Unit 15

My Class Project

I completed the website today (July 8) and submitted the url on Blackboard. The url is evolutionhomeappliances.weebly.com.


Tools I've Found Useful

I am doing the Historical Translation assignment this week. Since I have some background in French and Italian, I sometimes use online dictionaries to translate from those languages into English. My preference for online dictionaries is Reverso, by Collins. It provides dictionaries for 13 languages, such as:

http://dictionary.reverso.net/french-english/
http://dictionary.reverso.net/italian-english/

I think it is far superior to Google. It is like the big hard back dictionaries I used to use way back when as a French major, with more information about multiple uses for the same word and idiomatic expressions. It provides example sentences using the word you want to translate. You learn a little about the culture by using it and seeing words in context. It's not quite as good as the big hard back dictionaries, but it is close.

Unit 14

Other User Participation Projects

I don't think I see National Archives anywhere in your Unit 14 note or the transcription assignment:
https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/registerandgetstarted

There is one at the UVA Law Library, which says "Seeks Transcription Help for Documents Offering Insight Into American Revolution and More"
https://content.law.virginia.edu/news/201706/crowdsourcing-history


Project Update

The draft of my website is complete (evolutionhomeappliances.weebly.com). I need to do some proofing/tweaking and check to make sure I have cited sources for all photos. I haven't been able to change the font color on the navigation menu. For some reason, my background theme does not allow one to change the navigation menu's font color. So, I tried a different background theme, looked for a place in the html code to insert a different color (e.g., #110855), etc., but so far haven't found a way to change that font color. I'm leery of changing themes again since it makes other changes I don't want when I do it.

Unit 13

Progress on Project

I have posted about 3/4s of the website, as of July 1, which has the url evolutionhomeappliances.weebly.com
I have uploaded photographs and text. I haven't been able to get Weebly to do everything I've wanted; I've adapted my ideas about layout somewhat.

Some issues I've faced are how long to make individual pages; not finding a timeline app thru Weebly (have used a table, instead); and not being able to get captions on the main photo on each page. (I've put the information about the main photo on the pages in the text, instead--tho I was able to get the citation under the photo on the home page.)

I'm used to using APA style for references, so the sources page is in that style. However, for citations, I've also added the page numbers where I found material, in case I want to easily refind material someday for another project. I can't get italics into the photo captions or hanging indent on the source page, but the information is there, even if formatting isn't perfect.  Most web pages I see don't have citations. I don't think they make it harder for people to read, personally, but I'm used to seeing them in my work, so I've included them.



Related to one of your comments to an earlier blog post--yes, I've found a washing machine museum. It's located in Eaton, CO, and has a website oldewash.com.  The owner is definitely into old washing machines!


Online Data Sets

Two places for Virginia data sets (though not related to my class project):

The Office of Personnel Management has Fedscope, which is a database on Federal employment. You can drill down to Virginia (as well as other states and DC). It says it works best with Firefox and Internet Explorer. I can't access it with Chrome.
https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/employment.asp

Data about education in Virginia at
http://www.doe.virginia.gov/statistics_reports/index.shtml
They have 21st century data online, but I don't see much before 2000.

For my project, I used some data from the Energy Information Administration:

Energy Information Administration (2017, February). Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS): Table HC3.1 Appliances in U.S. Homes by Housing Unit Type, 2015. Retrieved June 19, 2017 from https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2015/hc/php/hc3.1php

Energy Information Administration (2011). Annual Energy Review 2011, Table 2.6 Household End Uses: Fuel Types, Appliances, and Electronics, Selected Years, 1978-2009. Retrieved June 14, 2017 from https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.php?t=ptb0206   

Unit 12

Uploads to Northern Virginia Digital History Archive

I uploaded 5 photos to the archive on June 24, 2017. They are of the Old Town Alexandria waterfront and Woodrow Wilson bridge taken from an airplane flying to National Airport. Contributing a photo was easy.  I don't yet see my photos when I go back and search the site, but perhaps they have to be approved before they are visible to others. The difficult part of uploading was that I had to figure out how to shrink their KB size so they would be accepted.  I used Adobe Photoshop, and it took me a little while to find the right things on the pull down menus. I couldn't figure out how to tell it the maximum KB I wanted, so I just used inches. The resulting photos may be smaller in terms of KB than I could have uploaded. I still don't entirely understand how reducing the KB of a photo reduces its physical size or resolution. My understanding is that if one zooms the photo or reproduces it on a large scale, it would not look as clear.

An Online Digital Archive

I looked at the online archives in the Unit 12 note. On the George Mason site, I wanted to look for photos. I found Collections, then Digital Collections. Some of these sites seem to push one to browsing by collection, but if it isn't clear which collection might be most useful, there is the search box. I didn't find some of the collection names that useful (i.e., Manuscripts, Marie Elsie Fox Photo Collection), although Behind the Wall: Images of East Germany was a clear collection name and something I might revisit. (I've been watching the Weissensee Saga, a German TV drama set in East Berlin before and during the fall of the Wall.) Category Pages within LUNA showed me a very long alphabetical list. I thought I'd see if there were washing machine or refrigerator photos, but both searches yielded nothing. In the end, I feel like I'm not sure what the strengths are of their digitized image collections, and that it might take me a long time to figure it out. If I want photos of the university or Federal theaters, those are apparently subjects the collections cover.

My Project Status

I have sorted the pictures I have collected by type of appliance (washer, refrigerator, stove, other) and within each appliance category by year. I looked to see where the gaps were in my coverage, and searched for more pictures from the 1930s. I have also been finishing the sorting of my notes within each appliance category and by date. This week (June 26-July 1), I'll work with Weebly to see how well I can translate my ideas for a site into reality.

Unit 10

Real or Not?

I looked at Digital Karnak and Persepolis3d to see if they make it clear that they are digital reconstructions, rather than real. On the Welcome page, it says, in present tense, that Karnak “is one of the largest temple complexes in the world…” which is a little confusing if people don’t know Karnak is now only ruins. But on the About page, it says it is a 3-D Virtual Reality model. The site is very clear about who produced the site. Videos are clearly not photographs. And modern video footage is labeled as such. Persepolis3d.com clearly states on its home page that it is “a virtual reconstruction.” The pictures do not look like real photographs. The Statement page says that the goal is to bring Persepolis “back to life” and that it is a “virtual reconstruction” based on documentation from excavations.

Last winter, I visited the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, MO. They had a  room where you could stand in a plaster cast of what looked like a bomb crater. They also had a field of artificial poppies under a glass walkway as one entered the museum. Those were nice touches. I also recall watching a video at Mt. Vernon about George Washington’s winter at Valley Forge and having artificial snow falling from the ceiling, which was novel. Several years ago, I went to the Maryland side of the Potomac to a reconstructed farm that has a barn with drying tobacco and old heritage breeds of animals. Colonial Williamsburg also has old breeds from the Colonial period. Those are nice, real, 3D experiences, though not everyone (e.g., my husband) wants to talk to actors pretending to be living during the period.

With virtual reality goggles we may get closer to experiencing the past, but it still will not provide the taste, smell, or texture. We also come at history from our own life experience, environment, and culture. We can't experience history as someone living in the period did because we know that once we turn off the program or remove the goggles, the experience will be over. And there is always going to be some “fictionalization” in virtual reality because we can’t know every detail, word, or second of activity that took place. However, virtual reality may help us envision the past, improve our understanding, and empathize. The question becomes how can we enhance our knowledge and understanding through short experiences

Another experiential approach to history is to reenact it, but that also has similar limitations. Recently, I watched the PBS show, Victorian Slum House, in which several individuals and families temporarily lived and worked in slum conditions like those in Britain during the Victorian era. However, the participants received mini-lectures on what individuals like their characters would have been experiencing and talked to the camera about their reflections, so they were not just dropped into the period wholesale. It did seem that the participants’ and TV viewers’ understanding of slum conditions at that time were more specific than if they just read about the period in a journal or book. In the case of the PBS show, the participants wore the clothes, slept on the straw beds, lived in the rooms with peeling paper, and likely smelled the privies—of course, the viewers did not.

I am surprised there isn’t a bigger part of the tourism industry that lets visitors pay to temporarily “live” in the past—wear the clothes, do the work, eat the food, etc., from a past period. I’m not sure how closely covered wagon tours recreate the historic experience. In Kansas, the Flying W Ranch Bunk House lets you sleep on the prairie with the chuckwagon, and Wagons West Tours lets you ride and sleep in a covered wagon in the foothills of the Rockies. So far, I haven’t been tempted to part with indoor plumbing and electricity and give one of those tours a try.

Unit 9

About My Class Project 

My project is a website on "The Evolution of American Household Appliances: Washing Machines, Refrigerators, and Stoves." I will include a timeline in some form of key dates and periods in the evolution of each of these three appliances, with photos and drawings of examples throughout the period covered. Although my main interest is in the first half othe the twentieth century, I expect to include dates and examples form the nineteenth century, as well. I will provide short amounts of text to describe the use of the appliances and how it affected housework. 

I have used several books for background on the history of each appliance and the significance for women's work in U.S. Some are e-books or pamphlets that I have found online, such as on "How to Choose and Use Your Washing Machine," published in the 1940s by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics. An e-text by J.S. Woersdorfer (2017) provides me with the most recent survey on how household technology has evolved. I have found a few photos in the New York Public Library's Digital History Collection and many in the Library of Congress's digital collections. I found a couple of interesting videos on washing machines in NVCC's digital library. One demonstrated the use of a combined clothes and dish washing machine (though not washing both simultaenously!).

Other Materials on Building an Audience

Mitchell, Amy, Jurkowitz, Mark, & Olmstead, Kenneth (2014, March 13). Audience Routes: Direct, Search & Facebook. Retrieved on June 20, 2017 from http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/13/audience-routes-direct-search-facebook/

        Talks about how people access news websites and how their behaviors (i.e., time spent, returns) differ in relation to how they accessed the sites. Discusses measures of engagement and comScore Methodology.

Rainie, Lee (2011, June 13). The Perfect People Meter: My Beautiful Fantasy About Understanding Audience in the Digital Age. Pew Research Center: Internet & Technology. Retrieved June 201, 1027 from

http://www.pewinternet.org/2011/06/13/the-perfect-people-meter-my-beautiful-fantasy-about-understanding-audience-in-the-digital-age/

        Based on the transcription of a speech, this presents ideas on metrics for measuring and understanding an audience.

Smith, Aaron (2012, September 6). Reaching Your Audience in the Digital Age: Key Research Trends to Watch. Pew Research Center. Retrieved June 20, 2017 from http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/09/06/reaching-your-audience-in-the-digital-age-key-research-trends-to-watch/ 
       A presentation based on a nationally representative telephone survey of US adults. Includes computers, internet and broadband; smartphones and mobile computing; and social media. This information may seem more dated since it is based on a 2012 survey.

Unit 8

Sources for Digital Materials

So far, I have found the best digital materials for my project on the Library of Congress website. The Farm Services Administration, Office of War Information took a lot of photos in the 1920s-1940s. I've found almost 100 useful photos that do not have any restrictions on their use and are already digitized. I looked at the Smithsonian website, but it was not as helpful because it charges for some of the things that I might have used. There is a great brochure on how to choose a washing machine from the USDA's Agriculture Information Series (1948). I'm also using various books to help me understand the timing of the changes in household technology. My main interest is 1920-1950, and I'm focusing on washing machines, refrigerators, and stoves. I came across a good website for a washing machine museum, but since everything is copyrighted and the images are for sale, I only plan to cite facts from it and not copy photos from it.

Materials I've Digitized (though not for my class project)

(1) Ground crew mechanics next to bomber (likely a B-17), either 96th or 447th bomb group, US Army Air Corps, southeastern England (probably either Snetterton Heath or Rattlesden air base), circa 1943-44. Scanned from a photo. Do not know who took the photo. My Dad was a sheet metal mechanic and is in the top row, far left side.

(2) Maryville, MO, December 1962, Christmas decorations. Scanned from a slide. Photo taken by Dean E. Medsker.

(3) Havana, Cuba, 1953. Scanned from a B&W negative. Photo taken by Dean E. Medsker.