images
Jeff McClurken’s Adventure’s in Digital History seminar is (or is it “was” now?) a pretty amazing thing. The driving logic of the course was that four distinct projects, each dealing with a unique facet of local history, were be framed for the world-at-large as online digital resources. This is a quite ambitious goal, and as the class finished up today I think most would agree it did far more than meet expectations. I saw two of the groups present their projects last Friday, and all four groups presented their work today (or is it now yesterday, which I unfortunately missed). The projects, in no particular order, are as follows:
- The James Farmer Project This group focused on the life and achievements of James Farmer, Civil Rights Activist and late Professor at the University of Mary Washington. They capture this larger than life historical figure through quotations, video, an extensive biography, and countless photographs.
- The James Monroe’s Papers: Both a site for the James Monroe papers housed at UMW as well as a focused site on Monroe’s letters while an ambassador in France during the 1790s.
- The UMW Alumni Project: This group interviewed various alumni of the University of Mary Washington. They produced a site where other alumni can also add your own biography. They also created an extensive time line of the school’s history to commemorate UMW’s centennial year (1908-2008).
- The Historical Markers Project: This group created a functional website containing the Fredericksburg City, Stafford County, and Spotsylvania County Historical Highway Markers of Virginia. For each marker, they provided extensive research and further reference material for seventy different markers.
Take a look at each of them, for they collectively represent a valuable contribution to historical resources online. What’s more, each of these sites are Google-friendly, free, and open to the public, as knowledge subsidized by the public should be. And finally, to seal the deal, they even have Creative Commons licenses! It’s a model for future courses that want to use the web as a place to create and share a series of long-standing historical resources.
I was at Richmond for the bulk of this course and the rest of DTLT did all the heavy lifting, yet I was lucky enough upon my return to sit down with Shannon and think about making WordPress Multi-User bend to the imagined site design of the Historical Markers project. The group had to research and present 70 markers within Fredericksburg, Stafford, and Spotsylvania counties. Each marker had an extended resource framer a broader context for its historical significance. This is remarkable because the few sites that deal with historical markers in Virginia that are online only reproduce the marker text, failing to give any larger frame of its history. This group filled that void by remaining keenly focused on the extended history, buttressed by a bibliography for further reading. It’s an invaluable resource, and this group put a tremendous amount of labor into amassing the sources for each of the markers.
Thinking about the site architecture with Shannon was a lot of fun. The guiding question was as follows: “How do you get enable visitors to easily browse, search, and find markers within a puny “blogging” platform like Wordpress?” This was further complicated by the fact that the search function on WordPress displays keyword searches chronologically. For example, if you search for a common term you’ll get numerous results but it won’t sort for relevance by that term based on it’s place in a post title or its recurrence, but rather chronologically. For example, when searching “George Washington” the first five search results make only passing reference to him, while the sixth item is a marker dedicated to his childhood home. The logic of this search is determined by how recently the post was published rather than its relevance to George Washington. So, we were further restricted by an inadequate search engine, so what to do?
Well, we came up with three simple things: First, categorize each of the markers by county, by century, and by common topics and have these on the sidebar for quick browsing. Second, use tags to keep track of keywords and then use the Simple Tags plugin to create an alphabetical index of terms in the form of a tag cloud as well as integrate a related post feature for each post. Third, create a page where all the markers are listed by county, each of which has a link to the post for that marker. This worked in large part because there are a finite number of posts. Nonetheless, I think it manages the task at hand well, and does a nice job of getting to any marker on the site in two clicks, much like a search.
And as I often do, I tried to push Shannon into including all the historical marker images as well as the geo-tagged google maps locations of the 70 markers. All of which, by the way, is freely available on the Virginia Department of Historical Resources site (a good sign when a gov’t agency is geo-tagging all its markers with Google Maps, then making that info freely available along with high resolution images). But Shannon was smart for she understood that the key to this project was not the bells and whistles, which while potentially useful, would only detract from the core mission of this site: the research, extended bibliography and discoverability —all of which was accomplished brilliantly. Bravo!
Another gem from my Ubuweb video feed.
Just found this series of audio files that feature David Cronenberg curating an Andy Warhol exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto back in 2006. Here’s a nice quote from Cronenberg about Warhol’s influence on his own work:
Andy was making underground films when I was making underground films,…And I was more inspired by him than by Hollywood. He created himself: He was an outsider, a Slovakian, Catholic, gay, an artist, poor; an outsider in his own family, a triple outsider like Kafka, with his nose pressed against the New York window. And, he became the ultimate insider, the center of his own world, and drew people to him. He became a huge example of the invention of an identity.
I love how Cronenberg relates Warhol to Franz Kafka, at first seemingly impossible but in fact utterly brilliant and deeply resonant. The audio files are not too long (no more than two minutes a piece), and the provide not only insight to Warhol’s work, but also suggest just how much of Cronenberg’s themes and obsessions might be premised in the violence, sexuality, and experimentation of an artist/filmmaker like Warhol.
I particularly like the clip “Underground Filmmaking in the 60s,” which provides a discussion of the difficulty of sound in experimental filmmaking. What’s more, is that Cronenberg touches on an idea I have heard before about Warhol: he had his own “silent era.” What is meant by this is that Warhol own film career, marked in the beginning by the challenge of incorporating sound into his early underground films, can be seen as a mini-history of film. The silent era, the talkies, then a move later o to color etc. The very limitations of underground filmmaking re-enacted in a far shorter time period a kind of technical history of cinema in miniature.
Here it is, also enjoy the way Cronenberg understands the importance of presence in a theater, something we have lost a bit.
Download David Cronenberg - Underground Filmmaking in the 60s
If you liked that, the discussion of the Warhol triptych featuring Kiss (1963), Silver Disaster #6 (1963), & Blow Job (1964), may suggest some of Warhol’s influence on Cronenberg’s continued filmic fascination with sex, sadomasochism, and violence in his own films, a topic discussed recently on the bava here. You have to love quotes like, “I have no doubt that Andy understood that sadomasochistic part of formal state execution.” Add to that Blow Job, and how could you not listen? (As an aside: I imagine the triptych featured stills from his films Kiss and Blow Job, which served as bookends for the print of Silver Disaster #6, but this is pure speculation. Anyone have a better sense of this?)
Download David Cronenberg - Kiss, 1963 - Silver Disaster #6, 1963 - Blow Job, early 1964
Well, I’m not actually sure this blog title is entirely true, and that’s why I can freely publish it here. I found this 1887 baseball card on Shorpy’s Photo blog. It features the likeness of Chicago White Stockings first baseman Adrian C. Anson (also known as Cap Anson).
An early baseball card like this is in and of itself interesting to me, but it is far more amazing just how much history a seemingly inert object contains when coupled with a fascinating comment thread like the one following this image. You can find the comment thread here, and I will encapsulate what I learned from it below:
- Cap Anson was “(common for the era, even in his native Iowa) a bigot. His racial attitudes were stronger than most, however, and he led efforts to exclude blacks from professional baseball.”
- Which is followed by this fascinating bit: “Jackie Robinson was NOT the first black to play in the major leagues — both Fleet and Welday Walker played in 1884 before the color barrier limited baseball to the (ahem) melanin-impaired.”
- Lewis Ginter (of the Allen & Ginter’s Cigarette’s company) was a New Yorker who went to Richmond when he was 18 and became an extremely wealthy and powerful industrialist. Here’s a look at his profile from a user’s comment:
Ginter amassed a great fortune in the tobacco industry via new technology for rolling cigarettes. He used this massive fortune to act as a philanthropist and for the development of civic and business interests in Richmond. He developed the neighborhood Ginter Park and brought the Union Theological Seminary there. His niece Grace Arents continued his philanthropy, spurring the development of St. Andrew’s School, the Instructional Visiting Nurse Association and the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden at her home Bloemendaal.
Hired on to the John Allen & Co, he became a partner of the Allen and Ginter tobacco company that ushered in a number of innovations including cigarette cards and the use of local Virginia tobacco. In 1890 Ginter’s company joined forces with James B. Duke to form the American Tobacco Co..
- Cap Anson was the first member of the 3,000 hits club, and is currently 7th on the all-time hits leaders. he ended his career broke and in vaudeville (Confession: I learned about his standing on the all-time hits list and his vaudeville career from wikipedia.) There was a controversy surrounding whether or not he should be considered part of the 3,000 hits club given over 400 of his hits were made in the National Association, which some believed could not be considered a major league (see the wikipedia article here for more on this).
- Last, but certainly not least:
I don’t know how commonly known this is, but this photo illustrates the fact that baseball cards were originally introduced in cigarette packs in order to keep the cigarettes from bending over. When they later started getting popular with kids they were packaged with bubble gum.
Now, I’m gonna have to have the bava-factcheckers go over this list to make sure all these points are 100% accurate and absolutely airtight, so until they give the thumbs-up I just wanted to reflect just how amazing it is to see a 120 year old baseball card take on so many rich social, material, biographical, and political inflections. The comment matrix of other people brings this cultural artifact to life. Informal learning at its best and, as usual, it is spurred on by curiosity, connections, and serendipity, not the desire to “get educated,” so to speak.
Related posts on bavatuesdays
Image found on the Library of Congress site here, very Star Warsy in my opinion
This news is making the rounds, but it is really cool to see 3,000 Library of Congress images on Flickr. The logic by which they are approaching this project is similar to the UMW Centennial images we have made available on Flickr (read the post about this project here).
And while our collection is far more modest, it is nice to know, as Jerry notes, that “we guessed right.”
Related posts on bavatuesdays
I just posted an image from the ever-magical Shorpy’s Photo Blog, and when I returned to my RSS reader to continue browsing the images I stumbled a moving photo titled “A Big Kiss for Grandpa” featuring a cool-looking, supine man holding his grand-daughter up in the air.
What you may or may not notice on first glance is the cigarette leaning comfortably against grandfather’s lip. Not particularly strange for 1941 by any account, but the comments that ensue on this post suggest just how caught up we are in out own righteous and historically blinding sense of “progress.” Take, for example, the first comment left by Mr. Mel:
It shows what we didn’t know or think of then. The possibility of burning the child or even worse, the ingestion of secondhand smoke leading to the lung problems of that and succeeding generations. We’ve got the info now, but there’s still plenty of smokers out there.
As you can imagine, a series of comment responses follow about smoking, some defending Grandpa and others attacking him. What drives me crazy is that all these people can remark upon is the cigarette (a rather inconspicuous element of this photo), when the image itself speaks volumes about a intimate moment between two people, two generations. I don’t know why this irks me so, but to see an image that inspires so much that is beautiful be reduced to a sophomoric argument about the dangers of smoking drives me nuts. Our culture is spiraling out of control in all the wrong directions — and if it ain’t the organic hoax or the anti-smoking freaks or fitness frenzy or the touchy-feely child-rearing hippies, it’s the death of Hollywood, iHop, and all that is holy.
Related posts on bavatuesdays
I really like this image…
…of workers in an Insurance Office on the South Side of Chicago in 1941. See the full-size image on Shorpy’s blog here.
Related posts on bavatuesdays
UMW’s centennial is on the Flickr bus!
As 2007 comes to a close, the University of Mary Washington’s centennial year is set to begin. There has been much preparation for the centennial festivities, and the occasion has in many ways helped the university to focus on the importance of a digital memory for the institution more broadly. The Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies has found itself working alongside several other departments (such as the UMW Libraries, Publications, Public relations, and various others) to create a digital archive of images for the centennial celebration, which is now up and running and can be viewed here.
Jerry Slezak astutely managed this project, and he and the rest of the committee are responsible for all the heavy lifting. I just waited patiently as the archive became more and more robust with images and metadata to push for a little Web 2.0 flare.
With the committee’s approval, we are trying a little experiment with a number of the centennial images we have scanned. We have almost 1,000 images in the UMW Digital Archive, which is effectively an extension of the library catalog for digital resources. We are now taking images from this larger collection and making them available on the UMW Centennial Flickr site. Each time we make a new image available to the public on Flickr–which is a regular occurrence–it is blogged through the UMW Centennial Photo blog (proudly powered by the world famous UMW Blogs 
).
Now, one might ask, “Why three times the work? Why put it in a digital archive/catalog, upload it to Flickr, and then blog it?” Fair question, and I would answer in response, “Because it’s an experiment, Hondo.” In fact, it has been a rather quiet experiment that has been going on regularly for almost three months now. Since the middle of October we have been regularly releasing images from the centennial collection to the public on Flickr, then simultaneously blogging it on the UMW Centennial blog. There are now 54 images available to the public and, if all goes well, this daily five-minute tradition will continue throughout the centennial year.
The logic behind utilizing a more sophisticated archive, Flickr, and a blog is that by putting these images on Flickr and subsequently blogging them, they become that much more easily found through search engines like Google. In turn, the Flickr images and the blog posts all link back to the original on the official UMW Archive which enables people to find the originals with all ther pretinent metadata through different avenues.
So, if you are working under the assumption that a large amount of Mary Washington alumni are going to search for information about the centennial on Google and that we want the work that has been done to be prominent, then the Flickr account and the UMW Centennial blog afford this visibility. When doing a search for UMW Centennial on Google both sites show up in the top ten.
And while I am increasingly convinced that is quite important to make the fine work being done at UMW more visible for those interested, the larger reason behind this experiment is to make these images available to alumni so that they can connect with the centennial experience no matter where they are. Whether by commenting on images or even sharing some of their own memories with us through Flickr comments, the blog, or by joining the UMW Centennial Flickr group (which would additionally allow them to share their images with us!), the diasporic lumni of Mary Washington can be a part of the celebration using freely available digital tools.
I’m not sure how this experiment will turn out, but thus far we have over 2,000 views on the UMW Centennial blog alone — and the centennial year hasn’t even started yet. The next year will surely tell whether or not the extra work was justified, but I have to admit that even if it didn’t bear fruit it has really been a ball being able to see so many of these unbelievable photographs.
I mean who knew there was a pool in the basement of Monroe Hall back in the day?
And how could the Raccoon coat worn by a proud member of the Grammar Group in 1931 not fascinate me?
Or a more recent vision of Goth love on campus?
I mean, c’mon, a project like this is unbelievably enjoyable. What’s more fun then spending a few minutes each day trying to imagine what was, while simultaneously wondering what might be?
Related posts on bavatuesdays
One of the things I enjoy about Italy is the graffiti. It is often very entertaining, if not as elaborate as the fine art found on the subway cars in NYC during the 1980s. In fact, graffiti in Italy has a long cultural history dating back to the Ancient Greeks and the Romans. Here is an entertaining bit from wikipedia on the subject:
The Romans carved graffiti on walls and monuments, with examples surviving in Egypt. The eruption of Vesuvius preserved graffiti in Pompeii, including Latin curses, magic spells, declarations of love, alphabets, political slogans and famous literary quotes, providing insight into ancient Roman street life. One inscription gives the address of a woman named Novellia Primigenia of Nuceria, a prostitute, apparently of great beauty, whose services were much in demand. Another shows a phallus accompanied by the text, mansueta tene: “Handle with care.”
So, in honor of this tradition I have captured some more recent inscriptions on the walls of beautiful Trento, Italia. I haven’t seen any anti-US (or should I say anti-Bush — let’s hope the two aren’t so easily conflated) sentiments covering these ancient walls on this trip thus far, which is interesting because that was pretty much all the graffiti there was in 2003, 2004, and 2005. Nonetheless, the few political slogans I have found thus far have been just as much fun…
And my personal favorite…
The above examples represent the more overtly political and far less elaborate forms of grafitti, by far the most common. Interestingly enough, however, a brand new commuter train station in Trento (San Chiara) right below Antonella’s family home has some elaborate, Brooklyn-inspired graffiti that reminds me a bit of home.
I don’t know why I get excited when I see NYC-inspired graffiti accentuating a small, local train station in the Italian Alps. Is it just unchecked nationalism (or is it metropolitanism in this case?), or might it be the strange notion that US popular culture might have some interesting intersections that move beyond (or at least adjacent to) global capital in these dark times.
Related posts on bavatuesdays
