Final Project Progress…

My idea for this project has changed considerably. As I said before, my idea about roadside attractions and the rise of the American family road trip was of far too wide a scope for this project. Instead, I will be using a GIS map that I created for Dr. Petrik (with her permission), which illustrates certain types of employment and levels of disposable income around the country.

Dr. Petrik needed the map for to demonstrate the lasting effects of the Panic of 1893 on the Midwest. My interpretation of the map differs a bit from Dr. Petrik’s in that I am using it to imagine what other types of questions that can be asked or what assumptions can be made from the map. In making this map, I pulled up a list of Apple Stores and Williams-Sonoma Stores, placing points on the map for each store location. I also placed points on the map to represent each location of a General Motors subcontractor and each location of Defense Contracting companies. In locating the Defense Contracting companies, I pulled every fifth company from a list of every contracting company. The stores that I located on the map represent disposable income and the contractors that I located represent major sources of employment.  In addition to this map, I found a map from the NY Times, Geography of a Recession, illustrating unemployment rates across the country. This map is an excellent preliminary example of the ways in which cartography and GIS can be used in the description and interpretation of history and current culture. It is an interactive map that shows unemployment rates across the country with a color scale, and features pop-ups that show the unemployment rates of individual counties as the user hovers their cursor over the counties.

In looking at the two maps, it first becomes apparent that there are corresponding patterns between the two in the area of the Midwest. The empty area in my map corresponds with an area that has the lowest unemployment rates in the country. The fact that there is no representation of the type of disposable income that I mapped in this area, which comprises Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, and that there is very little representation of the employers that I mapped, coupled with relatively extreme rates of unemployment, suggests to me that the economic patterns or habits in this area are different from the rest of the country. These are areas that are well known for their agriculture production. When I look at the two maps, I imagine an economic system that is inclusive locally and exclusive nationally; characteristic of a system that we, who are trapped within the global capitalist discourse, might describe as traditional. It seems that the areas that I am discussing here must have avoided the incursion of national trends and disaster by maintaining a local community. I imagine that there are probably many more community stores than have been able to survive in the rest of the country. It seems that the people that live in these areas must spend their money at stores like this, that we would call “Mom and Pop Stores,” and that possibly these stores obtain the goods that they sell from within the community. Through this system, money almost wholly circulates locally, keeping profits within the community.

I will have more about this tomorrow night, along with the maps…

Project Update

Here is a question for anybody: When I was a kid, my father told me that Glen Echo amusement park in Montgomery County, Maryland was closed because the owners refused to desegregate. Does anybody know if there is any truth to this? Thanks!

I have been thinking about the final project for this class and, although I really love the amusement park idea, I will have to wait to attack that. The scope of the idea that I had was far too broad for this project. I do have an idea to work with, and , of course, it involves maps. It involves a map that I recently made. I am thinking about using this map as an inspiration for historic questions. That is as far as I have gotten, though. The historic questions will have to wait a little while. I think that I may end up supplementing this map with either another map, or another type of image.

If anybody out there knows anything about the western-themed amusement park, which was located on route 29, somewhere between the western border of Fairfax City and Bull Run, where route 29 crosses into Prince William County, I would love to hear about it! I am fascinated by those old theme parks. I grew up visiting the Enchanted Forest, near Baltmore, which was immortalized in the John waters movie, Cry-Baby. I was very sad when it closed down. The end of the Enchanted Forest was particularly late compared to most of the other small local amusement parks of that sort. I can certainly symapthize with all of the little boys and girls who lost their amusement parks, back when my parents were kids.

Creating a Smarter Public Through Acces

One of the things that I dislike most about the American public is what seems to be its collective and intentional lack of education coupled with its insistence on allowing a chosen few to do their learning and their thinking for them. I see this everyday as I watch our cable news channels. The fact that these channels exist and that the people on the news channels exist are evidence to me of this problem. As I listen to the stories being told and the things that are being said, I surmise that the audience must be buying into all  of it because they are still there. What I have learned from our news is that the stories of most importance to the American publice involve celebrities and their private lives and that reporting the news is a political and manipulative act, rather than an informative act. The result of all of this is an audience who is being told who to respect, who to hate, what to think, and what is best for themselves and the rest of the world.

This is what I immediately thought of when I read Willinsky’s book. I think that expanding access to information and the products of higher education would do a lot to alleviate the problem that I complained about above. In addition to making knowledge accessible, itwould be very helpful tofind a way to let the public know what is available and how they can get to it all. It may still take a little more work than people have become accustomed to, but perhaps it will begin a build up of momentum and people will learn more and more. I know that my fantasy of everyday Americans reading in their spare time, expanding their knowledge, rather than watching TV or looking up the most recent videos of people hurting themselves on the intenet will probably never be realized, but I don’t think it is unreasonable to hope for some progress in that direction. It would be great for students and teachers, as well.

Google seems to be systematically undermining the capitalist control of knowledge that has been a stple of our culture for a long time, and I admire the company for that. I am very grateful for the free access that google has provided so far and I hope that much more will come in the future.

Visual Data Analysis Project

In preparation for the Data Visualization project, I examined many of the websites that Dr. Cohen suggested to the class last week. I found many websites that I can see as being potentially very useful and valuable, not just for this coming project, but for many projects in the future. Some of the sites that held the most promise for me are those that have historic and current maps and concept-mapping, or mind-mapping tools. Additionally, although I have not yet looked it over, I found a description of IBM’s ManyEyes website, claiming that the site has already made charts and graphs which illustrate relationships between different factors. This is a tool that can be useful for almost any kind of research project, depending on the variety of factors available and the quality of their sources.

I need to do some further research to be sure, but I believe that I ahve thought of a good topic for my visualization project. I expect that my main method of visualization will be GIS maps, but I think that I will be able to use other types of visualization as well. In thinking about the subject, I realized that this could end up being a component of a much larger digital historical project.

I happened upon a website about old theme parks in our area and found that there was a western-themed park in Fairfax County in the 1960′s. The park was located in the “Centreville District” of Fairfax County on Route 29, but I don’t know any more than that. In looking through old maps, I found that the Centreville District once stretched from the western edge of the city of Fairfax to Bull Run, which holds a pretty long stretch of Route 29. The first thing that I want to do is find the theme park. Then, I want to fit the park into a more broad context of family life and leisure time between World War II and the 1980′s. I know that small theme parks and other types of roadside attractions grew as Americans became more mobile and family vacation road trips became more popular. There were destination attractions and wayside attractions, which were meant to give families a break from the road and a chance to spend some of thier vacation money. I want to illustrate the relationship between these theme parks and American driving traditions and learn how these attractions were representative of the perception and reality of family life after the war. I want to illustrate the factors that played a role in the disappearance of most of these attractions; I know that one factor was the rise of the interstate system, but what were other factors?

UVA website

When I applied to the doctoral program here, I knew that I wanted to ultimately create a digital project that included narrative and interpretation, maps, access to primary evidence, and some other things… The problem was that I had a half-visualization of what I wanted to do. Thanks to this website, I now have something like a three-quarters visualization of what I want to produce. I really loved the Thomas and Ayers website! It took me a little while to figure out how to properly navigate the site without missing anything, so I think that I would have included instructions or a more clear path, but this is not a significant criticism.

I loved the way the site was setup. The design gave me ideas of what I can do with my work and legitimated the ideas that I had and was not wholly sure about. I like the way that the primary evidence was not only referenced, but available to view. I think that this is a very important component of the “democratization” of history. A presentation like this offers the presenting historians’ persepectives and interprestations, but also offers all of the evidence used to form those interpretations. This gives the visitors of the websites the ability to form their own opinions about the evidence, which is something that has not been so easy for non-historians in the past. The evidence has always been there, but wiht this type of presentation, people don’t have to travel or research anything. (I did find at least one link that was not good anymore) The use of maps for interpretation and their presentation was great; I was very happy to see this because, despite the fact that maps can be very useful in history, it seems that thier acknowledged use has been too slight in the recent past. I imagine a more interactive map presentation in my work, somethign that dominates the discussion a bit more, but I have not put all of this together in my mind yet. I wonder also if Thomas and Ayers hhad included the ability to contact them with alternate views or ideas, or furhter supporting ideas, if such a feature would be used or appreciated at all. Overall, this was very interesting and inspiring. I now have a greater understanding of what I want to do and confidence in what I can do.

Charting this week’s readings

This week’s readings gave me the hope that we will now be moving toward geospatial ideas, whic does not necessarilly mean maps. I thought that Moretti’s approach was very interesting because he addressed literature, maps and organizational trees, rather than the standard maps, showing the geographic location of something. I am glad to have this wrtten, but I do believe that Moretti could have gone a lot farther with this. I am not sure if this is because I have spent that past year dwelling on ways to use geospatial technology with history and ideas of geographic relationahips used in non-traditional ways, but I felt that the book was an extremely brief introduction to these ideas. I recongnize that these were not all geospatial ideas in this book, but they certainly have leanings toward becoming geospatial. Anytime that you start out trying to chart something, you are looking at some form of mapping, which can become a slippery slope. Additionally, in many situations of charting, it can be said that the subjects can be better represented in a geospatial manner. There are so many uses for geospatial representation that I find that people have a tendency to overlook, or not think of. I am looking forward to this class explaining some of those things and lifting the hurtful stigma that has been laid upon geospatial technology.I hope that I am not misinterpreting this all, but anytime that I start to see organization like this, I think of spatial organization. Either way, when we get there, I think that it will be fun.

Although Cohen’s article did not really hold the promise of fun that I found in Moretti, I did really appreciate it. Data mining and data organization and cataloguing has always been a mystery to me. I have no problem searching for things, or at least I didn’t think I did, but Cohen made me realize that there is a great deal that I don’t know about data mining. I would like to learn a great deal more about the subject, though, and I am sure that I will get the chance to in the coming years. I can just add this to the list of many things that I feel that I am far behind the curv on and hope that I will get the chance to improve my self on in the coming years.

New Ideas for History

I have been working on my paper that is due this evening, so I have not gotten a chance to write in the blog yet. Reading the materials as I did,in the middle of working on this paper, I am getting filled with excitement about the new possibilities that exist for history now. We have, or soon will have, access to nearly everything! On one hand it is sad because it does away with all of my romantic ideas of traveling to far-off places to do research, in the process, experiencing exciting people and places, and grand old buildings. It does away with being able to return from research trips with lots of funny stories to tell. But I suspect that this is a romantic notion that belongs more to students than accomplished historians. I have the feeling that many historians are actually welcoming the idea of being able to perform research without needing to go anywhere. In all, the idea is thrilling because it offers a glimpse of a future in which we will be able to access any sources that we want within minutes; nothing will be off limits for us anymore!

As I look back on my impression of the internet as it was emerging and I was growing, I never thought that all of this technology would catch on. I did not want to have to start writing papers on a computer, and now I can’t imagine writing without a computer. I was sure that the internet was a fad that would go away, but it certainly did not. My point to all of this is that there were people out there (not me) who were excited by the promises of the capabilities of the internet and who never could have imagined how far things would go. So now,as I sit here saying that I am excited about the opporunities that present themselves to historians with current technology,  I feel that sure that there are advances yet to come that I cannot even begin to think of now. I amnow prepared to not just sit back and watch the technological advance, but to take an active part in it. I hope I am not wrong and this is all there is, but there is a pretty small chance of that!

Project Presentation Substitution

I was too sick to make it to class last night, so I am posting here what I was planning on presenting. I wanted to provide some images for this, but I was unable to get them ready yesterday.

After the Civil War, the entire population of the southern United States found themselves in a startling new world. The slaves were suddenly freed and they faced the paradoxical consequences of newly found freedom. African American men and women could now enjoy the pleasures of functioning autonomously, being allowed for the first time to live a life that was truly their own, but they also met the challenges of finding a source of income and housing and maintaining support of themselves and their families, which could be very daunting for people who had never thought about their lives in these terms before. The majority of the white southern population saw their entire worlds turned upside down with the end of slavery. They now faced the need to employ labor, paying for the work that they formerly received for free. Most white people in the South believed that the former slave population would wreak havoc throughout the land because they did not know how to handle freedom. It was widely thought that people of African descent were inherently lazy and violent and lacked the intelligence necessary to support themselves. In the minds of white southerners, the abolition of slavery presented a dual problem that demanded resolution: The owners of agriculture and other industries were facing the challenge of obtaining and maintaining a workforce that was unreliable and expected to be paid and they were anticipating that their women, their children, and themselves would have to live with the constant threat of violence and other illegal activities among their African American neighbors. Working together, southern business men and legislators devised a system that would resolve both of the impending issues; the convict-lease system. Inmate laborers worked on nearly all types of production in the South, but, in Florida, the majority of them worked on turpentine farms.

Turpentine is extracted from the flesh of the Longleaf Yellow Pine tree, which grew throughout the southern United States, including central, north, and west Florida. The work that was required to extract turpentine from the trees was so labor intensive and the conditions were so miserable that it was nearly impossible to maintain a steady labor force drawn from the wage earning population, but it was one of the most lucrative industries in the U.S. until the middle of the twentieth century. In Florida, as in most of the rest of the south, the system involved business owners paying judges and law enforcement officers to arrest and convict men to work for them. This extremely profitable use of inmate labor was facilitated in part by the laws that were passed by most of the southern states, widely known as the “Black Codes,” which were written in a manner that allowed them to be enforced arbitrarily and targeted African Americans. The most popular of these codes were the Vagrancy laws, the details of which varied from state to state, but all had the same essence: all adult men were required to provide proof of active employment to law enforcement officials on demand; if an individual was unable to produce such proof, he could be arrested and sent to work on the prison farms or assessed a fine, which could be paid for him by an agent for a manufacturer in exchange for labor. Most of the men who were arrested for vagrancy were black. In order to keep the inmates working on the farms, it was not uncommon for prisoners’ sentences to be extended due to some real or imagined offense, or for newly-released convicts to be arrested again. Due to this nearly endless supply of free labor and the almost total absence of official standards or concern for the welfare of the prisoners, abuse and neglect were rampant in the turpentine camps. Supervisors on the farms could, and often did, literally work the prisoners to death and abuse them in various other ways because they could very easily be replaced. Along with violent and cruel forms of punishment, the underfed and underclothed prisoners faced the dangers of malnourishment, illness and injury, and the threat of the dangerous animals that inhabited the swampy forests.The conditions in the convict labor camps were often worse than those under slavery because inmate laborers did not represent the same type of financial investment that slaves had.

I want to present this aspect of the history of the southern penal system, not just to inform people about this little known era in our history, but also with the hope that the knowledge gained here can be applied or reflected in current times. This is particularly important because the current U.S.  penal system is such a mess and because  the conditions described in the website are mirrored in current conditions of migrant farm labor and because there is a legacy from this period in history that is manifested in social relations, economic situations, and in local prosperity and in current penal statistics. This is especially important now, as Florida has lately been considering switching to a privatized prison system again.

Although the subject of the website is relatively specialized, the scope of the project is more ambitious than the nature of the topic might suggest. The project that I propose is an open source, highly accessible and versatile historical website about Florida’s turpentine farms and the systems of forced and coerced labor that sustained those farms. The website is intended to reach a varied audience, performing different services and representing something different for each type of audience.

 The objectives of the project  are education, archival storage, new data collection, and collaboration.

The project is innovative in that it combines traditional history with digital research and presentation. Additionally, it will serve a number of different purposes and it will bring together a number of varied functionalities and a wide array of source materials, interpretation, and production methodologies. The completed website will include many visual representations, which offer visitors new ways to think about and communicate history. Every step in the traditional process of historical research and interpretation will be represented; effectively making the process transparent, which will inform non-professional historians how history is done.

The home page of the website will have a written introduction to the topic; something that will entice visitors to further explore the site and that I hope will spark interest in any accidental visitors. Following the introduction, there will be a description of the website; its purposes, its structure, its contents, and how to navigate it.  There will be a list of links in a column on the far left side of the page; these will lead the visitor into one of seven different sections: ‘Archives,’ ‘The Experience,’ ‘The Story Through Geography (Or just Geography),’ ‘The Timeline,’ Historiography,’ ‘Community,’ and ‘Further Resources.’  The navigation of the website will be through icons which are located in different places on a map of Florida and along a timeline.

The Historiography section of the website will be constantly evolving; growing and changing as new facts and interpretations come to light. This section will include a description and assessment of past and current work in the field.

The purpose of the Archives section will be to provide a central repository for primary and secondary source materials and to collect any further relevant source materials that visitors want to share. It will be a  place where primary and secondary source data has been collected from many different archives and put together as a clearinghouse of data related to the subject.

The purpose of the Community section is to serve as an open forum in which historians and others interested in the subjects of turpentine production, convict labor, the southern United States’ penal system, and peonage can come together and exchange ideas.

There are some major historical issues that I will address with this project that I hope will encourage a fresh look at this subject in the past, and that I hope will encourage a closer look at similar situations in the present. The first of these issues is that the leading men of Florida, as well as those of most other southern states, built their penal system as a conscious effort to continue slavery after the Civil War. The second issue that the project will address concerns exploring the extent to which arrests and convictions were related to labor needs on the turpentine farms. Another of these issues focuses on the ways in which Florida legislators and other influential citizens ensured that turpentine farmers had access to and were able to maintain constant supplies of free, or scandalously cheap, labor. Another major issue that the project will address is the legacy that the turpentine camps and forced labor have left in Florida, which manifests itself in current social, class and color relations and the personal and local economies in the areas that were once dominated by turpentine camps.

The proposal that I am submitting is for the creation of a historical website that will be used to educate users and provide a database of materials for future users. The site will tell the story, present evidence, and describe my interpretations. I envision an ongoing project, to which I, and I hope, others, will be adding to for years. I will provide a forum for visitors to share their experiences or those of their family members, relevant images and other media, and any new interpretations or sources. I want this to be a collaborative forum in which other historians who share this interest can communicate with one another. The site will also function as an archival repository; a central location that holds source material related to the subject (prisons, inmate labor, turpentine, peonage, etc.). To this end, I will continuously add data to the site as I come across it, and I welcome others to do the same. Although I expect that much of this data will be available digitally from other resources, my site will function as a free-access clearinghouse for material pertaining to the subject. I also plan to include, and will welcome submissions of, suggestions for the further reading and research sections.

I do not know yet all of the types of sources that will be included in the site, since this will be an ongoing project, but I do have a tentative list. The Library of Congress has a collection of oral histories that were recorded by the WPA; I hope to add to these newer oral histories that I, and possible other historians, collect. The Library of Congress also has recordings of songs that were collected by the WPA and I plan to include the audio files and transcriptions for these songs. There are a number of photographs related to turpentine production, inmates, and the Florida landscape which I plan to include. I will also include some stereoscopic photographs, which offer a unique experience of visual immersion. The standard primary source documents that I will include will consist of court records, legislative records, newspaper and magazine articles, maps, census data, investigative reports, and official correspondence. I will include GIS maps and different types of photographic images of Florida to illustrate the evidence that I use in my interpretation and to present my conclusions. I expect that the list of GIS maps that I plan to use on the website will expand as the project continues to grow. Maps will illustrate the distribution of turpentine camps in Florida, the types and locations for other industries, changes in population demographics from 1865 to the present, patterns and changes in personal income between 1865 and now, the relationship between labor needs on the turpentine farms and arrest and conviction rates for the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, and arrest and conviction rate patterns in former turpentine areas since the time that the convict-lease system ended. Using GIS combined with photo images, I will depict the effect that the turpentine camps had on current vegetation patterns (if any exist, but I am pretty sure that they will) and the current condition of the landscape in areas that were once occupied by turpentine farms.

This will be a long term project that will require tremendous effort in the beginning and much less effort later on, as the site will need to be maintained and as data will be added to it. Once I have completed the start-up phase of the website’s life, I will make at least three full back ups of the completed website, which I will store on my personal computer, and external hard drive, and CD, and of which I will make new backups of as the site changes. I will keep versions of the different media that I use, of the highest quality possible, in the same three back up locations, but the website will use lower quality versions, so it can function quickly. As long as I am not restricted by copyrights, I will make full copies of the source data, which will include any GIS databases, which are compiled in the “Archive” section of the website so they will always be accessible through my website, regardless of what might happen to the site from which they were copied. If any of the sources are copyrighted, I will have to provide only links to their sites of origination. I will build the website using XML so that it can easily be accessed by other users and does not face any of the restrictions related to databases. I hope that I will be able to use a GMU server for the site because that seems to offer the most long-term stability. I also hope that I will have the opportunity to use a name for the website address that contains the name of the website, so that it will be easier for users to identify than an unrelated name would be. I will need to pay attention to the evolutions of hardware and software over the years and ensure that the website, and all of its backup data, are up to date, so it can always be accessible.

Turpentine thoughts…

I knew what I wanted to do for the Grant Proposal Project before classes started this semester. I did not know specifically what the project requirements would be, but I understood that it would be a digitally-oriented project. The project for this class actually worked out perfectly for my master plan; I came into the doctoral program with the intention of producing a dissertation that is part traditional history writing and part digital, with a strong use of GIS. The subject of my dissertation, I hoped, would be turpentine camps in Florida in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and their reliance on forced and coerced labor. I was looking forward to finding new, creative modes of communication for my work, in hopes of attracting new audiences. I have always thought that one of the greatest reasons for some peoples’ aversion to history was the presentation; if historians could only start using exciting new ways to deliver history, people might find that they really enjoy it. So, I have been looking forward to getting the chance to produce new forms of history while I am here at GMU.

I wrote in my blog a while ago about my love for turpentine and my plans to use this project as a starting point for the work that I hope will become my dissertation and I have been thinking about what I want for my website since then. It has only been in the last week or so that I actually started to do the work and have been able to conceptualize this project as reality. Now that I have reached this point and I am really seeing things all come together, I am becoming pretty excited. Since I want this ultimately be my dissertation, I am imagining a pretty robust, comprehensive website, with multiple objectives. I have found some sources that I think are really great, and I think that my ultimate product will be exciting and interesting (I am sure that I am biased, though). One of the things that I think will be most important, and I am not sure how to approach, is marketing. An interesting resource can only be interesting if people see it, so how can I ensure that I attract visitors that would not otherwise be concerned with my subject?

New revelations concerning the access of history

The readings for this week really got me to thinking that about an aspect of the accessability of history that I had not previously considered: that of offering and even welcoming the input of non-academic and non-professional historians. I had never thought that this would come to pass due to what I always saw as the inclusionary, and sometimes even snobby nature of professional history. I think that we have had all made comments or agreed with comments that were not particularly complimentary toward “amateur historians.” The readings for this shine a different light on those so often looked down upon “amateur historians.” My father was one of these people, but I think that the work that he did to answer his personal curiosities and passions was of no less quality than other work that I have seen done by professional historians. I would always welcome his input and anything that he had to offer to the greater historical world. (besides, if he was not such a passionate amateur historian, I would not be here now) I think that it stands to reason that there are plenty of people in the world that have done the same, or greater, quality of work that my father did in order to follow their personal passions. And, it naturally follows that these people might not only have something of significance to offer the historical community, but they might also be able to offer us assistance in our endeavours. I guess this falls under “democratizing history.”

So, although this does bring up the fear that by accepting non-professional contributions, we might be working our way out being necessary, as professional historians, and that we may see a decrease in our authority as this grows, I do think that this can be a very beneficial thing to consider. Besides, why should we go on making non-professional historians feel as if they could never have anything significant to contribute because they are not professional? This is something that I will continue to evaluate amongst myself, as I expect that I will be able to see it evaluated amongst the greater historical community.