Evelyn GoesPro

For as  long as I worked at Walt Disney World, I would look at the bright fluttering colors, hear the busy, not quite too loud music, and smell the piped in scents of cinnamon rolls and I would think about how overwhelming it must be to someone on their first visit. What would grab your attention first? How would you navigate among the crowds of spring breakers, annual passholders, and confused families?

Now, I know my way around  Walt Disney World. After ten years, I know Magic Kingdom better than my hometown and I could navigate Epcot with my eyes shut. I was an expert at weaving in and out of crowds, finding the smallest gaps I could fit through to speed walk my way out of a park after the evening fireworks. I had parade times and routes memorized and I could find any character that was out at any given time.

In late August 2015, my husband surprised me with a weekend trip to Florida to show my 7-week-old off to my friends. I was excited to see how this would play out. Sure, I had spent countless hours working and playing in all four parks at Walt Disney World, but of course I had never once thought about the baby care centers or how inconvenient they might be.

While it was wonderful to see my friends and show them my daughter, going to Walt Disney World with a tiny baby in late August is probably one of the worst judgments I’ve every made. A newborn just wants to sleep, so my attempts to introduce her to the many chipmunks I knew were simply slept through, and the rest of our day was spent strategizing around the single baby care centers to nurse, all while worrying that my daughter would get heat stroke.

Magic.

But by spring break time this year, my daughter was 9 months old, and I had conceived an idea to have her wear a GoPro. I wanted to know what grabbed the attention of a baby at a Disney park.Was it the castle? The characters? The other guests? My daughter is very cooperative, so I figured I’d just strap a camera to her head and record what she saw.

She already seems dubious.

The most important lesson I learned from this visit to Disneyland is that getting a 9 month old baby to wear a GoPro is a silly ambition.

I present to you the full, unedited cut of Evelyn’s GoPro experience as we walked into Disneyland.

For nine minutes Evelyn shows little to no interest in the Disney magic and much more interest in thing taking place in her stroller. Her cookie, the wrapper for her cookie, her beloved stuffed cat Lala, and the GoPro itself are all much more worthy of inspection to Evelyn than characters or landmarks. If Evelyn appears to look at anything beyond her small bubble, it might be the trees. The video lasts until I meet up with my family for breakfast. After breakfast, Evelyn and I had to go searching for the baby care center to nurse (which of course is on the opposite side of Main Street, USA than it is in Magic Kingdom), and then she took a two hour nap in her stroller. We rode zero rides and saw no shows. Evelyn’s favorite part was meeting Minnie Mouse after her nap in Disney’s California Adventure.

I think I can tell what’s grabbing her attention here.

 

It’s worth noting that my daughter points at EVERYTHING. Sometimes she’s pointing at what she wants, sometimes she’s just pointing to point. Sometimes she walks around with her hand curled in a point, read to unleash it like a cowboy in an old western. But for nine minutes as she was being introduced to Disneyland, she points at nothing. Either nothing interested her or too much did and she felt overwhelmed.

My own experience at Disneyland was one of surrealism. I had entered the park with misplaced confidence. I was so sure  that DisneyLand would be nearly identical to Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World that I never bothered to look at a map before I left. Instead, Disneyland is just close enough to Magic Kingdom to be constantly disorienting, like a dream you might have about your hometown. Things look the same, but it slowly dawns on you that everything is just a little off. I spent the duration of Evelyn’s nap walking swiftly and confidently one direction before stopping to realize that I had no idea where I was.

After our baby center visit, we attempted to meet up with my husband and his kids in TomorrowLand. TomorrowLand in Magic Kingdom

The one thing that kept me from breaking down was that I had no desire to experience everything Disneyland had to offer. I wasn’t trying to ride every ride or make it from rope drop to fireworks with no breaks in between. My husband and his two older kids took off to find thrill rides, and I was content walking around with my daughter, just doing what seemed to make her happy at any given moment. Very few guests enter a Disney park with that mindset. I am left wondering is who Disney Parks were designed for. At first glance, one might think Walt Disney World was a magical playland made only for children. But I had only known Disney as an adult, and often felt it was made to appeal more to me than to children. The mazes and constant stimuli are truly only navigable by those whose senses had become deadened to them: the employees. The size of each of the parks was really too much for children to take in. What, in all that noise and color, would grab the attention of a small child?

Walt Disney designed his parks very deliberately with attention to detail that is often appreciated only on a subconscious level. The buildings on Main Street are designed with forced perspective to achieve the appearance of height without dominating the skyline. You are never more than 20 feet away from a garbage can in the parks, thanks to an experiment Walt performed on Disneyland’s opening day. Entertainment, refreshment, and attractions are laid out specifically to control traffic flow. Entire sections of bookstores are devoted to guides claiming to help tourists overcome these traps and enjoy the parks in the most efficient way possible.

What I have learned is that the most efficient to experience the parks is not to go with a plan, beyond maybe a mental note of favorite rides or characters you have to meet. The most efficient way to enjoy the parks is to enjoy the people you visit with and not worry about how much “theme parking” you get done.

 

 

I think if I could choose a profession in the Digital History world, I would be a podcaster. A close second would be a YouTuber, but podcasting you can do in your pajamas.

Look at me, referencing two weeks of topics at once.

Podcast researcher Todd Cochrane has declared that “Podcasts are in vogue.” I have been a poscast listener since I got my first generation iPod Touch in 2007, though my podcasting experience usually occurred at 3am when I couldn’t sleep, and I would search for keywords of things that might entertain me until I could fall asleep. My download to listen ratio was severely out of balance.

While podcasts had indeed become less popular, I’m still not sure if “in vogue” accurately describes podcasts today, but I also think that sort of thing is difficult to gauge. Unlike other entertainment media, podcasts are supremely personal. This is facilitated by the medium that you play a podcast on, usually your smart phone. No one can hear what geeky podcast you’re listening to. Also, podcasts are often (but not always) not a visual medium. It’s hard to share anything on Facebook that doesn’t have a catchy photo with it. Because of this, I don’t know of any friends who listen to podcasts. On Facebook, one other friend likes the one podcast I listen to with any regularity.

Cecilia King believes that a renaissance in podcasting has begun thanks to advertising. “The industry has withstood the disruption that the Internet wrought on newspapers and TV, partly in thanks to an enormous audience of commuters trapped in cars.” The added intimacy of the relationship the listener imposes onto podcaster allows the podcast to advertise products more effectively. SquareSpace and Audible have taken full advantage of this trusting intimacy. Audible, I get. If you like listening to people talk while you’re driving, you might like listening to these other people talk while you drive. But SquareSpace is less clear. Just because I like listening to a podcast doesn’t mean I’m looking to build a website, but so many podcasts seem to advertise SquareSpace.

As Ian Forty points out, “having nothing to say doesn’t stop most podcasts from existing.” And that is the biggest problem with Podcasts, YouTube channels, blogs and any other unregulated media platforms available online. Anyone can create a podcast and publish it, with minimal equipment and technical knowledge. On the surface this seems great because people can reach out and find others interested in their obscure hobby, but it also leaves the field open to a lot of poor quality shows and misinformation. Dr Larry Cebula remarks on a case of a historical podcast where the information was outdated and mildly racist, but admits that “the real culprit here–the historical profession, which has been slow to adopt new technologies and has left the digital path open to well-meaning but untrained amateurs,” which is an ongoing theme I’ve noticed as historians try to make sense of this frightening digital world.

Despite the hurdles to becoming a successful podcaster, I still feel that I would find a great deal of satisfaction with this art form. Before podcasts, EWU professir emeritus Tom Mullin used to have a weekly special on KEWU where he would have a 3-5 monologue about his life growing up in rural Wyoming. It was very well recieved, and it’s a shame they were broadcast before the popularity of digital media, and so are not available online. But I would love to do something like that, or like the Memory Palace podcast for a living.

As we’ve discussed before, data preservation is crucial. It can seem like a daunting task, one where software obsolescence is breathing down your neck, and threats to physical data loom large over our fragile photos and documents with every spark, and even patron’s greasy fingers.

So with the decision to preserve your data at the front of your mind, where do you begin? Do you digitize everything? How long will your data last once it’s digitized? Forever, right?

Maybe it’s time for you to go back to “How does a computer ‘work?’”

You may have noticed that electronics advance at a rate faster than you can buy them. It’s not just your iPhone 5 that is already useless. The software used to run your apps, as well as seemingly simpler programs that read your photos and your documents are quickly becoming lost to the ages.

More importantly than your insignificant personal data (because no one cares about pictures of your cat, or even the research you started years ago on the book you swear you’re going to finish), the publics‘s data must be preserved. Unfortunately, many of today’s public documentation is “born digital,” meaning that no paper copy of your records has ever existed.

No One Cares.

Washington State archivist Jerry Handfield believes that public records belong “to the people.” As Jerome P McDonough poignantly put it, “If we can’t keep today’s information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture.”

We can go ahead and lose this one.  

The Washington State Archives has attempted to prevent this egregious loss of culture by building their archives deep underground in a bomb shelter. The hope here is to prevent the loss of information in even the most extreme emergencies. But what is the everyday historian to do?

The answer is clearly for every historian to build a bomb shelter in their back yard to house their research. And probably to store at least once archivist to interpret your work to our future overlords.

 

The History of Humanities Computing is the introductory chapter by Susan Hockey in another outdated text book that includes such gems as, “How does a computer ‘work?'” and the mechanical components in a keyboard. The site uses frames, which although useful for a book format, severely dates it. A more modern approach would be drop down flash menus for the chapters or at least hidden frames. Hockey introduces us to several early computerized humanities projects of varying degrees of usefulness.

I also took the time to look at the chapter on film studies to see what projects were discussed. I was disappointed at the primitiveness of the project and ultimately, how little they meant. As one former EWU film professor explained to me once, “if you come up with one idiot program, have you arbitrarily contributed anything?” Being able to scroll through screen shots is a very limited advantage, and did little, I feel, to advance the study of film as an art. Computers have contributed innumerable tools to the filmmaking process, but if this book is an indication, it has given decidedly fewer tools to the film critic.

A slightly more useful digital humanities project was the Newcastle map project, which used old maps and paintings to recreate the town of Newcastle and chart some of its layout changes over time. While one may once again wonder, “is this useful?” the townspeople themselves seem delighted. “We are lucky to have so much information about our beautiful town,” remarks one citizen. It’s worth remembering that small digital projects have as much ability to delight as larger ones, and we should still be willing to help with projects even if we feel we won’t reach a large audience.

This was of course not the first attempt at the visualization of data. This honor was given to William Playfair in 1786, with his invention of the modern chart. The popularity of visual data rose slowly through the centuries until, as Shawn Allen points out, “people are suddenly interested in data” [data being defined as “information abstracted in schematic form.”]. Graphs and charts remained the most common method of visualizing data until very recently.

Today, visual data enjoys its popularity in the form of the infographic. Infographics have surged probably due to the ease of making them thanks to tools such as Photoshop and programs that allow you to convert your drawing to digital form more easily, and also due to the internet becoming more graphic heavy thanks to faster than ever download speeds. While some infographics, such as the Oatmeal’s infographic on the Mantis Shrimp or the website Daily Infographic, which posts a new infographic each day are harmless and innocuous, others should come with “Spoiler Alert” warnings by the links, because some of us are right in the goddamn middle of season 3 of the Walking Dead on Netflix and this could have ruined a lot for those people.

Fortunately it didn’t. Because if it had, I would have been forced to find out what you love and spoil the hell out of it.

Rosebud is the sled.

Oral history can be a useful tool in a historian’s search for truth. But is oral history as trustworthy as one would hope?

Oral history has made great improvement since its beginnings as simply transcribed accounts of events, to audio recordings of interviews and accounts, and today with video technology. But with these advances, one thing has stayed the same: the stories are still being told by humans, and humans are fallible.

History Matters brings up the point that “Early interviewing projects at Columbia and elsewhere tended to focus on the lives of the “elite”–leaders in business, the professions, politics, and social life. But oral history’s scope widened in the 1960s and 1970s in response to both the social movements of the period and historians’ growing interest in the experiences of ‘nonelites.’” Technological advances have made it easier to document the lives of nonelites. But have these advances gotten us any closer to the truth?

Elizabeth Loftus has spent years studying the human memory and its flaws. She has discovered that our memories aren’t as concrete and infallible as we would hope. The words we use in the questions we ask can influence how a subject will not only answer, but how they will remember an event.

 

So what can be done to ensure accurate portrayals of events in the past? Questions for an interview must be carefully worded so we do not influence the answers, regardless of our own hypothesis.  It’s also worth noting that as technology has improved, from simple, transcribed interviews, to audio recordings, to film, subjects may become increasingly self conscious. People have always wanted to protect their own interests, but when your face is going to be tied to your words, you’re going to be even more careful about what you say. You may say what you think the interviewer wants to hear.

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The Daily Show
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Lastly, the question on transcription and editing come into play. As we continue to study the nonelites, we will run into subjects who are possibly not the most adept with our own language. The View From The Bottom Rail transcribes the freedpeople’s words, but it leaves them sounding ignorant, including spelling words like “can” and “kin.” I think this goes beyond a search for truth into what is a mockery of these people. But sometimes it’s not that obvious. Sometimes there are small grammatical errors and factual mistakes. How should we as the historian deal with those issues? If you correct them during the interview, they may become more closed to you because you are talking to them as if they are uneducated, or as if you think you know the event better than they do. If you say nothing but change their words later, you can be accused of falsifying documents, something no historian should ever get caught doing. If you add a small note that some items are wrong, you might risk losing future interviews.

I don’t really have a solution for this last problem. But I think it’s something we have to think about when we set out to document the elites and nonelites alike.

If It Feels Wrong, Copyright

Thanks for Sharing.

Historians deal with copyright frequently. Sources are often old, and it’s hard to find out who a particular photograph or recording belongs to. But it is important to give credit where it is due because as Wikipedia puts it, “food and housing cost money; so authors, directors, painters, photographers, poets and other creators must find other jobs to support themselves if they can’t get compensated for their creative work.” But surely that doesn’t mean you.

Cracked.com explains in less than eloquent terms why taking something and slapping it on your blog is at best, terrible, but also, sorta illegal. Doctrow feels that “there’s nothing moral about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there’s nothing immoral about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV,” but Mark Helprin points out that ” in Jefferson’s era 95 percent of the population drew its living from the land. Writers and inventors were largely those who obtained their sustenance from their patrimony or their mills; their writings or improvements to craft were secondary. No one except perhaps Hamilton or Franklin might have imagined that services and intellectual property would become primary fields of endeavor and the chief engines of the economy. Now they are, and it is no more rational to deny them equal status than it would have been to confiscate farms, ropewalks and other forms of property in the 18th century.”

So we get that it’s wrong. We understand that people’s livelihoods depend on the public paying for their intellectual property… But we also really want to use their stuff for free. I think educators are incredibly guilty of this. It’s so easy to open up YouTube and search for documentaries on any given subject. You don’t have to order them, pay for them, or walk all the way to the library for them. But the people who worked on those documentaries will never know that you watched it, nor will they receive a cent for you and the classroom of 50 who watch your documentary on Pompeii. I have struggled with this issue all throughout my schooling, because I feel very strongly that credit should be given to the creators of works you appreciate, and educators seem to love YouTube. I fully understand a short clip to make a point, but a full-length documentary should never be shown. Besides breaking the law, you run into quality issues and ads. I recently had to watch a documentary in a class about the Industrial Revolution that the instructor could apparently only find in pieces, and so we watched it in 15 minute increments, complete with ads before some sections. Just drop the $20 on the documentary, already! The same instructor showed a documentary on Alexander the Great where the quality was so awful, the narrator was simply a flesh-colored block in a blocky red sweater. If you’re relying on these creators to make up 3-4 hours of your lecture time each week, you should feel obliged to pay them for their part in advancing your career.

The other issue that interests me, similar to Creative Commons laws, are artists who willingly give their art up, and where that falls legally. The TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 used to encourage fans to “Keep Circulating Those Tapes!” Now, while they’ve more recently explained what specifically they meant by that, and that making copies is still illegal, there was a time when this was more encouraged.

As law struggles to keep up with newer and better technology that makes copying and sharing easier, how will artists protect their works, and how will historians continue to write about history without breaking the law? More importantly, how will historians teach about history without breaking the law?

Dilution of Shared Culture: Is Crowdsourcing the Solution?

As a culture, we have become increasingly more fragmented. We can look at Television, Film, Music, and even the News to see this happening. In a time where a shared experience has become seeing more than one of your friends post the same article on Facebook, is it possible that Crowdsourcing projects such as the Library of Congress entering Flickr are attempts by our society to get back some of that shared experience?

If you look at Television, you can see the experience change from a few channels, where everyone who owned a TV would have seen most of the same shows begin to slowly shift over decades away from that shared entertainment. Cable came, and soon viewers had a few dozens of channels to choose from, but still remained united by staple viewing events like TGIF and Saturday Morning Cartoons. After satellite entered the mainstream, people had multiple feeds of channels, small niche channels, and international channels available to them. They no longer had to watch Boy Meets World simply because it was the only thing on. Shortly after that, DVR made it possible for people to record shows at the same quality that they were originally broadcast in, allowing yet a further step away from shared experience. Now, streaming sources such as Netflix and Hulu allow for a viewer to watch shows years after they have ended their run. I personally only have Netflix and Hulu+, and so cannot really share the live experience of television with my peers anymore. It has changed from a completely shared experience to one that is mostly personal. I’m only on season 4 of Walking Dead, and so cannot talk to people that have AMC about the show, because they are a season ahead of me.

Movies have had a different path but with many of the same results. Movies went to being a very short term event in a town, where you might only have a few showings before that particular movie moved on to the next theater, so everyone would watch it collectively in one town in just a few showings.  Soon more copies of movies allowed for longer stays in each town, spreading that shared experience out over weeks instead of days. When VHS arrived, people no longer had to go to the theater at all. They could buy or rent a movie on their own time, and watch it alone, in their own home. Today, Netflix gives you access to a huge database of online movies, some you may have never heard of yet. Additionally, YouTube allows you to watch clips from nearly every movie, which could help you understand an “in joke” from a movie without ever having to sit through it.

I don’t need to watch it.

Music has probably taken the biggest hit. When you had a radio, you could only listen to a song when the station played it, and you shared that playlist with everyone in your area. Records allowed you to choose only certain artists to listen to. Cassettes brought portability, and the Walkman. Your media now existed only for your ears only. CDs introduced the ability to listen to specific tracks, over and over with no effort. Music’s final steps were to move online, where iTunes allowed you to only buy single songs, instead of paying for a whole album. Pandora, Songza, and other “music curators” give us unlimited streaming music designed to our unique tastes. If you don’t like a song, simply hit the “thumbs down” and you’ll never hear it again. Finally YouTube once again, allows us to search for nearly any song in existence and listen to it for free. It has also brought to our lives many artists who were discovered on YouTube. Justin Bieber, Lana Del Ray, and Psy are just a few artist who owe their fame to YouTube.

Thanks, Internet.

Even the news has stopped being a shared cultural experience. We’ve come through local newspapers, radio, and television reporting on national events to several stations, all of which are accused of some bias or another. Online, you can get only the news you want, if you choose to get any at all. You can get your news from the networks’ sites, or sites of varying integrity and talent. Gawker, Huffington Post, 5 Things You Should At Least Pretend To Know Today, and the Onion are all sources citizens get their news from online.

News.

So my argument is this: Is crowdsourcing an attempt to get back this shared experience? Is Mr Lick This trying desperately to prove he is a part of the conversation, like that friend in the 90s who could simply say, “Rachel’s hot. I’d do her,” While the rest of you were discussing The One Where Rachel Finds Out?

Mise en scene

Never Forget.

Quite a bit of our time has been spent discussing the many merits or faults in digitizing history. It is indeed a debate that, at least among the historical community, still rages on. But what this feels like to me is spending so much time debating film versus VHS versus BetaMax. While it’s an important discussion to have a first, I’m ready to get to meatier issues. I think a lot of these debates will be settled shortly in favor of various digital formats. Technologies such as Google Books will continue to improve, and it will be time to stop worrying about whether or not scanned books are a legitimate source for research, and we can get back to studying the things that interest us most.

As we discuss various techniques for design and  How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell, it might be time to go back to the beginning and ask, “Do I have something to say? Is there a story here?” All the flash animations and pyrotechnics on the internet won’t help you if you don’t have a strong idea and realistic characters.

It takes a whole production team to make a successful movie, and it’s going to take more than one person to make a successful digital history project. Instead of reading text books that will tell us what fonts to use and encourage us to become fluent in html, perhaps it’s more useful to think of yourself as the director of your project. If you were making a movie, you would hire a cinematographer, and a separate editor and not find this unusual. Why should your digital history project be any different? You would still have creative control, but it should be totally expected that you bring on people that have a specific eye toward design when you might not.

And this is where I think the really conflict is for historians. Filmmakers have been going through this on a fairly regular basis since Train Pulling Into a Station premiered in 1895: As the equipment and resources get less expensive and easier to use, people who were not necessarily trained in the field become able to create. This can be amazing. Suddenly, people who are passionate about history are able to find rare books in Google Books and articles on the internet, and even without the funding of a university or backing of a museum, they are able to become historians. Innovations are made by people from other backgrounds. Of course for every Citizen Kane (Written, Directed, and Starring Orson Welles, who had no formal film training), there are plenty of Manos: The Hands of Fate (Written, Directed, and Starring Harold P. Warren, a salesman who made Manos on a bet. It is largely considered one of the worst movies ever made.)

Your website could go either way.

But is is worth stumbling upon several Manos before you find the Kane in the digital history field? I personally think it’s time to let amateur historians enter this new medium with us. They could being new skills and new ways of looking at the world, and perhaps truly change the way historians practice their art.

All About That Stuff, No Treble

Established Historians today are faced with a problem that might seem new to and disconcerting: the feeling that there is too much information. Author and historian Ann M Blair points out that this feeling actually accompanies any advances in information and communication technology. While it may be true that medieval scholars were also frustrated by the inundation of books, what can historians today do to ease their suffering?

Defining Digital History

Staying current and relevant will be one of the biggest and most constant hurdles for historians in the digital age. As we saw this week, many online exhibits are quickly become antiquated to the point of obsolescence.

The Valley of the Shadow site boast one of the earliest copyrighted online exhibits, begun in 1997, but the way we experience the internet has changed vastly since even the most recent date given, 2007. Websites need to be navigable, sharable, and interactive. The Valley of the Shadow offers none of these amenities. When exploring the site, it is easy to become lost in the many rooms and chambers. The site is searchable, but not easily. There is a no search bar on the first page, only if you first click into a room. If you were not sure of the exact date of what you were searching for, this would be a frustrating task, searching all three rooms. Some rooms are only accessible if you know what you are looking for already. The images warn that the full size pictures may take “several minutes” to load. Today, they appear instantly, proving once again that the site is many years outdated. While of course, you can copy the link in the address bar and paste it in an email or your Facebook status bar or download a browser plugin for sharing, websites today can make this easier by putting social media buttons on every page. Lastly, the Valley of the Shadow is distinctly missing a comments section anywhere on the site. This truly makes the sire feel dated. Where are the historians discussing battle maps with passion, comparing each other to Hitler?

Remember what most visitors are coming to your site for.

Another struggle for the modern historian entering the digital plane is the desire to define Digital History. The problem with this discussion is that historians are focusing on the medium, rather than the material. If you are utilizing digitization methods to experience history, you are participating in Digital History. The focus should be on the content and its accessibility rather than if it fits all possible definitions of Digital History. Some historians expressed this feeling, such as Amanda French is the Debates in the Digital Humanities, who when asked to define Digital History responded, “I don’t: I’m sick of trying to define it. When forced to, I’ll make the referent to the people instead of the ideas or methods–Digital Humanities is the thing practiced by people who self-identify as Digital Humanists.” However, many historians are bogged down by the desire to define Digital History.

I hope that historians will settle into the digital era and become more community-based. The more materials that are available and easily accessible online, the more opportunities everyone will have to learn.

Lastly, I will leave you with some images from Cracked.com editor’s recent video, 4 U.S Presidents Who Put Action Movies to Shame. I’m putting this up and linking to the video because I want to know how everyone feels about history being presented in this manner. Obviously it’s not aimed at an academic audience. Cracked.com is a humor website. But 97,472 people have watched this 8 minute video about presidents. Dan O’brien who wrote and narrated the video has written a book about U.S. presidents and his articles and videos are well researched. I just wanted to find out everyone’s thoughts on more pop cultural presentations of history.