Francesco Collura WordPress Blog 8

Langdon Winner: Do Artifacts Have Politics

Having read this article previously for another class, and then revisiting the article for this class, I found that it gave me a new light on the aspect of technology, especially for the study of history. While new technological innovations may be efficient and productive, they can also signify power and authority. This results in the artifact having political influence on society as a whole. For example, the construction of overpasses was created in order to discourage the buses on parkways. By looking beyond the artifact itself, Moses’ ideologies are inherently political in the construction of these overpasses. Moses built the overpass based on his class bias and racial prejudice. He did this in order to allow the upper classes of society to use the parkways while the lower classes would be kept off of the roads because they normally required public transit in order to get to work. While this is looking at an object, if we were to assess technological innovations as objects in historical studies, then we would see the underlying influence that politics has in the scholarly field of history. The introduction of new technologies have become integrated within our lives and the educational system. The problem however is that these new technologies influence us all as students and professionals, but are deemed unscholarly or unprofessional. What I have learned throughout writing such blog posts is the fact that due to the rise of technology within the educational system, we must integrate the technology with history and work together rather than single out one or the other.

WordPress Blog Response to Gianpiero on Theibault’s Essay

Response to Gianpiero

I agree with you in the sense that individuals can find information more practical and relevant when they can understand it. I argued a similar point here because understanding historical information can be quite difficult. The more tools that we as historians have to interpret the past provides us with a better method of understanding the past as a whole. Visualizations can provide further insight in historical analysis. They not only allow for the individual to analyze and interpret the image in itself, but they also allow the individual to give further insight and relate the written historical information to the image.

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Part 5: See What I Mean? Visual, Spatial, and Game-based History

I found John Theibault’s essay quite interesting regarding visual history. While writing is the preferred method of scholarly works, a picture should also be regarded as scholarly depending on the context of the image. The problem that many scholars have with this notion is the fact that anyone can view the image and interpret it differently. As a result, there is a distinction between experts and the average person making an interpretation on the same image. While there may be a distinction between the various interpretations, these interpretations should not be left without regard. By allowing individuals the ability to interpret history, whether it is in writing or in visualization, history should be open to all. Traditionally the primary visualization tools included maps, timelines, and genealogical charts. Now, as we have progressed into the digital age, we have gained more access to tools that can aid visualization. An example of this would include our digital media project. Not only are we looking at various things, such as images and maps, we are assessing the history behind these visuals. As a student I find that visualizations are quite helpful when learning. By including images, one can connect the words on the pages with the images they are seeing. As for the digital media project, we can connect the images and maps with the specific time periods that we selected and dive into historical information. As a result, this allows us to see an alternative method to historical study, by implementing visualizations along with traditional written textual evidence.

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Part 6: Pubic History on the Web: If You Build It, Will They Come?

These articles demonstrate how digital history is public. This means that digital history is open to everyone, not just a selected set of individuals who study history. These articles are all similar in the sense that if a digital database is created, they demonstrate that this will ultimately attract people to visit, comment, and engage in digital history as a whole. The articles point out that these mediums for displaying history reach a vast majority of people, which creates a sense of public history. This means that history is not reserved for a certain set of individuals who are studying history, but rather for everyone to enjoy and engage in the history itself. The Seattle Civil Rights Project, outlined in the first article, is the perfect example of this feeling of engagement among the public. Through this project, they were able to have meetings with people of Latin origin and find information that was not easily accessible to everyone. Once they found these materials on rural and urban narratives on Latin culture that was not found in history textbooks, they opted to make it accessible for everyone who was curious or interested about the subject. This was also seen as the best method to preserve this information, by publishing it online. I found the first article particularly interesting because I was able to relate it to the “Mapping of Digital Harlem”. Through the use of these online databases, we are able to find information that we may have otherwise not bothered to research. As a result, we can now gain a further understanding of the history itself and are able to grasp further knowledge in these areas of study. In this case, Seattle was the focal point that looked at social and political mobilization within the Latin community. This is much like Digital Harlem because we are able to track down these movements and understand why such movements occurred.

WordPress Blog 5 Response to jdegraveblog

My comment was awaiting moderation so i posted it as a blog post

Comment (jdegraveblog)

I found your blog interesting in how you distinguished between virtual gaming and history. While there are more scholarly ways to present history to students, virtual gaming can ultimately help integrate the student into the history itself. The game allows the student to assess the history of the 19^th Century and gives them an understanding of how life was like during this time period. Such games can also engage the student because as you mentioned, it can be seen as a fun way to integrate students into history and actually get involved in their studies. While games may not be seen as an ideal method for teaching history students, it can offer a much broader aspect and engage students who are living in a digital world. Much of our understanding of history has changed as the development of new technology has emerged, and it should be used to its full potential by giving students an education while also enjoying what they are doing.

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Pox and the City (Zucconi, Watrall, Ueno, & Rosner)

This article analyzes how the use of online gaming helps recreate history. The Pox and the City allows individuals to explore nineteenth-century Edinburgh from a historical perspective. This online interactive game allows individuals to look at disease and the medical history during this time. I found the construction of the game quite interesting considering how the manufacturers of the game were all scholars with specific specialties in the historical field. This type of game allows individuals not only to explore the past in a chronological order, such as reading through a variety of sources, rather, it allows the individual to choose their own path when playing the game. The individual is in control of their fate within the game, meaning that anything that you choose could dictate your next move within the game. This creates a sense of being part of a historical virtual reality. It gives individuals a sense of what it meant to be apart of nineteenth-century Edinburgh. The open-ended gameplay allows for an endless amount of possibilities. I think that this style of game engages the players much more than any other type of game because it allows the player to critically assess their situations and surroundings within the game. By doing so, the player is able to make a valid decision based upon their current situations in order to reach the next stage in the game. While some decisions may not be the best, this approach is trial and error and will educate the player on their mistakes and educate them in areas where they can change their style of play.

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Informal Writing, Blogging & the Academy (Cummings & Jarrett)

The traditional forms of writing have changed drastically, since the late twentieth century. According to Cummings and Jarrett’s essay, this led to a growth of media influence on individuals, which in turn allowed people to express themselves informally through various blogs, such as WordPress, Wikipedia, and websites. Historians are often observant on the use of digitized sources as academic. While it may seem that informal writings occur online, scholarly-based sources are also distributed in the online world. While informal writing is not deemed with much importance in the scholarly world, it can be seen as an advantage because these blogs allow individuals to express their ideologies. These forms allow for wider ranges of audiences. Blog posts are representative of our modern world. A blog, while it may not be considered academic, creates a purpose for the bloggers. Bloggers have the pressures to write regularly, meet their posting deadlines, and demonstrate their work to those involved in the blog. This is pretty much what we are doing in this class through our WordPress blog posts. We engage in interesting discussions about the readings on a weekly basis, we meet our Sunday night deadlines, and comment on each other’s blog posts to create an interesting discussion for the following class. Blogs such as this, encourage writing on a variety of topics in a variety of ways. Online blog posts can motivate individuals to practice and strengthen their writing skills. Not only will this form of writing engage individuals to write, it will demonstrate that there are multiple ways of expressing oneself through written text.

Francesco Collura WordPress Blog 3

 The Wisdom of Crowds (Madsen-Brooks, Graham, Saxton)

After reading Madsen-Brooks, Graham, and Saxton’s articles I found interesting parallels between the study of public history and the problems that it entails. While public history may reach a wider audience, it only offers a broad sense of understanding history. This is evident in Madsen-Brooks’ article “I nevertheless am a historian,” through his use of the “black Confederate soldier”. As seen with the release of the film Glory, the wider audience assumed that there were black Confederate soldiers in the American Civil War because they were shown throughout the film. As a result, the term began to become mainstream after the release of the film. While in fact this term may not be historically accurate in truth, it was believed to be a historical fact because the wider audience viewing the film believed it to be true. While historians may have viewed the film, they were certainly the minority in the sense that the general audience who viewed the film spread this terminology into history without attempting to dig deeper into historical analysis and find that some of this information may have been altered for the purpose of the film. In order to educate the public on historical issues that may arise, digital history offers more opportunities to understand history. While search engines such as Wikipedia may offer factual information regarding a historical event, it is not scholarly because anyone can edit a page and input information about such an event. It is up to the historian to conduct further research on such matters. I found that what is most important after assessing these articles is that the public should be aware of the differences between academic and non-academic work in order to make a general consensus on a historical fact.

HIS 500 Francesco Collura WordPress Blog 2

Putting Harlem on the Map (Robertson)

In analyzing Stephan Robertson’s “Putting Harlem on the Map,” I found it interesting how Robertson’s thesis relates to that of Stefan Tanaka’s “Pasts in a Digital Age,” in the sense that we now have a more meaningful concept of history. In this case, Harlem has no longer been studied through a series of chronological orders; rather it is evident that the study of Harlem, through Robertson’s article, takes us through a much more modern approach to the study of history and the use of digital media. Robertson points out that in order to conduct this research, he needed to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS). To the historian studying Harlem in the linear approach, it is evident that such tools would provide insufficient information, with the use of addresses of buildings and events unimportant. To the historian using digital media, the study of history opens up more opportunities in studying the past. We are now able to look beyond the traditional systems and can dig deeper into finding the historical information behind Harlem and the movement of people in Harlem. Systems such as GIS have allowed historians to process through the information that was once missing in the linear historical method of research. By doing so, the historian is now able to go through information and process what is valuable and what is unimportant to their study. Robertson points out the perfect example of this when he describes the Harlemites relocating. While it may not sound important, we can see that when these residents moved, they only moved a few blocks away, still living in Harlem in order to continue their social relationships. As we can see, the use of such tools allows historians to get a greater grip of understanding the past.

HIS 500 Francesco Collura WordPress Blog Post

Re-Visioning Historical Writing (Dorn and Tanake)

While reading the two essays constructed by Dorn and Tanake on “Re-Visioning Historical Writing,” I found it interesting how both scholars described how digital media is effecting the ways in which younger generations of students study history. Dorn demonstrates this by explaining the vast array in which digital history projects have helped aid historical research. Some examples that he describes include Hypercities and the Papers of George Washington. These projects were intended to have multiple interactions among scholars. In my opinion, I believe that these digital media projects are helpful to the study of history because these sources allow for multiple scholars interpretations rather than a single bias representation that we would find in a book or journal article written by a single author. Tanaka on the other hand describes the computer as an aid to historical practice because digital media/tools allows us to transform history as a whole. Basically this means we can conduct research in a much faster and effective way. Tanaka then goes on to explain how such tools help the study of history as a whole through the ability to enhance communication and collaboration between scholars working on digital media projects. While most historical scholars disagree with collaborating with one another in order to achieve an end result, based on the information that Dorn and Tanaka have provided, I find that digital media projects can help produce a greater understanding of the past through the elimination of a single bias created by an individual versus an entire group collaboration.