ST235A - Digital Projects in History

Author: Jack MacPhee

Snappy Title

April 8, 2019 / / 0 Comments

For my final project, I want to create a timeline/map that will show visually how our consumption of music and music media have changed over time. With the invention of so many different ways to distribute, listen to, and create music over the last century or so, I want to research this topic more and learn how we got where we are in the mass streaming era.

There is historical significance when we try to determine who the most popular artists and “biggest names” of all time are, and thinking about how musical tastes have shifted through the years. Music is a very important part of culture, and when music changes gradually, so does our culture.

Some historical sources I plan to use are lists of the most popular genres, songs, and artists during each year since musical popularity has been documented. I also plan to use online or text sources to compile a timeline for certain inventions that transformed music or were revolutionary in their time. These will range from synthesizers in the 60’s and 70’s, to the internet and computers for music in the 80’s and 90’s.

I am unsure precisely what I will need to carry out this project, but most likely a WordPress site or arcGIS site would suffice. I am mostly unfamiliar with the creation process of these sites, so some guidance from ITS will definitely be needed, but the bulk of this project will be the research itself.

I have already begun collecting sources and compiling lists of data I can use to draw conclusions for the final timeline. I am reading two books currently about the history of the relationship between music and both culture and technology.

  1. The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization by Howard Goodall
  2. Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century / Edition 1 by Hans-Joachim Braun

The challenges associated with this project will mainly come on the technical side, so I plan on spending ample time with ITS when creating the site itself. I have some, yet minimal, experience with programming and website creation from my time at Colby, but a project like this I cannot do without guidance through the more technical pieces.

timeline java script
tableau public

 

 

Project Ideas

March 18, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I have been thinking about a couple of ideas for my project. I am interested in the history of music, and I am trying to think of a good way to be able to put something in that vein into a digital project format. I am also interested in the history of Colby, thanks to our visit to special collections. I was reading through old echo articles about the fraternities on campus pre-1984 and articles looking back on their impact and how the mark they left on the college was felt post-1984. It was very cool to see how the culture on campus has changed through the years and I think this would be a good project idea to carry out.

If I were to pursue the music project, I think I would try to document the official history of music listening/purchasing/streaming from around the 1800s to today. This would include everything from theater, concerts, vinyl records, and early radio, to today’s larger music streaming services like Spotify, Soundcloud, Napster, iTunes, etc. I have always had an interest in music and the means by which we listen to it and how this affects culture.

If I were to do the project involving Colby and the frats, I would initially try to find all the articles in the Colby echo I can pertaining to that subject, and then perhaps expand to local newspapers to see if the frats had any impact on the town or the state of Maine. I know that some chapters were created here at Colby, so it would also be a cool idea to see what, if anything, other schools’ frats have done to impact their communities, good or bad.

They Shall Not Grow Old – Reflection

March 10, 2019 / / 0 Comments

The film They Shall Not Grow Old was a spectacular documentary about British soldiers fighting in the trenches during World War I. It experiments with a new way of portraying history in a digital form, by enhancing old footage from the war with color and sound. It takes the typically dull black-and-white film and breathes new life into it, giving it a more realistic and less detached feel. Although the events portrayed happened over 100 years ago, the film allows you to empathize and connect with the individuals who experienced them as though it happened yesterday.

The film does an incredible job of fleshing out the original footage into a completely new scene. It adds many dimensions to the original black-and-white footage by introducing sound and color. Being able to hear not just the sounds of war and fighting, but the other side as well with laughter and the soldiers joking amongst one another, made the film a rather surreal experience. The film excels at appealing to emotion and getting the viewer attached to specific soldiers or “characters” in the footage. It makes it much more heart-wrenching and difficult to watch when the same people and faces you have been getting to know are suddenly shown on the ground covered in blood and dirt. The strategic use of macabre footage in this film to trigger a primal response is simply amazing. The addition of color also brings in so much more detail and gives the movie a unique vibe. The slight haziness of the color overlay gives the soldiers a very cool almost ghostly appearance. It also makes the film feel as though it didn’t take place a century ago, but rather much more recently. It is crazy to think that I am currently the same age or older than many of the people featured in the footage, at around 20 years old.

Hearing the narrators talk about specific memories they have from their days on the battlefield was yet another aspect of this film that created a more intimate dynamic with the viewer. Some of them could be heard choking up or being brought to tears when talking about certain moments. During the scene towards the end of the film, when the British rushed into the territory of the Germans and killed in their words “anything that moved,” several things stuck with me. For one, this was right near the end of the war, so many of the soldiers were simply worn out and tired of the war lifestyle, and hearing the narrators talk about how desensitized they had become to stepping over dead bodies and seeing people with horrible mutilations was very eye-opening. It reinforced my existing feelings about how utterly awful war can be and usually is. Also, hearing the narrators speak on the Germans they captured, and how they were actually glad to be captured because it exempted them from any more fighting and terror, was something that I could not help but notice.

This film is quite the experience, from the raw commentary of real British soldiers to the colorized depictions of 100 year old war scenes. It is unlike any World War I documentary I have seen, and I can only imagine the painstaking work it took to so beautifully bring to life the footage from the museum.

Digital Darwin and John Van Wyhe Reflection

March 4, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Learning about one of the largest digital projects ever created, Digital Darwin, and getting to speak with the man behind the creation of it, John Van Wyhe, was an interesting and valuable experience. Digital Darwin is itself a very impressive project due to the amount of time, dedication, patience, and passion one must have for pursuing a project of this magnitude. I still find it mind-blowing that it is the largest collection of documents and information dedicated to one single figure. Going into this, I did not know about too many historical digital projects, so being exposed to one of the most revered ones and speaking face-to-face with the mastermind behind it was beneficial to my understanding of these works.

During our chat with Van Wyhe, I learned that with great projects comes great responsibility and risk. He noted that Digital Darwin just might be the most under-cited scholarly website in existence. He has had to deal with many counts of plagiarism and stealing, and believes that some people simply take for granted the work he has done to assemble all of the historical documents concerning Charles Darwin into one place. That said, he is not exempt from his share of legal hardships on the other end. He stated that possibly the most difficult aspect of creating Digital Darwin has been getting permissions and rights in order. When dealing with so much documentation and so much history, there are bound to be cases where legal issues arise. I feel as though most projects like this–though not on this scale–would experience similar difficulties and complications when piecing the project together.

When I asked Van Wyhe if he knew whether or not the popularity of Digital Darwin spurred the creation of similar projects for other important historical figures, his answer intrigued me. He said that there were a few small projects created for a few other scientists, but that Digital Darwin is a special outlier since there is so much content and it has remained so crucial and debated throughout the last 150 years. The evolution discussion has produced so much material and inspired so much research that few other scientists’ findings could ever match the production of what Darwin has done.

Speaking of the evolution discussion, Van Wyhe acknowledged that the resource he has created has been used by both those who believe in evolution, as well as those seeking to debunk it. He knows that his collection of documents has helped fuel the fire in this heated intellectual debate. I admire him for addressing this by saying, “That is what its there for.” He created Digital Darwin for scholars, no matter their beliefs, to use for whatever purpose they wish, as long as they are not stealing or plagiarizing the material. This evolutionary debate is also a good thing for the site as well, giving it continued exposure for the foreseeable future.

 

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