DHM 280

In week five of digital humanities class we started to closely take a look at the items that were posted on omeka and gain a better understanding on the most formal way of submitting an item. We also jumped into finding a better location for a lot of the posts. For a lot of my own posts I put something that was written on the item without even thinking it may not still exist or would be clumped up into a broader location, making it not completely accurate. We were even shown after the google survey how many of the omeka items got clumped into the same spot on campus, when half of them were inaccurate. When you further research the location or the document, you can gain a better understanding where it took place and what it really was. After I looked back at a submission of my own, I figured out it was not even an event taken place in West Chester, it was actually in Norristown at a theater, so I had to go back in and edit my item to fix the location. Each class we are getting a better understanding on digital scrapbooking and how to go about it in a much more clear way.

This week we explored the concept of mapping, and how it helps scholars understand more about the nature/story of the items.

On Monday, when we discussed the concept of mapping and what it does for digital humanities, we explored how the Crustacean Period can explain why certain counties vote in favor of a political party. I remember being shocked by this discovery. It is fascinating that something so simple as a map of political parties per county can be explained by a period millions of years ago. It makes me question what other factors can explain the way counties sway their political views to one party.

On Friday we began mapping our items, and I will admit, it’s been conflicting. Most of the items I mapped were complex with their locations. For example, I would have an item that was labeled with a destination such as “West Chester, PA” which obviously, doesn’t give me much. The “Appointment card for Theresa’s Beauty Salon” is a perfect example of this problem. The card’s location was “West Chester, PA”, so I began searching for locations in West Chester that may be linked to a beauty salon. I found one location that stood out to me the most: “Theresa Paoletti Beauty Salon”. However, the salon has only been running for 36 years, so it wouldn’t fit under that destination. Therefore, I chose to identify the location as “West Chester, PA” since I had very little details on where else to put it. I’d rather be vague and inconclusive than specific and wrong.

Unfortunately, some of my objects were not able to be mapped. These objects mainly consisted of artwork and photography. One item that gave me the most difficulty throughout entering metadata and mapping is the “Decorated paper of a snowman in a winter scene”. The item has no context attached to it whatsoever. It is a flimsy piece of paper, most likely cut out of something and pasted into Joyce’s scrapbook. I have no idea where it came from, and honestly, I have no idea what it is. However, it’s quite pretty, and despite not knowing anything about it, I love how beautiful it is.

An item I also had trouble mapping was the “Program for the musical production ‘Ala Carte’ of 1947 in the form of a menu.” The item has an endless amount of location possibilities. I’m assuming the production took place in a theatre, but the question is what theatre? I can’t assume it was a theatre in West Chester, and I don’t exactly know where to put it. I even looked through the 1947 yearbook for any information. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything location wise, but I did find a picture of Joyce in the 1950 yearbook!

Overall, I’ve learned that mapping can be a bit difficult, especially with items with little context or details. However, with a lot of research and a few historical and modern maps, I believe I could map a few items with harder to find locations. 

This week in class we warmed up with the idea of hopefully adding a location to our items installed into Omeka. The first two classes of the week we really played around with just the possibility of seeing if we could put our items on a map. It was really to just get our ideas flowing and thinking about looking at our items breaking them down then critically thinking about the appropriate spots to place the items. Today in class, we broke down and started to map our inserted items. Today I looked at and started to place three of my items on a map. A football schedule, a soccer schedule, and a little poem titled “The Skater.” My items were challenging to put on a map. The football schedule was the easiest one to place. It was the home location of Westchester state colleges football stadium, then there were many other locations. I had the idea of just placing it on a map at the location of our football stadium. The home games were held there, and it was Westchester’s stadium so by default I figured it would be an appropriate location to mark it as. The soccer schedule had no games at home and just a bunch of away locations, so I did not know where to place it. It got me thinking about all the locations for the soccer and football schedule that had away locations. Yes, I could ballpark it and place these in the area, but which set location do I pick? Should I go back and research which games were the biggest, and set the location there? What do these locations say about Beryl foster? Did she attend these games? Visit these towns? Or was it something she might have just wanted to have the option to attend? The most logical explanation is that these are some events to look forward to if she had wanted to attend if she had nothing else going on. “The Skater” I believe is not mappable. It’s a picture of an ice skater and a mini poem with a name underneath it. I looked up the name of the writer I’m assuming and got nothing and then I looked up the lines of the poem and still did not get anything. I think it is one of those things that aren’t mappable, but I will ask for confirmation for sure before I just write it off.  

This week, I learned how to map the items I uploaded on Omeka from Joyce Murrow’s scrapbook. Mapping some of the items was really time consuming because you can’t always tell just from looking at the items where it was from. For example, I had to do some research for a napkin from the “Harrisbuger Restaurants.” I had to search for a restaurant that isn’t currently still around. After doing more research, I found out that the restaurant was located in a hotel in Harrisburg and was able to find the address. Another item I mapped was a coaster from the Fuhrmann and Schmidt Brewing Company. It already stated on the coaster that it was located in Shamokin, PA. That narrowed the search to that location and I figured out the place had moved around multiple times since opening in 1906. This made it difficult to determine what year the coaster was from. I then found a list of the company’s locations and found the address for the time period of the 1940s. There were a couple items that I absolutely couldn’t find a location for such as a handwritten receipt made out to Joyce Murrow. The receipt was a notecard with 5 payments each of $10, but could give no hints as to where it came from. I also had an item that was a notecard with a devil on it with the name of Bob Newlin. That information wasn’t enough for me to figure out a location as well.

This week we where learning about the importance of mapping. We went through our artifacts and look more into the location of the past. The process of look up my locations was easy for me. I was lucky enough my artifacts had the address. When i looked up the location i found it so cool that it was so local to me. I found most of my address i found where right in West Chester. The process of finding the the location was looking at your artifacts address if there was one and look it up on google. Not a hard process at all. I would take that and map in on Omeka. Lets say if i did have a artifact that did not have an address i would look for clues or content to help me. We learned in class this week that not finding an address is ok and that not all artifacts are findable. I was nervous hearing that but there not that much we change of the past. This past week in class has been one of my favorite things to do throughout the whole Omeka project. It is interesting to me and makes me feel like i am finding out about someone life.

For this blog post, the assignment was to play around with and figure out the mapping website and guide that was provided to us in class, as well as reflect on some of the lecturing and assignments this week. To me, this mapping website seems really easy to use and pretty self explanatory when trying to plot points on a map. I think it’s pretty cool that you can also view other points on the map other than the ones that you posted, as well as their exact points on an actual map on Pennsylvania. I also noticed that some of the metadata was plotted on the maps in places far away from West Chester which was interesting considering we found almost all of the metadata in the archives of West Chester in the early-mid 1900s. This put into perspective to me how important saving metadata is even today, because it was the reason we were able to create this map consisting of small artifacts that we have been studying. Saving and mapping metadata will help us in the future as well when we try to access artifacts from today’s world. I’m also particularly interested in the fact that we have now touched on the mapping side of digital humanities because mapping has been, is, and always will be an essential part of humanity, which means now that so will metadata. It’s cool that we get to live in the era in which mapping has become digital, and where we are able to do this from anywhere, such as the sixth floor of the library. Being able to finally see the process of collecting artifacts, from real life all the way back then, then turning it onto metadata, and then mapping it to be able to see where the actual event/function took place is a cool experience.

For most of my artifacts it was easy to map because it had the general location of West Chester State Teachers College. For example, the news articles I published. There was one other one that took place at Temple University for a Temple vs. Bucknell football game. Which I assumed because the ads in the program had Philadelphia street addresses. Another artifact was a program for a theatre in Philadelphia. The other artifacts however did not give a narrow enough location for me to figure out where to place them yet. For example, one of my artifacts is a cutout of a womans head promoting an ice cream shop/brand. All it says is the name of the shop and “excellent french ice cream.” Therefore, I don’t think I will be able to map that one as there seems to have been more than one location. Another one I think might be unmappable is a program for a ballet recital. It says, “State Teachers College presents Ruth Page and Frank Parker” with the date of the show being below. Other than that, I cannot seem to find anything else on the program that hints at where exactly the show takes place.

During the third week of Intro to the Digital Humanities, we began snapshotting images of old scrapbooks and uploading those images to the Omeka database. I received page 67 of Murrow’s Scrapbook. On this page there were three items, two menus’: one from Wil Wright’s and another from Knott’s Berry Farm Steak House. The third item was a wooden toothpick, still wrapped in its paper cover. The most interesting of these three was definitely the Menu from the Knott’s Berry Farm Steak House. I think this was the most fascinating since it shows an entire layout of the farm and a map of the farm’s surrounding area. On top of this, this menu provides an extensive history on the area providing much context to the native Americans that used to live around the area. I thought it was really cool to see how a menu from the past can provide so much information on not only that town but what was going on in America at that time and its rich history.

This week in Digital Humanities was a particularly interesting one. We spent our time in the library on the sixth floor at special collections where we learned how to photograph different items and upload them to a google drive. After this we were instructed to upload them to Omeka as metadata. This is a semi complicated process that took a while to get the hang of but was very interesting upon mastery. Labeling, titles, and processing the items to become metadata was a trial and error process as well. Having to figure out how far back some of the items originated from, as well as determining what the purpose of some of the items were was a long process that I was eager to reflect on this week. It was very interesting to see just how far back some of these items come from. My earliest item so far had been from the early 1900s, which was pretty cool to see something that originated so far back that the college had a completely different name. To reflect on how truly stunning of a find this was, I would also say that it’s truly astonishing to see something written on paper preserved this long, considering how many ways something like this could get lost. So much of our data and records are kept via computer or the internet now, so seeing and getting to interact with some of these items was a blast from the past and reminded me of when I was in elementary school only working with paper and pencil. Getting to see the history of my university and my community through documents that are perhaps 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 plus years old is something that I am lucky to be able to experience via this digital humanities class. Furthermore, being a part of the documentation process of this items for future students and scholars to discover makes me feel as though I am taking real strides to preserve the history of my university.