Josh Newsom's History 390 experience

I finally finished detailing John Knapp’s vitals on the spread sheet as well as documented the basics of all his pictures. Classes were cancelled after 7 pm today so I will have to wait until next week to fill in more for a post.

I finally got my Feedly set up this week, and I also received my soldier. Working on my soldiers spread sheet’s right now, here’s a link. My soldiers name is John Knapp. He went throughout New York and Pennsylvania in order to enlist according to his muster’s. Apparently he was born in Germany according to one of the documents and I’m still analyzing the rest so I’m sure I’ll find the city later on. He enlisted at age 19, pretty young by our standards today but was about average back then I’d say. When he tried to receive a pension he complained of deteriorating vision, hemorrhoids, severe indigestion, he has a rather large hernia in my opinion how ever which is probably the most serious of his injuries. He’s only about 5′ 6″ which is average for back then but I’m about a foot taller than him so he’d be a pretty small guy now a days. Some signatures on the documents were hard to read but luckily I have plenty of translations. He appeared to serve throughout all the years of the war as well. He has one son and was married once to a woman named Mary, originally Mary Seitz. His son’s name is A.J. Knapp born in 1872. I found an error in the translation for image 2994, It translates him saying his birth was 1864, but the original document states 1842 clearly. He had 3 sons total, two of which died at age 4 sadly. Haven’t found a record of his hair or eye color yet but I will continue looking. He finally passed in December 1924.

Early in the class we were getting introduced to HTML format and how to look at it by right clicking on most web browsers. For example you can see the HTML code for this blog post by switching between the ‘Visual, and Text’ tabs at the top corner of this text box. We later went on to see some differences between HTML and XML text formats. We then transitioned into how historians analyze the past. They don’t generalize  and try to make things relate like many social sciences. Documents and fragments are important to them but also it’s just as important to keep an open mind to what you don’t have. Later we looked over a ‘dear John letter’ giving me a taste of things to come for when we get our soldiers next week. Some advantages of DH (digital history) are: Capacity, accessibility, flexibility, diversity, manipulability, interactivity, hypertextuality. Some disadvantages are: quality, durability, readability, passivity, inaccessibility. What is most unfamiliar to the way we look at history I think is the way we can easily access everything through the internet. It’s all just the click of a mouse away. Next class we will be able to see our soldier and I think using our computers to analyze the documentation in front of us should be really cool because I’ve never done anything like that before. It’s going to be very interesting to track my soldier through his life that occurred a few centuries ago. I’ve also been trying to set up my rss via Feedly, however when I attempt to register it makes me sign up for a Google email. I’ve made about three different email accounts and every time I try to sign in with it the system tells me I’ve used the incorrect log in info when I’m sure I’m using the right info. I’m hoping to get to the bottom of this problem by next class so I can set it up.

1. Time Sharing- a system by which users at different terminals of a computer can, because of its high speed, apparently communicate with it at the same time.
2. Packet Switching- A method of data transmission in which small blocks of data are transmitted rapidly over a channel dedicated to the connection only for the duration of the packet’s transmission.
3. Batch Processing- a system by which the computer programs of a number of individual users are submitted to the computer as a single batch.
4. ARPANEt->RAND->NPL->CYCLADES led to the formation of the internet as we know it today.
5. TCP-IP Protocol- a code used to label packets of data sent across the internet, identifying both the sending and the receiving computers
6. Servers- a computer or program that supplies data or resources to other machines on a network
7. ISPs- Internet service providers
8. DARPA- the central research and development organization for the United States Department of Defense; responsible for developing new surveillance technologies since 9/11
9. NCP -> TCP- NCP became outdated by TCP on flag day in 1983.
10. IMP subnet

In week one we learned a lot about internet development and the basics on how it works. I found the two videos we watched to be very informative and taught me a lot about the internet that I really didn’t know to begin with. When researching myself on google I realized by having a pretty generic name I stayed off of most of the links to other search engines because there would generally be 3 other Joshua Newsom’s at least. That and not having a criminal history made me pretty low key. However I did find that I was on wikipedia because my great grandfather had made an entry for me and my mother on the page for the lineage for people with the last name Newsom. Other than that I found my facebook, twitter, and myspace but really nothing unexpected.