So this is what I made today! It is a word cloud from a year of NASA press releases from Kennedy Space Center in the 1960’s. Voyant is pretty easy to use, but I wonder how much it can be used to tell the story you want to tell, because one can simply delete and delete words until it looks interesting. I used Adobe Acrobat to make my pdf’s more readable, then created text files and uploaded them to Voyant. I think this might be a good tool to use when dealing with a massive corpus of original sources, which NASA definitely has. I am excited and curious about the possibilities this kind of tool represents in my research for space history. There is so much information available in the public domain, and this could really help me narrow down my topics, as far as primary sources are concerned.
Category Archives: Projects
My Project
For my project, I’d like to use what we learned in the XML and CSS course to build a site with a table for organizing court cases related to censorship and obscenity trials. I figure information can be organized and sorted by plaintiff, defendant, date or year, whether the decision was a state or federal one (or foreign one, in one case), and whether the case was overturned by a later case. I would like to include links to brief summaries of the case histories (this is a history project after all). To give an idea of how many cases I’m thinking of using, the following have been among the most notable in previous research. They are presented in chronological order. Thoughts?
Regina v. Hicklin (1868) (English case)
Dunlop v. US (1897)
Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915)
Winters v. New York (1948)
United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948)
Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1952)
Gelling v. Texas (1952)
Alberts v. California (1957)
Roth v. US (1957)
Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964)
Freedman v. Maryland (1965)
Ginzburg v. US (1966)
Ginsber v. State of NY (1968)
Miller v. California (1973)
FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978)
Idea for Space History
In my main field of research, I am looking at the way outer space is viewed/handled in Soviet and U.S. culture in the 20th century. For instance, what happened in U.S. culture between the 1960’s and the 1970’s to change people’s perception of outer space conquest from admirable to unnecessary? How is this reflected in culture? How could I use digital tools to research these questions and represent the answers digitally?
From discussion with our class instructor, Dr. Church, I will find primary sources in public media such as newspaper articles and Time magazine archives; government sources such as NASA archives, State of the Union addresses etc. Text-mining, web-scraping and Python were mentioned. These are all tools and techniques that I will be learning in the next several weeks. I am excited to see how it all turns out.
Endless Possibilities
Just wanted to check in and see if anyone else Loves CSS and HTML. There is so much we can do with it and this is only the beginning. I think that learning webdesign has so much potential for the field of Public History. The “public” sees the world in these formats (i.e. web pages), so we should know how to show them history through the lens with which they are most comfortable. Accessibility is key here.
I do want to reiterate my earlier statements: I believe that this is the job of the Public Historian, not the Academic. We need trained professionals (digital historians) in academia to teach these skills for use by the public historian. It is easy to get lost in learning web design elements and lose what is important about what we are doing (or trying to do) as academics/professionals.
There is a great work that predates the digital revolution that is poignant to me as we work through these problems and you can access it here.
Now you may like this Christina!