My blog

Post 4:  What are you doing that seems to be successful in the internship?  Challenging? How can you address these challenges?
I am most successful on the research end of my project, concerning both the Veterans History Project’s interview archive, and online materials about Story Maps .

Starting with interviews, I’ve listened to approximately two dozen new interviews with Native American veterans since writing my last post, and even added one of my own by interviewing a non-Native family friend who served in Vietnam. The result is a surfeit of evidence for the Story Map I’m creating. In addition, I’ve managed to track down three of the interviewees and appealed to them for photographs that I can use on the site to accompany their stories. Of these, two have already sent digitized, high resolution photos, and another I expect still will. Pictures, as discussed in the last post, are the sin qua non of Story Maps, as Kathy Carroll’s stunning and easily navigable Right to the City site reminds us. I have written a rough draft of my Map’s text, which I’ve done best to keep short, absent the quotations from the interviews I plan to cite. It’s no small task to hunt through an 80-minute interview for a given topic, so I’ve kept track of where the quotes appear, just not what was said specifically. I wrote up six profiles of interview subjects for Megan Harris of VHP, to help her in building their site’s next “Experiencing War” page about interviews on a particular topic–in this case, Native American veterans. And those require a profile blurb, followed by choice quotations, followed by poignant or otherwise noteworthy passages from the interview. Boy did that take a lot of time. So the writing portion is by no means finished. I just plan to keep it purposely short.

Reading up on Story Maps and viewing dozens of exemplary maps online–some more than others–has reminded me that DH apps, including platforms like Story Maps. Nor should they be! If it’s not changing, then whatever you created on it isn’t bound to last. I think Omeka suffers on that account; it looks a bit behind the times. So, as pertains to Story Maps, I’ve looked at many Library of Congress maps that scroll downward in “cascade” format, but which feature none of the horizontal devices used on Carroll’s site, which came out just after Story Maps’ last update. (Vocabulary is one aspect of DH and the wider web that still eludes me. There’s something that the GMU program could provide future students: an illustrated glossary to distinguish widgets from theme builders, and so on.)

The greatest challenge is putting all of the Story Maps features and my photographs and my text into a coherent and visually pleasing and most important of all, up-to-date-looking whole. Again, Carroll succeeded in that. Now, will it look outdated in a year or two? Perhaps. But the site works. It’s big, it’s informative, but the mosaic of visuals combined with the configurations and tools that she uses to present it, whether a slideshow or a map with pop-up images, comprise a full course meal. A meal that the viewer can consume one neighborhood at a time. Essential to this is familiarity with the tools that Story Maps has assembled. As noted, I’ve read up on these such that I know what a slide show looks like, and the variety of map themes I have to choose from. But the pieces of the Map that I’ve built thus far still look a bit primitive. Bringing them up to date, not to mention informative and visually pleasing, is my challenge for the coming weeks.

The guiding question for this post is “What new skills are you developing?” My answer is Story Maps, with plenty more to learn. I’ve spent the bulk of my time since Post 2 listening to more Veterans History Project (VHP) interviews with Native American veterans, determining which are best suited to appear on my “Veteran Storytellers” Map, and drafting a storyboard from the ones selected. I began this final stage by breaking the mass of material that I’ve heard into themes rather than discrete wars, narrowed and fused them into four themes, and designated a “lead character” to open each of them, of whom we have access to more than one photograph. The themes are: Motivations to Serve, Combat Stories, Discriminations, and Homecomings. The dearth of photographs in the VHP digitized collections is a shame, considering how many gripping, telling stories would be limited solely to text unless I manage to track the interviewees down to petition them for more documentation. (I’m pleased to note that the head of VHP is very happy that I took this up.) But the material is more than adequate to meet the Project’s standards, and has evolved over regular, productive consultations with my mentor, whose engagement and interest in the project remain outstanding. Preparation and drafting culminated in my presentation of the present board to three of the mentor’s colleagues this past week for their approval and recommendations.

It was during that recent group Skype call, and another that followed two days later, that December’s concern about my lack of a “loc.gov” email address came back to haunt me. Back then, team members had expressed concern that whatever I created would not be able to appear on the Library of Congress’s page of twenty-odd Story Maps (see https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/storymaps.html), and would therefore—in so many words—amount to a lot of time spent with little to show for it, at least for the VHP’s sake. Efforts to smuggle me into the Library’s Story Map account as a “co-editor” failed at the second meeting, leaving me with a private account short of all the tools and accoutrements that an institutional membership affords, not to mention the Library’s “loc.gov” imprimatur. I suggested that we try again to get me certified, a thumbprint-an-background-check process that I’d undergone in October with no luck, allegedly on account of Covid. And we’ll see about that. But at the end of the day, I’m free to do what I set out to do, and no one on the team sees any benefit in stopping me. To the contrary, what matters is that the VHP’s rich archive find another outlet online. Which brings us to a question I have for the folks at RCCHNM. If the Center has a membership to Story Maps, as I assume it does, I wonder whether I might use it in order to have access to the full toolkit mentioned above.

Only in the past two weeks have I begun getting my hands dirty in Story Maps, partly because of my hesitancy to put too much work into something that will have to be scrapped in order to re-build it o the Library’s account. But now that those reservations are gone, or at least diminished, I’d like to learn more quickly than I have to date (see the conclusion to Post 2). Fortunately, I’m happy to say that Story Maps is a simpler platform than I feared it might be. The twenty-odd Maps on the Library of Congress page (see link above) have provided me with a very helpful reference for the variety of forms that Maps can take. The colleagues with whom I spoke twice last week, and who has been designated just recently as the Project’s Story Map authority, shared her opinion that Maps with too little text fall short of their responsibility to the included images and texts, and by extension to the viewer. Without context, she argues, Maps are too easily reduced to photo albums. To which I replied that per my experience, informed partly by prior RRCHNM courses, is that too much text threatens to deter more visitors than it educates. We agreed that the aforementioned dearth of photos for Native American veterans favors the text-heavy approach. My answer to which is to limit context to a bare minimum, facilitated by maps showing where Danang and Kandahar are, relative to the front in a given conflict, and to focus the rest of the site on two media: photographs, and direct, unadulterated citations from interviews, pertinent to the theme in question. Sadly, as I mentioned in Post 2, audio and video are unavailable (despite an archive of filmed interviews!) on account of the VHP’s antiquated software, coupled with a lumbering licensing department. To conclude, this is where I’m grateful to you, Jennifer, for introducing me to Kathy Carroll. Carroll’s Map on Washington D.C. is outstanding, and outshines all but a few of the Library Maps, precisely because of its judicious prioritization of image and maps over text. The maps further engage the viewer by progressing across time and through different map styles, absent the cryptic CSV table data that less seasoned Map-makers like myself present. So there’s much more to learn. And there are many more hours to be logged. I’ll be frank that I’m short of 80 hours by 15 or so now, and am running well short of the 3 hours per day that I budgeted back in early January.

Thus far, I’ve most enjoyed my discussions with my mentor, and by extension, his colleagues at the Veterans History Project (VHP). I say “our” because he says it, and I’m pleased with that. I remember your statement, Jennifer, that the folks who get the most out of their DH projects tend to be the ones who enjoyed the most freedom and therefore bore the most responsibility for their work. Well I have no fear of Brendan stripping me of responsibility for the Story Map I’ve been charged with creating about Native American veterans since World War I. Our frequent phone calls reassure me that this project matters to him, and to a lesser but still notable extent, the VHP more generally. It’s an important moment for Native American veterans, with the National Museum of the American Indian having just unveiled a new statue commemorating Indians’ service in the armed forces. So Brendan and his boss recognize that it’s a great time to attract the press and Members of Congress to the VHP’s living collection on the same issue. Aside from his genuine interest in the project’s success, Brendan is bright, he’s interested in Story Maps, and he’s friendly–open to suggestions and committed to regular communication.
One benefit of these conversations is how much they’ve taught me about the VHP as an institution torn between its mandate to share its collections via all possible media, and a host of limitations–most notably on what media can be included on VHP sites (only in-house, already digitized material), on how quickly new media can be approved for digitization, then digitized, and finally, on the site’s own infrastructure. To be reminded what the web looked like circa 2002, visit https://www.loc.gov/vets/. While Brendan has told me plenty about these inner workings, the most revealing conversation came when we spoke with four of his colleagues via Zoom about their experience with Story Maps. The most useful piece of advice that I heard came from a VHP archivist who had made her own Story Map the year before, about race in the armed forces, by way of a single Black veteran’s experiences over several decades. The problem, she discovered, was that the soldier’s collection contained little visual material. Since materials from beyond VHP collections were not permitted, not to mention the Project’s own digitized video interviews with veterans, she was left to build a text-heavy page on a platform designed for splashy graphics. The message of the Zoom teach-in was clear: select individuals for your Map whose already-digitized collections contain a lot more than interviews. And above all else, look for images.
So this is what I’ve enjoyed the most over my first 30 hours: the conversations with folks who have used the apps and platforms of the moment, and can help me cut corners. That’s what I enrolled in this program hoping to achieve.
Going forward, my best bet for “creating more positive experiences like these,” to quote the prompt for Post 2, is to keep in contact with these people. And in order to do so, I need to have either something to show them, or specific hands-on questions to ask them. This will be my subject in Post 3: the work that’s underway, and the skills it exercises.
For now, I’ll say that my work style preferences on Story Maps have yet to take shape. This is my goal for the coming month: advance from sifting through collections to getting my hands dirty on the platform. Only then will I be able to return for more tips.

The Veterans History Project (VHP) began with a unanimous vote in both houses of Congress. As my mentor confided in me (I’ll use “Brendan” from here on out, in case I write something the mentor would rather not share), the VHP is the Library of Congress’s best selling point on Capitol Hill. Democrats and Republicans post its links on their websites, and the Library budget passes.
The purpose of the VHP is to collect letters, diaries, and interviews of US armed forces personnel, whether war veterans or not, and to educate the public on how to collect more. The Project’s website presents a formidable collection of collections, each dedicated to an individual service member, and each comprised of however many media said member contributed. For many that’s an interview, and for others it’s an interview paired with letters and photographs. Many but by no means all of the collections have been digitized, and can be viewed/read online.
I learned over the course of two lengthy phone calls with my mentor that my role in the organization is twofold. First, I will add a new Story Map exhibit to the half-dozen that are currently accessible on the VHP site. The first of these, and the only one that VHP staff recommended I look at, is on D-Day. It’s an impressive piece–four servicemen’s experiences before and during D-Day narrated down a page that scrolls through text, maps, and images to tell its stories. Second, I will assist the VHP in a data entry project that seeks to chart all of the Project’s collections by zip code. Needless to say I’m more interested in the first role than the second. But perhaps I can hone my primitive Excel skills in the process.

My challenges are twofold now. First, I must conclude catchy explanations for why the samples that I’ve selected lean to one ideological side or another. Second, I must learn more about Omeka. I find this difficult, and yet this is why I began the program. Specifically, visitors must press a button and be taken to the subsequent page. Second, I don’t like how the pages all have to be listed in the menu bar. Why can’t I have multiple pages contained under one link in the menu bar?? I could go on, but the problems are of that magnitude–nothing terrible, but when you add them all up, the site looks primitive and amateur. The zoom out video that I posted is a great example. But the idea remains a clever one, and if I stick with it, this could be a successful page unto itself, absent the Cold War NGO schtick. Discerning a propaganda’s author across time!

This is a useful question for me to ask, as distance learning is no longer all that distant. One challenge is the shift that we have seen from secondary and tertiary historiography, or monographs and textbooks, to a glut of primary material. Why is it that we still feel wedded to print when we sit down to draft a syllabus? One reason is the question of veracity that Wikipedia poses. Historiography undergoes a rigorous process of external review and editorial oversight that helps separate weighty, wheaty dissertations from unpublished chaff (forgive the corniness); and not all sites do. Now, it is true that there are plenty out there as we’ve seen, that provide precisely the metadata that Wikipedia doesn’t: an author, the author’s degree and institutional affiliation, and so forth. But even if the author is the dean of the site’s topic, it’s become common wisdom that the internet shortens the attention span, which compels site authors to abbreviate their texts, which in turn compromises the texts’ complexity. The exception to this is to have students read a conventional book chapter or article off of a screen in the traditional page-by-page format. How this works, but writing that same text on a website for public access doesn’t, is a mystery to me. And so we come round the glut of primary sources. Art, radio broadcasts, posters, interviews–it’s all there. But now the teacher must become the secondary scholar. Unless you adopt someone else’s syllabus or lesson plan as your own–something few of us do not just because it feels like a cop-out, but also because we’re not sure it fits–you must pick which sources to show and how to contextualize them (here’s where a nuanced introductory text over 1,000 words would help). To which the best answer is, in my view, YouTube. And here I don’t mean talking head documentaries, but outstanding lectures. Why do yourself what someone else does better, accessible for free at all times of day or night to anyone with a WiFi connection?

I would add to the above concern about too much primary material and too little outstanding secondary text, the fact that text has its limitations. The thousand-word adage is familiar to us, and Powerpoint has helped lecturers cover that base. But what if history is best served by inundating students in primary sources without recourse to anything more than 1,000 word introductory texts? What if, to cite Wineburg, the best way for students to understand slavery is to show them pictures, have them listen to the WPA interviews with former slaves from the ’30s (all of which are online), and look at the wealth of online statistical data on the slave trade, not to mention slave-related crime. Here we get to the method introduced earlier in the course by Caulder (sic?) and others, to turn the classroom into a laboratory. Have students infer from primary source material, maybe even make some themselves, and have them share the results with online hobby-history communities. And here we come full circle. The principal challenge of digital history, it seems to me, is its impatience, combined with its lack of a rigorous editorial process. Natural science has suffered a litany of controversies over the past few years over path-breaking studies based on faulty or outright contrived data. Such is the tenure process, and such is the longing for distinction. As for impatience, information requires interpretation in order for the learner to retain it, and interpretations require a deep knowledge of historical context. This is why summary lectures matter, and why text matters.

This section is more about teaching than about presenting the past, so don’t feel obliged to read it. I just want to keep it for memory’s sake. I I drafted a survey for my first 40 all-online students, and read the answers once I’d submitted their final grades on Sunday. The results were informative. 68% of students said that they prefer asynchronous to synchronous classes, which I found encouraging, as I decided to follow the university’s online teaching guru’s advice and go whole-hog online, leaving students to schedule their time as they see fit, mindful of summer jobs and all else. But when I asked for any further tips on how to make the course teach better, I recognized a pattern. Students praised the volume that they learned, the linkages the assignments encouraged between present social, economic, and political debates and the utopian visions we’d read; they also enjoyed the Zoom groups and recorded discussions that I had them submit. But they missed seeing me only in writing, rather than on the screen; and they missed seeing just a handful of classmates, not the whole group. In short, you can’t have one or the other. When I asked if it would be good for me to join in on the small group discussions, the response was overwhelmingly positive. In sum, I plan to model the class along the lines of your department’s hybrid model–fundamentally asynchronous, but with synchronous opportunities interspersed.

It’s been two weeks since my last report, and one week since our conversation (thanks very much for the email regarding zooming in and out of photos). Forgive the negativity here, and please take it with a grain of salt. I am having fun trawling through my endless photos for good material to post. But I face three challenges at present, the first of which is familiar: the continued hunt for Western material. It’s fitting, given our readings for Module 7, that my bugaboo is Google. My front organizations produced publications, and libraries have collections of them. Try as I might, though, I cannot find Google images of them. I do have Seventeen magazine to fall back on, as you rightly pointed out. But the site is dedicated to Cold War front organizations, and as yet, I’m relying chiefly on grainy photos either from the archives, or from a few scattered eBay sellers.

The second challenge is Omeka’s; or rather, reflects my ignorance thereof. I have spent the past 36 hours trying to figure out why it is that when I upload an image as an “item,” what I get is a thumbnail that winds up showing just two-thirds of the original. Thus, when I settle on a magazine cover from one of the few Western publications I’ve dredged up, visitors see only the center of it. Omeka Forum is a hampered not just by overtaxed responders, but also by the awkwardness of articulating in writing what the problem is. It reminds me of the difficulty we have describing smells–the vocabulary just isn’t there. In Omeka-world, the talk is there, I just haven’t learned it.

The final concern is that we’ve been planning for weeks to head up to my hometown in New Hampshire for ten days, where I plan to polish off a prototype for the July 11th class. Then, yesterday, it occurred to me: the internet up there runs like molasses. Added to this the fact that there will be six adults plus three kids on devices, plus that the local college library is closed, and I’m in for late nights or recourse to public hotspots. Which reminds me of what a disadvantage the present crisis puts people at who have poor or no internet coverage at home. I say this not to generate sympathy or as an excuse for incomplete work come July 11. Lord knows we’ve had plenty of time to prepare!

I remain confident in the concept and now have a better sense for the media that I’d like to include. In line with your advice in response to last week’s update, I’d like to show, for example, just photographs on the first page. And maybe just headlines on the second. Something intriguing that will pique visitors’ interest and keep them coming.

I am still hunting for sources, and have found fewer on the capitalist side, interestingly, than on the communist. This is a concern, especially since the West did not pour as many resources into their front publications as the Soviet bloc did into theirs. So I’ll keep searching.

Here is an example of one that I do have, and that I posted to Omeka for Mills Kelly’s class. The resolution on this picture is better than on others, but I’m not sure what the amateurish photography means for the visitor’s experience. Does it make the publication somehow more authentic? Does it make the site seem unprofessional?

The other problem concerns Omeka. I haven’t found any plug-in that will let me let the visitor click on one side or the other and have that input appear on a subsequent page, so that you wind up with a score at the end. If this proves impossible, then I’ll have to just go analog by letting visitors keep a tally themselves, and show them the answers in a final page. I’d prefer to do something flashier, but I don’t have 1/10 the coding skill to make that happen. Which brings me back to the issue of what platform to choose. I’m still wondering, should I just do WordPress? I’ve had trouble with my WordPress version of the site, on the front end. So it’s not as if everything there is easy. But the plugin universe is so much larger there that surely my button-pressing function will be possible. And then there’s the smartmaps option that Carol brought up on the call last week…

All told, I’m behind where I’d like to be. Having reviewed the course calendar, it looks like I won’t put the site on display until July 11, when we show it to classmates. Is that right? In that case I’ll have time to bear down and catch up once things settle down for me–the APs are done and my grades are in. Thanks for your understanding on that.

Like most 20th-century-born lecturers, I continue to think Powerpoint is cutting edge. It’s a subliminal but still powerful notion. Our teachers fiddled with overhead projectors and VCRs, and now we have every image imaginable, coupled with slow-populating YouTube clips, at our fingertips. I show a nibble of The Name of the Rose for Erasmus’s comedies, and the opener to Triumph of the Will to show a godly dictator descending from the clouds.

But as the readings for Module 5 remind me, Powerpoint is by now passé. And so is Prezi. Today’s experiments are no longer about how to engage students as passive listeners, but how to engage them in the act of history-making. This was the premise of “historical thinking” in the 2000s, and it’s the same one that digital humanities initiates have brought to assignments and assessments. I, for example, just gave my students a choice ten days ago. For their second paper, they can either write 1800-2000 words, or they can make a 10-minute Spark Video–both in response to the same question. I’ve since learned that Spark maxes out at around ten minutes. And I’ve confirmed what I anticipated, but didn’t have the time or experience to outmaneuver. The medium is too different from a traditional expository paper for students to know what they’ve produced is sufficient, and the same for me. In short, what can a Spark Video do that a paper can’t, and what can’t it that a paper can?

What I learned from the readings is that digital story telling is best suited to visual sources and phenomena. The Spark Videos that I’ve seen show lots of text, in excerpts from the assigned books, and a few token images taken from Adobe’s catalog. But the deft editing seen in the GMU projects is missing–there isn’t the time. And so is the weighing of contrary evidence and counterarguments that I require for all papers. There is no reason why this can’t happen in a video. But what is the visual that can not only accompany but advance that argument? That remains an open question.

I’m not yet sold on the intellectual rigor of digital story telling, but I’m curious to experiment further.

The premise of the project is good, and the publications that I’d like to display and have site visitors compare are available. The challenges that I haven’t met concern (a) the selection of issues from said publications, and (b) the structure of this feature of my site.

The publications that I have in my photo archive are the Soviet bloc-backed World Youth and the CIA-backed Student News and Information. The photographs are not of great quality, something we’ve discussed. And I have tried to improve the quality of some, with so-so results. Were they old yellowed documents, the poor quality would be forgivable. Because they’re full-color 20^th-century magazines, it’s problematic. The chief problem is not appearance, though, but content. It would be good to start viewers off with two issues that address similar topics. I could then show issues with wildly different themes to suit a higher level of difficulty. In which case I’d have to use two new publications, the titles of which are not yet familiar to the user.

The structure of the site concerns what visitors see when. My plan as yet is as follows (I’m afraid I pasted from Word).

Home page for “Cold Fronts.”

Menu

            1. Organizations (each site accompanied by images of its publications).

            2. Maps

            3. Analysis

            4. Which is whose?

                        A. Opening page introduces the comparison.

1. On this page is a list of demographics (students) or perhaps events (Vietnam War), each of which links to a page with a sheet from two front publications—one communist and one capitalist.

               a. Vietnam War (example)

i. At the bottom of this page is a simple toggle to select “which one is whose.”

             Here I need some kind of extension on Omeka that will show users “congratulations!” or “wrong!” in response to their entry.

What do you think of that structure, Professor?