Counting Down the Days

On Wednesday of this week we had the dress rehearsal of our project launch in front of a small group of faculty members who are very excited about our work. This was especially exciting for all of us because this is the first time we have really shown our projects to a group of people how are not directly involved in our process. While our projects are not finished, having the opportunity to do something which resembles what our presentation will be like and then receive feedback from the same audience was incredible. Being able to speak with the audience members and have them ask questions about the work we have done and hearing not only their opinions but also their stories which connect them to our work was very special. The whole event truly drove home how cool the work we have been doing is and how it will have a greater impact on the Ursinus community as a whole than just our class.

During the presentation itself, I feel I should be more critical of myself so I am able to improve for the upcoming launch. Personally I feel I could have and should have been more prepared to speak eloquently about my share of the project. I feel as though I went up there with limited structure and knowing just the guidelines of what I wanted to talk about. For the launch next week, my part will be much smoother, more detailed, and more eloquent. That being said, I could not be more proud of the rest of my team. My critiques of myself aside, I  think we were able to get present what our project is and what it will look like rather well and I’m excited more than ever now to see the final product.

There are two interactions from Wednesday which stick out rather prominently in my mind. The first woman who came to our table, regrettably I can’t remember her name for sure, I believe it was Mrs. Hubbs, asked if we had found anything about a man named Bill Heefner. We told her that we were familiar with the name but never came across anything very specific. She then told us she was curious because she had heard stories about how Bill Heefner went into Bomberger and  began playing the organ once news of Pearl Harbor had reached campus. I was rather disappointed I couldn’t confirm her story for her. The second interaction was with Dr. Clark. Jon Kishpaugh, my partner in researching Pearl Harbor for this project, was discussing how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be our generation’s version of the Vietnam War. Dr. Clark seemed to be on board with this idea for a split second then brought up a possibly argument breaking counter point. The draft was never used for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dr. Clark said you could ask anyone who was in the draft lottery for Vietnam what their number was and they would remember it immediately and that is an experience no one who went to the Middle East had to go through. While this conversation was more of a tangent than anything relating to our project, this stuck out to me because it brought about new stories and let us learn more about one of our professors and who he is as a person.

-Liam

Teams, Goals, and Reaching Out

This past Wednesday, we had a woman named Kelly Becker come meet our class for lunch. Kelly received her Undergraduate degree in history from Ursinus a few years ago and after earning her Masters degree in organizational management from Misericoridia University, she started working at Under Armour. Part of her job at Under Armour is hearing pitches from various entrepreneurs and inventors and being a liaison for them to reach Executives at Under Armour.

For about an hour we spoke about the importance of teamwork, knowing your goals, and networking. Kelly stressed the importance of teamwork during our time together. While that might sound like trivial advice, it really is quite important. Teamwork and communication between all team members saves everyone huge amounts of frustration and can make the project turn from being a headache to an enjoyable experience. To go along with that, having a team that knows the goals of the project and the personal goals of each person on the team is important. On our team, everyone has different roles and different goals while the overall goal is to have everything tie together and turn into a full and complete project. Knowing everyone’s goals will reduce the amount of repetitive work we could potentially do. That isn’t to say we can’t or shouldn’t ask for help though. While we may have different goals, we are all part of the same team and having the ability and openness to reach out and help each other can be the difference between a good and a bad end product. Kelly also shared with us how she met the woman that hired her and the importance of that first step to making a connection. As I’m sure many people have experienced, it is easy to say that reaching out your hand and introducing yourself to someone is easy but in reality it can actually be very nerve wracking. This is a basic component of professional life though. Everyone is forced to make connections and network at some point that being said, however stressful or nerve wracking a situation may be, the potential results of that relationship could be extraordinary for both parties. Some of the most honest and real advice I’ve come across in a movie is from the 2011 film, We Bought a Zoo. In it, Matt Damon’s character says to his son, who is having some girl troubles, “You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of embarrassing bravery and I promise you something great will come of it.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmMFIganRQY) Now, while professional networking isn’t exactly the same situation his son wanted advice for, it is still applicable. In fact, this is something I think about whenever I get nervous about a situation because I know taking that first step is always the hardest and after those twenty seconds, you find your groove and everything gets easier.

-Liam

And So It Begins

Our research projects have now officially begun. After multiple class sessions, we managed to separate the class into groups so that we could tackle three different projects. Jon, David, Tiffini, and I will be researching Ursinus’s reaction and response to two different national tragedies, Pearl Harbor and September 11th. Even though it’s a serious subject, I’m excited to be in the project that I am. I think a subject such as this can lead to some incredibly interesting sources and become a fascinating display of Ursinus history. Our group has decided to subdivide our group farther so that Jon and I will be tackling Ursinus’s reaction and response to Pearl Harbor while David and Tiffini will be doing the same for September 11th. So far I think it has been going very well. Last class we spent time setting up an online presence for our project so that we will be able to more effectively market our project and show off our progression along the way. Ideally I would like to start making use of our Facebook page this weekend and begin reaching out to different local historical societies that may be interested (I’d put the link for our page here now but there are some finishing touches we still want to add and because of that it is currently unpublished. I’ll come back and edit the link in tomorrow!).

As for how I’m doing with my responsibilities, I feel very lucky so far, I’m not having any issues finding sources, in fact it’s quite the opposite. If I continue to find the amount of sources I currently am, I will be forced to tighten my definition of reaction and response or else I will be overwhelmed moving forward. It not only be too much to analyze but also too much to digitize. The sources I have been handling so far have been Weeklies and once I am done with those, I will move on to 1941 Ruby. It has been fascinating looking at these Weeklies and how everything unfolded in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor. While what was left unpublished could have been very different, the Weeklies paint a picture of a delayed reaction – almost as if the campus was in shock of what happened. There are a handful of various articles about the war in the 1941 Weeklies but even fewer regarding the attack at Pearl Harbor. It took until the beginning of 1942, when students were returning to campus after winter break that we see a sizable increase in interest regarding the war and more articles published regarding it.

-Liam

Wartime Sacrifices Back Home

Instead of answering the actual prompt for today, “Describe an object you encountered in the archives. What questions does it raise?” I’d like to take a little gamble and switch the wording around a little so it reads, “Describe an object you didn’t encounter in the archives. What question does it raise?” I want to switch the prompt around a bit because during my time in the archives, I was intrigued by the lack of a 1919 Ruby. There is a 1918 Ruby and a 1920 Ruby, so for what reason would class of 1919 not produce a Ruby? Right off the bat, I figured it must have something to do with World War 1 but for that to be true, the war would still have to be raging in 1919. However, the Allied victory came on November 11th, 1918 so what could have happened? The working hypothesis I have currently is that it was indeed the war which hindered the class of 1919’s production of the Ruby. More specifically, I think the Ruby was traditionally produced, if not published, during the first semester which means at that time, the class of 1919 was still seeing the carnage of World War 1. If the United States was prioritizing making sure supplies reached the front lines and helping the war effort, it would make sense that schools would reduce the amount of paper they consumed as well. While I am still working on finding concrete evidence of this, I have a hard time believing a graduating Ursinus class would simply decide to not produce a Ruby. On top of that, the class of 1920 dedicates their Ruby to the class of 1919. While that is a far stretch to be considered evidence, it makes me think that the class of 1919’s decision was not just on a whim and that there was a real and important reason for them to not produce a Ruby. Like I said though, this is all just part of a working hypothesis and I will need to spend more time in the archives to get an answer.

The class of 1920’s dedication of their Ruby to the class of 1919.

For any more answers to these questions, I believe I will have to take a closer look at the school newspapers published during the fall semester of 1919. However, the newspaper could also end up becoming a counterargument to my claim. If paper was in short enough supply for the 1919 class to not produce a Ruby, shouldn’t that also mean there would be an impact on the newspaper somehow? Whether it be either it’s length or frequency? To reference my last blog post, this is part of what makes the archives feel so overwhelming. For every piece of information I come across, another handful of questions come with it. I suppose that’s just the nature of research though. By taking this project one step at a time, I feel confident in my ability to find the answers I’m looking for.

-Liam

Archives and Moving Forward

Oh man, the archives. Physically, they are pretty much what I expected but the amount of information in there has been near overwhelming for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed the couple hours I’ve spent in there so far but there is just so much to look at. I feel I need to force myself to stay within the frames of a single subject or else I’m just going to get lost as I follow interesting tangent after interesting tangent. Now, if I was super confident in the subject and question I wanted to look at, this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but I’m not. And if anything, being in the archives have only made me more certain that I don’t know what I want my project to be about yet.

So far I have been reading both the Ruby’s and the Grizzly’s from World War One and World War Two. I came into the archives at the beginning of this week looking to explore the school’s responses and engagement during different conflicts and I figured I’d start with the major two of the twentieth century. I have come across so much interesting material so far which range from material on the V-12’s which stayed on campus to articles mourning the first Ursinus student to be a casualty in World War Two to why there is no 1919 Ruby (it was due to a paper shortage during World War One, by the way). Even with all the material I’m finding already, I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of what is there and the stories surrounding them all. That being said, I feel like I’m limiting myself on what I’m looking at in the archives due to the fact I’m feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information in there. I’m worried I’ve latched onto the first idea that piqued my interest and am just running with it even though there could be projects better suited and more interesting to me. This all falls to me though. It’ll be my fault if I get stuck in a project I’m not super stoked about. For my own personal homework assignment, I need to take some time, now that I have a much clearer handle on what is actually in the archives, and seriously think about what topics I want to research for this project, what my goals for it should/could be, and what questions do I want to answer.

From where I’m sitting now, I think this class could easily cause the most amount of work for me during the rest of the semester but at the same time I’m still excited for it. If I find a topic I’m truly happy with, there will still be an element of fun too all the work and hopefully that won’t make it feel quite as stressful as it could be.

-Liam

From UC to UPenn

Late Friday morning, our class piled into two vans driven by Dr. Throop and Dr. McShane and we began our journey into Philadelphia to visit the University of Pennsylvania’s Digital Humanities Center. Our first leg of the journey consisted of getting to the Norristown train station where we boarded a commuter rail into Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. A short walk and numerous head counts later, we arrived and were promptly seating at the White Dog Cafe, a favorite of our professors, where we enjoyed a delicious lunch. After lunch, we walked into the University of Pennsylvania’s gorgeous campus and into an even more gorgeous library. Within moments, we were greeted by the smiling face of Dot Porter. Mrs. Porter’s official title at UPenn is the Curator of Digital Research Services and she was the one we would be meeting with.

After a slight technical glitch, Mrs. Porter began her presentation where she discussed her job, methods of going about it and the programs she and the University utilize to present their work. She also discussed some of the issues she comes across when digitizing sources. The issue which she brought up that stuck with me the most was that the viewer has no visual sense of scale. To show this, she opened up a page on her browser to a scanned version of a 14th century prayer book and then pulled out the artifact itself. On the screen, it was impossible to guess the size of it when in reality it was this short and fat little book which someone would have kept in their pocket so they could have quick access to it. I, and it seemed like the whole class, was almost shocked by the actual size of it. Another issue Mrs. Porter discussed was that when digitizing an artifact you lose the physical and tactile experience of examining it. There is usually a reason why an artifact is presented on a certain platform and getting these artifacts online, it can be hard to replicate that feeling. To show this, Mrs. Porter, with the help of a colleague, unfurled a thirty-something foot scroll which supposedly traces King Edward of England’s lineage back through all the other kings of England all the way to Adam. Everyone in the room was fascinated by this artifact and it is the one which has stuck with me the most. It was incredible watching that scroll get unfolded. The scroll was the final piece of Mrs. Porter’s presentation for us so then she led us to a physical exhibit which she had curated for the University. I thought it was very interesting seeing how someone curated an online space and then being able to see how they curated a physical space. It has given me plenty to think about in regards for how I want my information to look when it is presented online and what might be the most effective way to do it.

Being able to go on a trip like this was absolutely incredible and my sincere thanks go out to Mrs. Porter for taking the time out of her day to talk to our class about what she does. My thanks also go out to our two professors, Dr. Throop and Dr. McShane for organizing an amazing experience.

-Liam

First Month Check-up

Classes began roughly five weeks ago for our new semester and for our Bears Make History class. Thus far we have been introduced to numerous tools to allow us a variety of ways to present our projects and we have discussed, analyzed, and learned how to foster and maintain not only a professional online image, but also one we can be proud of.

Looking back on these past five weeks, the word that comes to mind is fun. The work I have had to do outside of this class and the time we have spent in class have been fun. I’d even say the fact that this process is new to the professors adds to the feeling as well. The feeling that the work we are doing is the work of one cohesive group instead of work done by students and work done by teachers is unique. I haven’t had another class come close to something like that.

Looking ahead to the rest of the semester, all I can say is that I am excited. I am looking forward to getting into the archives and truly beginning our projects. I’m excited to find a topic and begin researching it, I’m excited to experiment with which way (hopefully ways) our information can best be presented in a digital format, and I’m excited to be working on a project which will be seen by more than just me and my professor. How I’m imagining the next few weeks will go is that we will form our groups and then be diving into the archives to find our topic and begin researching it. The other way I could see it going is that we go into the archives and begin looking around for topics which interest us and then make our groups based on that. However, I feel that leaves too wide an opening and that people will find interests which aren’t strongly connected to others and will be forced to abandon that idea so that they make it into a group. The weeks which follow that, I assume will be spent waist-deep in the archives not only finding sources and researching, but also determining how we want to present our information and determining which medium and tone would be best for our work.

My hope for the rest of the semester is that it will be just as much fun as these first five weeks. Sure, the workload will most likely increase. Exponentially, perhaps. But if everyone can land in a project they enjoy then hopefully the amount of work we have to do won’t feel that bad. I’ve had high hopes for this class ever since Dr. Throop introduced it last semester and those feelings have been maintained. As far as I can tell, those same feelings will easily make it to the end of the semester and I couldn’t be happier about it.

-Liam

Mapping History

Wednesday in class we looked at a program called Timemapper. Timemapper, as you may be able to guess from the name, is a way to present ones research in a way that highlights the time difference between sources and their location geographically. For Wednesday’s class, we were asked to look at some of the models provided for us on Timemapper’s home page. One of the more popular options was the one which discussed the major battles of the Napoleonic Wars. Our class found this to be an interesting model to have on the homepage and show off though because there was no written data in it. I think we reached a consensus that the most likely explanation is that there was a glitch on the site but nonetheless, the map and the markers were able to show off some intriguing information just by themselves. When being critical of the site, it is impossible not to take this glitch into account yet it’s a weird gray area that we have rather little control over. As creators, we’d never want to see our written work vanish from a project but there isn’t much we could do aside from either trying to redo it or contacting Timemapper.

Above, is a screenshot of the Timemapper project titled, Major Battles in the Napoleonic Wars by user rufuspollock. As you can see, the entire left side of the screen is blank. It serves no useful purpose for this project right now. The right side however, serves an incredibly large purpose. So, right off the bat, viewers can make some assumptions and generate some questions. When I first looked at this, I had assumed that the orange dots were the locations of these major battles and that the varying sizes of them represented the size of the combined forces at each battle. It was brought up in class that the size of the dots could also refer to the casualties in each battle and honestly, I like that explanation a little more. The first question I had was, what are those blue markers doing there? When you click on one, it will provide you with the name of a battle. The blue marker on the southern edge of Spain for example, when clicked, shows a little bubbled with “Battle of Trafalgar” in it. I couldn’t figure out why the author had decided on a blue marker for these three as opposed to the orange circle like the rest of them. Then in class, someone actually looked up the battles on the blue markers and discovered they were naval engagements. Knowing that, the maps makes so much more sense.

The reason why I decided to talk about this half broken project for this blog post is exactly for that reason. It only has half of the information there and it is still incredibly informative. The tools Timemapper provides to customize markers only adds to the viewers ability to distinguish events. If every battle had been marked with an equally sized orange dot, there would be a lot less to gain from this project. I’ve always heard that a picture is worth a thousand words and this program continues to prove that phrase true. Was that a corny enough ending? Great, I think so too.

-Liam

Oh Boy, Omeka

Over the past week, we have spent a lot of time discussing the online tool Omeka (https://www.omeka.net/). Omeka is a tool that allows scholars to present our digital humanities work in an easy and professional way. A fellow student of ours at Ursinus, Sarah Gow, came into class Wednesday and showed us her Summer Fellow’s project on Mabel Dodge which used Omeka. I had tried messing around in Omeka beforehand without making much progress but after seeing Sarah’s project, it became quite clear that Omeka is a powerful tool to not only host one’s work and research but also as a way to present it. Honestly, I’ve been having a difficult time figuring out how Omeka works and being able to use it well. I think this is partly because I was unable to attend Monday’s class where we received a more formal introduction to Omeka. I’m hoping that through more exposure and experience with it, I’ll start getting a better grip on how to use it. Seeing Sarah’s project was encouraging but it was also quite motivating. I find myself looking more and more forward to actually starting our projects and I can’t wait to see how we end up implementing Omeka and whatever other tools into our work. If anyone wants to see a great example of a project hosted on Omeka or just wants to learn more about Mabel Dodge, I implore you to check our Sarah’s project here!

One of the points we discussed in Wednesday’s class that has stuck with me is the idea of breaking our research and writing up into small chunks for each artifact. Something I have been thinking about as we get closer to beginning our own projects is where we should be drawing the line and knowing when enough is enough. Obviously the answer will partly be determined by what the subject of the project is in the first place but it was nice to see that the whole class seemed to agree with Sarah’s idea of only writing up to two pages per artifact. I was worried about getting sucked into the black hole of trying to figure out how events are connected and it spiraling out of control until most of the time spent working is just trying to determine when the time frame for the project should start instead of making a more efficient use of the time. Keeping our writings to two pages or at least putting some limit on it, seems like manageable way to keep our projects on point and stop us (or maybe just me) from spiraling out of control and into areas outside the project.

-Liam

Thoughts on Voyant

As a relatively young medium, Digital Humanities is filled with areas that can feel cumbersome or even inaccessible if you’re trying to do everything by yourself. This week in class we have been discussing tools which can make our work in Digital Humanities easier. The first of which, and honestly one I think could be the most useful, is called Voyant (http://voyant-tools.org/). Voyant is an incredibly powerful tool to help with online text analysis and it displays the information in several different ways. It allows you to see your most used words, the context they were used in and where in the document they were used. Being able to analyze a webpage like this allows one to more easily decipher the messages and main points of a site. Below, I have put up a screenshot of what Ursinus College’s homepage looks like after being analyzed by Voyant so if you haven’t had the opportunity to check out Voyant for yourself, you can get a feel for what it looks like. One thing I would recommend watching out for however, Voyant cannot find words located in a video or picture file. So if one tries to analyze a picture or video heavy website, the results may not necessarily be a true representation of the site.

A very cool feature of Voyant, and something I haven’t seen before online, is that it is able to read and analyze PDF files as well. So naturally, when playing around with the program and learning about how it all works, I decided to try and test its limits. To do this I first had to rack my brain to come up with the longest book I could think of. I ended up settling on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Next, I did some Google magic and found a PDF version of the book and dropped it into Voyant. Now, I wish I could tell you that I got some interesting results back but after letting it run on my laptop for the better part of the day, Voyant wasn’t giving me anything in return. To its credit though, Voyant never technically crashed on me, it just sat there, telling me it was fetching my corpus. Due to it not crashing, I assume it was still working but I had things I needed to get done so I decided to stop the process. I learned my lesson though, large files will take their sweet time going through the system. Depending what ones project is, saving time for it to process the information would not only be imperative but make the difference between getting something done on time or not.

-Liam