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.