Josh Newsom's History 390 experience

This week class began by us working on our Omeka’s in greater detail than before to finish the project. It’s still a long ways from complete but I must admit I’m a little worried that I may not be cut out to make a high quality site accurately detailing John Knapp’s life. However, we shall see I suppose.

Later I went home to start chipping away at my project and with a little help from one of my friends in the class I realized it wasn’t as difficult as I had previously expected! My project is coming a long nicely and I’ve learned some interesting facts about John Knapp’s life and time with the NY 29th infantry as I dwell deeper into my research.

Text mining: reads a massive amount of material, machines are really powerful and efficient but not that smart when it comes down to it. It doesn’t comprehend meaning. We saw some interesting graphs when the lecture transitioned into google books Ngram Viewer.

Ngram was very interesting once I took a swing at it for myself. I liked using the tool and plan on using it again in the future when the opportunity presents itself.

We started class by going into great detail on a map of Harlem from the early 1920’s the documented arrests, housing trends in African Americans, and even 3 years of the life of a young man by using probation officers records. I found the railroad map of Nebraska over the course of 20 years from roughly 1860-1880 one of the most interesting maps we analyzed. We then looked at the history pin site, it was interesting to see the pins in locations like on top of major highways because it makes you realize they weren’t there 100’s of years ago it was probably just a dirt road. The next map we looked at was one of London’s past. Then we transitioned into designing our own maps using google. (Blog assignment: does the map give you a better sense of your soldier)

We spent a lot of time during class working on various data tables. The focus of this blog however is our weekend assignment of using DAYTUM to see what was going on in our day to day lives statistically. Also I need to use Gould to make another data sheet for my soldier.

Finally Finished up my Daytum for the weekend: http://daytum.com/Jnewsom is was pretty tough keeping track of everything due to the fact that I couldn’t get the app on my phone to work very well. However I do think it was overall a success

I did much more poor on the exam than expected, matter of fact it was my worst exam grade in my entire 3 years of college. Hopefully I can pull it off and finish the class strong however. We’re planning to go to Blenheim house next Tuesday hopefully, I’ll post about my experiences next week. This weeks class we set up omeka.com and I put up one document which was John Knapp’s first application for a pension. Hopefully using this website I can paint a detailed picture of John’s life after the war. Using one of the family tree sites, I think it was familytree.com, I found some pretty detailed information about his son who was living in PA still in 1940. Still working on finding outside info on john but since his sons time period was much more recent and closer to the digital age I can find detailed information about Johns legacy.

The midterm went smoothly in my opinion. The blog assignment for today was to write about what your soldier was doing after the war and John Knapp was living in Philadelphia PA for the majority of the time. The majority of his time was spent as an Iron worker after the war. Unfortunately this was very difficult for due to the fact that he had a rupture in his right side which sounds like a bad hernia that he had to wear a truss for. This apparently was cause as a result of heavy lifting. During his time after the war he had 3 children, only one of which made it to adulthood whereas the other two died before or around the age of 3.

I finished setting up my zotero and adding professor Robertson to the list of users who can see it. During class we visited the waybackmachine which we used to see what the mason site looked like back a bunch of years ago. After this we transitioned into talking about personal archiving. We spent a little time talking about backing up our computers and data as well as pictures, games, and all the other important stuff. The best practice to use this is the 3-2-1 method. We also learned about secure web pages and how to maintain our own security by using anti-virus software, not opening suspicious emails, use secure connections, and managing browser cookies. At the end of class we went over what we should know for the mid-term exam following spring break.

Today’s class, started out by listening to a presentation from a Blenheim representative. She gave us a lot of interesting facts about the history of the Blenheim farm. I found this presentation very interesting as she went into detail about the home, attic, and some of the soldiers graffiti and drawings in particular. Following this presentation we looked over some differences between sources vs sites. We learned to do some deeper digging about where the info comes from for sites we use. We also learned about how to identify a trust worthy source. Familysearch.org is a good source for research that I wanted to take note of to learn some new things about my soldier. Later we read and analyzed the ‘touched with fire’ article. It described the harsh conditions of the these soldiers experiences throughout the war. The diets were terrible, uniforms were in total disarray, illness was very wide spread, entertainment was crude, and along with all these decaying conditions morale was rapidly declining throughout the units. We learned about zotero later on in the class so I went ahead and downloaded that to google chrome. So far it’s been a useful tool for citing webpages that I’ve been using in this class and all of my others.

We opened up the class with a brief discussion on copyright’s which quickly transitioned into the ‘Why?’ slide/lecture. We discussed why we need to know our primary sources and be copy right compliant. Historical sources are fragmentary, the research is about collecting and combining sources to fill in the gaps starting with what are soldiers did in the war. We then began discussing primary sources which are directly about what you are studying. We went to the valley of shadows website and looked around for primary sources regarding the war. Some online primary source examples are American Memory, Google Books, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Later in the class we learned how to go to settings on google docs to see a translation using ‘OCR’ to see more clearly what our images say. We also watched a video on how google sends back search results, based on credibility, personalization, filter bubble, quality, algorithm, and other reasons. This led into us learning the best ways for us to search for details on our soldier using the web/ search engines. I found some interesting details regarding my soldier such as who led his regiment and a document saying some more specific details about his vitals. So far the project seems to be moving very smoothly and I figured it would be a little more difficult to find info on a soldier from 1.5 centuries ago but in reality it’s actually pretty simple. I’m sure more road blocks will come to follow but as of now it’s pretty simple.