would be interesting to learn about some of the previous work he has done. And interesting it was. Dr. French's project frames over 4 decades of letters between Thomas Jefferson and William Short by their ideological positions as well as key events going on while the letters were written to provide important context.       One of the projects interfaces works like a New York subway map. The user is able to select a key term and the interface will morph to show the letters that pertain to the key term selected. Some of t
Post a Comment
Read more