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Assignments

Overview Of My Intern Experience For Digital Humanities Certification

At each internship this year, I achieved new skills and real world application from my course work for the digital humanities certification. The digital internship at the Smithsonian Affiliated Health Museum in Houston introduced me to museum work: The Health Museum At this internship, I developed a variety of skills that can be transferable to many careers. These skills included science communication to the general public, teamwork, and day to day museum exhibit planning with community outreach.  The Health Museum is dedicated to health education, so interning there gave me experience in developing educational ideas around improving health education and how to best communicate that education through podcasting, social media, or websites.

The Health Museum internship was unique, and I learned how a science-based museum works that do not own a collection or archive. I researched healthcare topics like sexual education with a science communication intern. I worked with museum marketing and reviewed how they deliver health education to the community, including a goal for expansion beyond the Houston community in a digital format. I also attended a Smithsonian conference virtually on digital exhibits and best practices for these exhibits. The exhibit-building and education mission at The Health Museum furthered my knowledge of the day-to-day communication and teamwork needed to start projects. While the podcast did not happen while I was there, the initial groundwork for a Health Museum podcast was started.

My next internship and to be closer to school was at George Mason’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media – Democratizing History through digital media (rrchnm.org). My work was on a specific project within the Center called Death By Numbers,  Death by Numbers. The research and transcription work on the Bills of Mortality exposed me to the first public health data from a different era in London. This experience gave me a unique perspective on public health trends that actually intersected with my interest in medical history and the fields of epidemiology and public health. I would argue that John Graunt may have been the first epidemiologist, and his observations from the Bills of Mortality are the starting point for the field. The Death By Numbers project is to be a computational database transcribed from over 8000 London’s Bills of Mortality. In the past, I had written a paper on the historiography of quarantine history, and this project directly intersected with that work. For this project, I wrote a blog about an outlier death of starvation during the plague year and hope to see it published soon on the website. 

As part of this internship, I researched the historical data to write a blog about starvation death during the plague year in London. Also, I proposed a poster to be done at a future conference on the beginning of the scientific, historical fascination with the numbers of male versus female births. This internship experience has been helpful for any historical job that requires critical thinking, problem-solving, and research skills in digital humanities for future conferences or papers.  My writing skills were significantly rusty from not being in class this semester, and honing a blog post with assistance from my mentor for this project improved my writing style for a humanities blog rather than the previous health science focus. 

Both internships did strangely intersect due to medical and public health, current and past. Beyond that, these internships involved using different digital tools. But both internships focused on modalities of dissemination of information like data visualization software or new web development platforms, like Hugo, to share digital projects or information. Both internships required significant teamwork and collaboration to achieve progress on the work. Because of these two different experiences, I have learned how to better function in teams and improve my historical research skills in different ways, one for current public health information and how to improve general public outreach and the other for database work for historians interested in the public health history of London, or the plague, or history of numbers.

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Assignments Graduate Work

Blog Post 4

Post 4:  What are you doing that seems to be successful in the internship?  Challenging? How can you address these challenges?

One success has been the engagement of science communication with history. Being part of an interdisciplinary team engaged in teaching health to the general public in a museum-type format is a significant endeavor. In light of anti-vaccine sentiment and misinformation about science within political rhetoric, the work of factual education to the local community by the Health Museum has given me hope about the success of information through a museum-type format.  Initially, I used more of my current job skills in this role than in a historical or digital humanities position. The project decided upon as a sexual education topic in light of the need to start the conversations for parents and educators while also making it enjoyable can be successful by adding a little bit of history to the discussion.  I teach everyday information about sex education to individuals from a medical standpoint.  Those skills translate very successfully to a project on sexual education for the general population. Medical knowledge is relatively dull as a podcast or education, though. 

I would like to add the history of sexual education to make the podcast more interesting to listeners. The background history of sexual education was initially called sex hygiene to not offend people. The controversies about teaching sexual education started in the United States in the early twentieth century.  There was an intersection with morality, eugenics, and std prevention, especially syphilis.  Physicians have been dealing with how to treat this disease for many years without educating the public. This started to change in 1910. The history of sexual education is fraught with controversies about who teaches, how, and with what purpose. Those same controversies are still very present. I researched for Washington DC beginning efforts to prepare sexual education and found a lot of information about this topic. I hope to write up next semester as a side medical history blog.  

At times, the challenges have been about my current job skills taking precedence over learning digital skills for the team as I have coordinated meeting with the University of Texas Public Health School and their research work for teaching sexual education with research results. I hope to be able to use their expertise in a shared podcast or project. The other successful yet challenging things that seem to be working are weekly brainstorming meetings and people with different goals within the limits of budget, museum work, and marketing. 

Other challenging aspects have been the remote format.  I cannot be there every day in Houston, Texas, nor have I been assigned to do social media or any other digital communication. I can address these challenges and ask for more work. My mentor has been open to taking the project into controversial subjects like sex education due to the need for fundamental challenges to misinformation and political rhetoric. The project work is challenging in coming up with a definitive pilot, and we are addressing the logistics, the script, and the research as a team. The research being done by me is historical-based and online only. I have not visited any Smithsonian archive material for this podcast so far. The material culture for sexual education does exist as the first birth control pills and medical ads, and I plan to address this within the podcast or in addition to links on a Youtube or wherever the podcast is to be published. The other challenge is the museum’s focus is science based rather than history. I want to focus on history as an extra educational piece to make the podcast more entertaining, and that is my interest in medical history speaking here. So, I may do a blog on that piece separate from the podcast. I am addressing these challenges for myself and within the team’s work on this project.

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Assignments Graduate Work

Blog Post DH Internship

  • Post 3:  What new skills are you developing? Have you identified other skills to develop in the future?

As a closet introvert who has to act like an extrovert online, the skills in engagement and brainstorming with others are being developed every week with meetings. Being an intern at a science museum rather than an archival museum has had its challenges. Struggling to develop a valid project around sexual education has been the goal for this semester and at this time it has turned into a potential podcast around sexual education, sexual education history (USA history focus from me), and sexual health communication. My fellow intern is getting her degree in the form of science policy and science communication which has identified new skills for me to develop for a general audience. 

Communication of complex biological concepts is a limited skill that I have on a day to day basis from a medical point of view but not in a creative format. It is important to develop better communication skills and educational skills for a larger audience using some of the information we learned for the digital certificate over the summer. Teaching through online media or conveying information whether through podcasts, social media, video can be boring if strictly factual and scientific. The audience engagement required for health education like interactive parts of the body at The Health Museum or a controversial topic, like sexual health and sexual education requires a fine line between communication skills, education, and entertaining material to improve retention and learning. 

The new skills I am developing at this juncture of my internship are soft skills in teamwork and collaboration for project ideas that my remote location from the museum has somewhat limited. Digital fluency has been a goal for the Health Museum, and that skill is a large and broad one for myself in regards to social media outreach, website building, and graphic design that I do not have the skills nor computer science skillset to perform. The skills to learn how to do graphic design, website building, or coding have not been my educational focus, but developing some fluency in each is a goal. My Master’s degree pursuit and current education have been strictly researching and writing history. This is why we (myself and my mentor) have switched gears to a podcast format on sexual education instead, alongside a fellow intern with a science educational background.  The hope is to further develop website content and communication skills for a general online audience that helps educate and entertain creatively. 

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Assignments

DH INTERNSHIP

When I applied for a digital humanities internship, who knew I would go through the “match” again? For people unaware of Match Day, it is the day each year that every graduating medical student learns where they have been matched to do their residency training. Match Day 2022 at McGovern Medical School (uth.edu). Applying for my digital humanities internship was not quite as daunting, but it was a Match-like endeavor. I filled out my goals and ideal training, what I have learned so far, my CV, and my digital projects. My digital humanities “match” is at the Health Museum in Houston, Texas. It made sense to be matched at a Smithsonian Affiliate Museum whose Mission is to foster wonder and curiosity about health, medical science, and the human body.

My role as an intern is with the guest engagement department, and the current goal is to expand digital engagement about the museum with their mission statement always top of mind. The plans are to have me work with a science communication intern and marketing department to develop a specific digital project with focus groups, social media engagement, and either video or website format that educates on sexual health, birth control, and health policy around these topics. The physical museum does not have traditional archives but is based on an interactive science museum. The goal and my work as an intern will be to help this department increase visibility of the museum in the digital space and educate a larger audience on one or all of these topics. We brainstorm and now have weekly meetings for the final goal, project, and development. I hope to be able to access Smithsonian archives to assist in the build and plan to do this education either through social media tools or creative modalities online. I am excited to expand my knowledge on focusing on a target audience, tailor the information based on that audience, and learn how to apply those tools to get engagement with the museum in the local community of Houston but also to a larger audience to foster education rather than misinformation about health.

The Health Museum

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Assignments Software Tools Tools

Word Cloud of Summer Blog Class Posts 2022

Word Cloud From Voyant.

Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Cirrus”, Voyant Tools, accessed July 2, 2022, https://voyant-tools.org/?categories=853c7c65560b565369c1c9d2b36b3a24&visible=105&corpus=4827e509dd3cd151a1868d76052a5b4f&view=Cirrus.

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Assignments Graduate Work

Project Promotion

Made with Adobe Illustrator and Canva

Source: The Woman Patriot. January 4, 1918. Google Digitized Book. Public Domain

Suffrage Watch Fire or Riot?

What was a watchfire? How were these demonstrations reported in the press? Anti-Suffragists called it riots, see photo below of the watchfire. Lesson will include historical evaluation of these events and at least three primary sources.

Watchfire Image Library of Congress.
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Assignments

Movie Review for Project

Write a blog post addressing the following:

FILM METADATA: List the basic information (metadata) about the film, including title, year, producer, and how you accessed the film. If this film is based on primary or secondary sources, mention that as well.

BIG THEMES: Think carefully about the big themes related to this topic. How does the film portray those themes? What is historically accurate and what is historically inaccurate?

KEY MOMENTS: Describe 2 key moments in the film [up to 5 minutes per moment] that either addressed the larger themes or were especially important in the representation of the historical moment or event. Include the time stamp for the two moments.

TEACHING AND LEARNING: Having evaluated (or reevaluated) this film, would you use it in your history education context? How would you introduce the film and issues of historical accuracy? What questions would you pose? What questions would you want learners to ask?

Iron Jawed Angels (TV Movie 2004) – IMDb

Film Metadata: Iron Jawed Angels: Lead, Follow, Or Get Out of the Way

2004

Director Katja Von Garnier

Playing on HBO MAX June 2022. 

Primary Sources: Jailed for Freedom by Doris Stevens and multiple images on Library of Congress.

Big Themes: The film portrays women in the National Women’s Party with a biographical focus on Alice Paul. The themes are the suffragist’s protests, the arrests and the women at the Occoquan Workhouse when jailed, and hunger strikes with Alice Paul being force-fed. The movie ends with the passage of the 19th amendment, and it comes across that this occurs totally due to these protests with Woodrow Wilson being against the suffragists the entire movie.  Historically, hunger strikes did occur, and suffragists were sent to jail from their silent sentinel for the fake charge of obstructing traffic. The charges were considered harsh and arrests at first led to women being let go to actual imprisonment during their protests in World War I. In an early scene for one of the suffragist’s parades and the violence to the suffragists, did occur.  The parade route at the beginning of the movie did get violent, in fact, Congress had a hearing to investigate the DC Police for not protecting the suffragists in the parade.  Big Theme is violence and arrests to peaceful protestors.

Key Moments: Several key moments in the movie included that convey what the women of the National Women’s Party went through to push for the vote for women include:  the parade where the suffragists are attacked by the crowd, arrests of the suffragists continuing the silent sentinel efforts during World War I, and when Alice Paul is being questioned by a doctor for her sanity since she is on hunger strike in jail and he stated that she is not insane Time Stamp : For the parade and violence against them 21:10 to 25:50, which leads to the newly inaugurated President to meet with them. Then the violence against the women during World War I and the arrests is at 1:17-1:23 with prison and putting on prison clothes. (The women later took those prison clothes and went across the country to bring awareness on the issues and how they were jailed for protesting nonviolently). Watchfire/bonfire is at time stamp 1:30. Alice Paul being questioned by doctor on insanity and his report to Woodrow Wilson that she is not insane and was like Patrick Henry. “Give me liberty or give me death.” ends at 1:38

Teaching and Learning: I would use this film for history education as the women in the National Women’s Party did do these protests. In fact, this movie has a long lesson plan and evaluation on a website called Teach with Movies. This movie did show one watchfire scene (which is the focus for my lesson plan) and they get arrested and sent to jail. While in jail, Alice Paul is separated from the other suffragists and goes on hunger strike until she was forcefully fed. Questions I would hope from students. Did this really occur? What really happened to the protestors? Who was Alice Paul? What was her importance? Was Woodrow Wilson truly that obstructionist to suffrage? 

My questions would be:  Did their efforts help or hinder the suffrage cause? Assignments could be to support either stance based on primary sources. The movie makes it seem that the National Women’s Party efforts are what achieved success and leaves out the significant work done and made by NAWSA in Congress. There is a full lesson plan for this movie done very well on a website. Other questions could lead a student to analyze how protests from the past are similar or dissimilar to today? How did these white women treat native American women and black women who wanted the vote? The politics of each individual senator and lobbyist efforts by the NAWSA is not delved into like the primary documents. In Congress there was a significant overlap in prohibition and anti-prohibition, “states’ rights” and that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee the right to vote and that each state should decide on women’s suffrage.  What recent Supreme Court brief touches on these same themes that were against a federal amendment for a woman’s right to vote? 

Iron Jawed Angels – Teach with Movies

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Assignments

Third Piece of Puzzle

Third Puzzle Piece

So far, I have found a primary source from each organization that I want students to analyze and think about the words used in these sources to describe demonstrations, the President, and propaganda in light of World War One. These sources are long and will have to be narrowed to specific protests; I may narrow them down to the peace talks in France in December of 1918, as this was when the National Women’s Party escalated to the watchfires. There are not many descriptions in the newspapers of these events, maybe due to the overwhelming coverage of Woodrow Wilson in France. 

 One, The Front Lobby, describes the work of the lobbyist of the NAWSA, and she explains how the suffragists worked in Congress to get support for Susan B. Anthony Amendment. In this source, the work of the NAWSA is contrasted with the “militants” of the movement. The second source is the book, Jailed For Freedom as the source from the National Women’s Party. This source described the work by the National Women’s Party, the “militant” suffragists with their DC silent sentinels, to the watchfires and protests from 1917 to the passage of the 19th amendment. The third source is “The Woman Patriot,” a DC newsletter written by anti-suffragists who described the activities of the suffragists as riots, socialists, and pro-German and anti-patriotic. 

Other sources I have found and plan to incorporate possibly are the African American paper, The Washington Bee, and additional newspaper articles about protests in Washington, DC. I also will contain links to all the different websites that include further information on the overall history of suffrage. This lesson is limited to the years before the passage of the 19th amendment and the language used by the different groups with propaganda during World War I and after. Images I also plan to use are pictures of the watchfires, which are limited but need to be included and can be analyzed along with the primary documents. I will help the audience with the images based on the dates and background of World War I dates since this is a focused segment on woman suffrage and anti-suffrage. 

Document Sources so far

Park, Maud Wood, Carrie Chapman Catt, and National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection. Front Door Lobby. [S.l.: s.n., 192, 1920] Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/93838361/.

Stevens, Doris. Jailed for Freedom. United States: Boni and Liveright, 1920. Library of Congress. 

The Woman Patriot. United States: Woman Patriot Publishing Company, 1918.mGoogle Digitized.

Richmond times-dispatch. [volume] (Richmond, Va.), 02 Sept. 1919. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045389/1919-09-02/ed-1/seq-4/>

Images

These images in the list may be used for this lesson plan, and is not the final list. These images show the events of the suffragettes who picketed at the White House, a political cartoon, and an ad. All of these were during or immediately after World War I. I would also like to find anti-suffrage images to add to the lesson for analysis. The challenge I am seeing is—ok, so I have these different sources for evaluation. What do I want the class and objectives to be? What website do I want to develop? Omeka or Google sites?  What will the website do? Do I make it interactive or just a lesson plan to compare the sources? With the focus on DC, Virginia, and Maryland, I could also add a segment. For example,  find a voice from either side and write an analysis of how you researched the person, where she was within which group, and her importance. There are many women in the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, the Suffragist (National Women’s Party), Maryland Suffragist News, National Women’s Suffrage Association, and the Woman Patriot and Women Opposed to Suffrage that could be researched and discuss their contribution to their organization. I also want to show how World War I and suffrage propaganda helped further their cause. At the same time, anti-suffragists also used World War I terminology and words in opposition to women’s suffrage. Women’s suffrage was supported in the Washington Bee, and African American newspapers that could also be added despite the racism found in the documents by all three organizations. 

[Two suffragettes and bonfire at front gate, White House, Washington, D.C.] (loc.gov)

“American Justice” (loc.gov)

3c13716r.jpg (640×512) (loc.gov)

Harris & Ewing, Washington, D.C. Party watchfires burn outside White House, Jan. United States Washington D.C, 1919. Jan. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/mnwp000303/.

The Washington times. (Washington, DC), Jan. 9 1918. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84026749/1918-01-09/ed-1/.

Harris & Ewing, Washington, D.C. Suffrage demonstration at Lafayette Statue to get the last vote in the Senate before June 4. United States Washington D.C, 1918. [Sept. 16] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/mnwp000191/.

Harris & Ewing, Washington, D.C. Party watchfires burn outside White House, Jan
. United States Washington D.C, 1919. Jan. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/mnwp000303/.
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Assignments Graduate Work

Second Thoughts of Puzzle Piece

Digital media of primary sources and the ability to evaluate the use of words to tell a narrative allows students to dissect the narrative about specific events, like the final years before the 19th amendment. Digital media with the digitization of images, congressional records, and newspapers allows the student to evaluate the anti-suffrage movement and the choices of their words to fight the protests and lobbying efforts of the NAWSA and National Women’s Party. I plan to focus on the DMV area and the local efforts by anti-suffrage groups, specifically the publisher and the newsletter called “The Woman Patriot.”

The Woman Patriot newsletter continued after the 19th amendment passed. The arguments within this newsletter reveal propaganda associating suffragists with socialists, feminists, Bolsheviks, and pro-German during WWI. Allowing a side-by-side comparison of word usage like riots, pro-German, socialism, feminism, and militant from anti-suffrage to suffrage newsletters could allow word and topic modeling within the texts. This may shape my final project as word usage in newsletters, lobbying efforts, and protests could be compared. Both sides used the background of patriotic propaganda of World War I to further their cause. In the Woman Patriot, the outline of what they stood for clear. Women were to be the stewards of the home and not involved in politics. This was the best way to honor the men fighting in World War I. E By exploring the words used by the three main groups, DC anti-suffragists, NAWSA, and National Women’s party, the student can analyze how the World War I propaganda were part of these newsletters that have all been digitized. This shapes my final project pitch based on how students interpret these different primary sources and think about how the words used during World War I were employed by anti and suffragists alike. The digital programs to do text analysis of the documents of “The Woman Patriot” and newspapers could be run through voyant or Mallet for topic modeling only if I can teach myself quickly enough in time to see this data visually and if this helps teach students about how to look at the suffrage movement in context of anti-suffrage, especially in Washington, DC. Interestingly, there are quotes from Capital police when arresting suffrage demonstrators who talked about how they do not have the vote either since they live in DC. Just an interesting tidbit I ran across about suffragists being brought down to the level of a DC resident.

Realistically, for this class and the short amount of time, a more teaching type of exercise may include a museum type exhibit of images and several textual primary sources on the one event of burning Wilson’s speeches and how this was described based on anti-suffrage versus the competing suffragist groups. “The Woman Patriot” termed this event as a riot and other sources described this event as a protest, or militant protest and have the student evaluate the different primary sources to contextualize and form their own narrative about the event and if these events helped or hindered public opinion about women’s suffrage could be a good lesson plan.

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Assignments

History Teaching for Historical Thinking

History teaching has changed in the late 20th and 21st century with the digitization of primary sources and the free-flowing access to information on the internet. While this has improved students’ access to information, especially college students who can access paid databases that their respective college subscribes to, it does not necessarily teach how to do a good analysis of these sources. The importance of history teaching is the same as it was when Carl Becker’s addressed the American Historical Association and described that everyone is a historian.[1] At the heart of history teaching, is how to teach students to think critically about sources within the context of the time they are written. With the improved access to primary sources due to digital access, this teaching has become even more fundamental.  If you agree with Carl Becker that everyone is a historian, then teaching history in this way will help everyone think more critically about their own past and the country they reside in.

Over the last twenty years, history teaching has attempted to evolve from coverage teaching of facts within textbooks, to teaching historical thinking about sources and narratives.  A significant push for historical thinking is from SoTL, Standards of Teaching and Learning. “Early on, history SoTL specialists realized that one of the most important tasks in front of them was replacing the coverage model’s understanding of what it means to be proficient at history—which unintentionally reinforced public misperceptions of history as important things that happened—with new understandings of expertise based on how historians think and tuned to how people learn.”[2]History textbooks in the United States have overall been mass-produced by four major publishing companies and do not truly teach historical thinking. [3] External constraints on teachers by the few narratives in USA history textbooks can be alleviated by digital access to sources, alternative narratives that are made free for teachers and students, and continued dedication to encouraging the questioning of narratives. The AHA Tuning project is a way to assess teaching and learning about history that adopts technology and techniques to improve and measure historical thinking.[4]

Digital techniques for assessing primary sources through analysis using computer-generated programs like word analysis and networks within primary documents is just one example of 21st century learning that can help teachers escape the constraints of textbooks. Many digital humanities and websites also have learning plans and exhibits online that expand the narrative on events or people to help learners develop historical thinking skills. These new techniques for teaching history with a focus on digital content that can improve teacher skills for historical thinking allows a freedom of expression away from standard textbooks and are an adjunct to text and primary source analysis.

[1] Edward L. Ayers, Everyone Their Own Historian. Journal of American History Volume 105, Issue 3, December 2018, Pages 505–513, https://doi-org.mutex.gmu.edu/10.1093/jahist/jay276

[2] Lendol Calder and Tracy Steffes. “Measuring College Learning in History.” Social Science Research Council. May 2016.

[3] Hyde, Anne. AHA History Tuning Project: 2016 History Discipline Core. American Historical Association. 

[4] Lindaman, Dana, and Kyle Roy Ward. Introduction History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History. New York: The New Press, 2004.

Categories
Assignments Graduate Work

You will write a blog post that explains the argument of your final project and the intellectual and practical justifications for the choices you made in creating it. How will you evaluate your work?

When I started this project, I was initially focused on learning who the eclectic medical doctors were. I stumbled upon their textbooks, which is another story to tell, but needless to say, I opened them, and inside were pictures that looked like any other medical textbook from the late 1800s. I googled eclectic medicine and went to the Wikipedia page as anyone else would do. The men who wrote the most texts, Dr. John King and Dr. John Scudder, were two prominent physicians of the largest medical school, the Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati. Dr. John King wrote the over 1400-page American Eclectic Dispensatory detailing how to make different plant-based compounds for diseases. These physicians prided themselves on being experimenters and following science to help bring people back to health. The history of medicine as being behind the other sciences is a very true story. People do not realize that the ancestors of physicians today were still taking lancets to make patients bleed and giving them mercury and poisonous compounds even into the gilded age. The eclectic physicians were not homeopaths, but plant-based medicines from the Americas were used in complex formulas similar to homeopathic medicine. My argument for my final project was to shed light on who they were, examples of their treatments, and cost. The practical justification for limiting to a few female cases was strictly the access to what I had received from the Lloyd Library Archives. I wanted to know more about Dr. John King since he was a professor in obstetrics and gynecology for thirty years and had asked the archivist if I could have some pictures of a few interesting female cases later in his career that also showed cost. With those parameters, I built the website around those three cases to teach who the eclectic medical doctors were and how they treated women. My final argument was while they claimed to be scientists, Dr. King did not escape the moral standards of the time. Female symptoms were treated as nervousness (when a woman could not even walk), a widow who now masturbated needed treatments to counteract sexual feelings. A complex case with symptoms similar to a coronavirus was treated for over three months with various complicated regimens requiring her to drink a wineglass full of mixtures and pills. Of course, the patient gave it up.
Interestingly, Dr. King would have taught many female medical students compared to other medical schools of the time. Dr. Haller lists these graduates in his work and many women went but did not necessarily graduate. The first female physician from the institute subscribed to the same eclectic beliefs as did many regular medical doctors of the gilded age, who taught that masturbation would lead to insanity and even death. As a historian, visitor traffic will be essential to ongoing interest and success in evaluating my work. I think the website will appeal to people interested in quack medical history, but I may not get much interest from the general public. It is a very specialized subject with a significant amount of text, plus the background knowledge of medicine of the 19th century will make it less accessible to the general public. Medical historians who know how slow medical science was to catch up to the rest of science will understand the website.
As far as website design, the omeka foundation theme has a better mobile experience than the other classic templates. It has some issues on iPhones but not on android. The other problem is getting a secure web address, and I may need to change the attribution on the site, so people do not take the images without attribution to the Lloyd Library. Without the help of the archivist, the website’s argument and the story would not have come to fruition. When I had polled non-medical audience members, the history of female sexuality and hysteria helped change this website and argument. The other evaluation of my work is the education piece. Why did these people matter? What is the answer to the So What? The women of the 19th century who paid a significant amount of money for these medical treatments show that they were not unlike anyone of today. Hope for a cure for a medical illness and will try complex herbal therapies to achieve health is no different than modern medicine. Eclectic physicians recommended exercise, walking, or hiking as the best way for women to stay healthy, and if health faltered, only then would intervene. These physicians were part of the history of alternative medicine that has not gotten much attention from historians. Dr. John Haller is the exception, and I hope getting this information onto a website will drive more interest into this branch of medicine that was in existence for almost one hundred years.

John S. Haller, Jr. | History | SIU

Welcome to the Lloyd – Lloyd Library

Categories
Assignments Graduate Work

The Relationship Between Audience and Public History Website Content

Graduate students in history are a distinct audience for public history projects that do not always reflect what the public would like to see in a history website or museum website. Tailoring your public history project based on your historical research interests does occur because of the enthusiasm to share the knowledge with others. But I also recognize that my research in the history of medicine may bore the public or people not interested in medical history. How do I increase an audience for these topics of history? Not everyone will be interested in your research. Everything has a history, but not everyone will care to learn about it.

The relationship between academic historians and public historians can also be evaluated as analogous to this conundrum of interest for the public.  The discourse about what is important content for graduate students versus everyone else was discussed by Ronal Grele in 1981. [1] Unfortunately, for myself being in an academic environment may also limit my perspective and limit my project to a monograph-style blog of information. The discourse between academic and public historians can and has been evaluated in different areas of the profession. In Denise Meringolo’s work, “Museums, Monuments, and National Parks,” she has assessed the public historian as a government worker whose role is fundamentally an interdisciplinary one.[2] Digital public history projects with a larger audience are traditionally interdisciplinary between computer scientists, website designers, historians, and even social media influencers. For a regular graduate student, with a lack of capital, the audience is relatively limited even with a Twitter presence, as influencers will pay to have their tweets and websites promoted that a graduate student cannot afford. That being noted, public historians can promote their work on social media for free and increase public history websites’ visibility among the public.

Historians have a duty to fellow historians and the public to bring facts and their interpretation into all types of work, whether the academic journal or the public history Twitter feed or website. Audience evaluation to tailor content for a primary and secondary audience has been done for digital history projects that continue the role of interpretation of the primary sources. An example of this work is the website, Mallhistory.org. On their website of how this project was built, is a page about who the primary and secondary audience was. The secondary audience was fellow historians and fellow enthusiasts. [3] Using this example and description of the process is an open dialogue of how the team built the website and the sources used. This is not unlike a traditional academic paper, that cites the work in a way that any fellow historian can follow to check the validity of the argument from the sources.

With the historical content and method secured as fully transparent for the reader of any academic historical work, so should the public history project. The public history project has the added caveat of evaluating its end-users for the project and design. This gives an added challenge and dimension for the sole producer of public history projects. Unlike the solitary academic journal article, interdisciplinary work is a more common pathway to successful digital projects. Website designers evaluate their audience before total production and storyboarding with this work. Helpful articles about audience-directed content are by website designers. There are multiple helpful guides to research for a primary audience, including interviewing and persona development. The interview advice given by Erika Hall in 2013 holds true for today. Avoid leading questions and get out of the way when conducting interviews with your primary audience. [4] Doing the interviews, research, and developing personas took ample time. Persona development was something I had never learned about nor done. [5] In this exercise, you make up people who would be your audience. While I interviewed men for the audience, I made my two personas into two women from two different demographics and careers that reflected who I thought best represented my primary audience for this website.

[1] Grele, Ronald J. “Whose Public? Whose History? What Is the Goal of a Public Historian?” The Public Historian 3, no. 1 (1981): 40–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/3377160.

[2] Meringolo, Denise D. Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History. 154. University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk1kt.

[3] Brennan, Sheila and Sharon Leon.” Audiences” in “Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. October 2015

[4] Hall, Erika. “Interviewing Humans.” A List Apart. Published on September 10, 2013. Published in Just Enough Research. A Book Apart, (2013).

[5] Goltz, Schlomo. “A Closer Look At Personas: What They Are And How They Work (Part 1).” Smashing Magazine. August 6, 2014. 

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Assignments Graduate Work

Website Research for Spring Semester 2022

For Spring Semester 2022, I am working on a small public history project on the professors and textbooks of an alternative medical school in the late 1800s called the eclectic institute of medicine. These textbooks illustrated the competition with allopathic medical schools and used multiple quack herbal drugs from North American plants.  Developing a project for medical history for this semester expands on the knowledge I learned in my Intro to Digital Humanities course. In this work blog post, website audience research included interviewing representatives of my primary audience. In these interviews with primary audience members and even some secondary audience people, I learned that interest in medicine ties into living during a pandemic.  All of the target audience is interested in the medical history of the past as we recognize that we are also living in a moment of medical history. The nineteenth-century saw a considerable shift in knowledge in medicine towards the end of the century with the discovery of bacteria, vaccinations, and pasteurization.  Despite the trend towards scientific knowledge and professional education, competing medical schools existed in the United States. The history of medical therapeutics that did not honestly treat the relevant disease but were used anyway as quack medicine is relevant today. The people interviewed seemed to want to see the relation to covid pandemic or vaccine hesitancy tied into today’s issues which I had not considered doing. The eclectic medical school was shut down in 1939, but this school trained thousands of doctors impacted many people. Did they help people or hurt people or accidentally kill anyone? While I plan to make a traditional sourced history, it is done through the lens of our time. So, living during a pandemic with people grasping at straws for treatments instead of vaccination is not unlike the past of homeopathic medicines. Did these doctors hurt more than help by using different plant compounds? Or did they know enough, or was the placebo effect powerful enough to make a difference?
Their textbook on plant medicines has a mixture of homeopathic remedies and plants that became actual medications, like digitalis and podophyllin. The primary audience also wants a story or a scandal drama to make the website more engaging. For the medical historian, the drama is already in the story of competing students for medical education during the gilded age, with professionalization occurring for one group of physicians but not for others. The eclectic medicine institute and professors seem to be between homeopaths and allopathy. The pictures in the texts are not unlike what you see in regular medical textbooks, but after discussing the website and topics with my user research, I hope to add pictures that draw the audience into learning about these late nineteenth-century professors of eclectic medicine. The works include diseases of women and children and how to treat them. While the anatomy and surgical pictures are similar to allopathic texts of the day, the significant difference is the multitude of plant compounds suggested for treatment in warts, venereal diseases, and cancers. The basis for some of these remedies did have inspiration from Native American plant-based medical practices. The textbook is a primary source for a medical historian and is also a snapshot of physician attitudes about women of the late 19th century. The audience is less interested in this aspect and more focused on how it ties into today’s issues. Users agreed that pictures or existing plants used today to connect to today’s medical use would be fascinating history to learn. Living in a pandemic increases interest in medical history and how it relates to medicine today, but it has to also be immediately engaging. You only have four seconds to engage a user for a website per my professor’s advice, so I plan to strive for a little longer, the equivalent to qualify in a bull riding competition.

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Assignments Reviews

Comparative Review of James Monroe Museum and Website

On a street corner of a historic block in Fredericksburg, Virginia, is the museum dedicated to James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States.  Upon entry through an iron gate into a walled brick garden with the focal point of a black marble bust of James Monroe, you immediately step into a sense of presidential regal space from the early 19th century. The museum is located in a historic area of Fredericksburg where James Monroe practiced as a lawyer.  The entrance to the brick building is a tiny foyer with a gift shop and two docents from the University of Mary Washington who were there at the time of my visit.  The museum’s layout is easy to navigate; the main room is an overview of James Monroe’s life, floor to mid-wall posters about different segments of his life on each wall. Then there are three small rooms, divided by period, one for the revolutionary war, one for his time in France, and the White House.

The primary audience for the museum is a general audience and tourists that come to visit Fredericksburg, Virginia. The University of Mary Washington runs the museum, and there was no one else in the museum at the time of my visit to evaluate any other types of visitors. The museum is on the Fredericksburg trolley tour. This indicates that the target audience is the general public. The museum encourages traffic flow to its first extensive overview, “James Monroe, An American Life.” This central open room with books behind glass represents the large number of books collected by his descendants to reflect James Monroe’s library. The website has a link to books in his actual collection, and it would have been helpful to have a QR code by the books to link to this.  The docent states they have thirty-five books that belonged to James Monroe specifically but not highlighted nor known behind the glass which books were his. I found that disappointing as a historian but doubt the general public would care.

 One part of the main room has a more significant display case and material object area that includes clothing worn for the period and a beautiful gown worn by the first lady. There used to be an area where children could dress up in apparel as young revolutionaries, but it is now gone due to covid. The docent directs that the following rooms are somewhat color-themed, and then you go to three smaller rooms, in order of his life from the revolutionary war to his ambassador years in Paris, then the WhinrteHouse. The museum has tiny QR codes next to specific artifacts that lead to quizzes about James Monroe and Facebook videos about the material objects, called Chatty history.  It adds an interactive piece to this small museum but is limited to Facebook, which not all people have on their smartphones.

These are all permanent exhibits that I have described within the museum.  The interpretation of James Monroe in this physical space feels distinctly like one of a founding father and glorification with no flaws. The museum poster installations on each wall had different parts of his life, and I wanted more interpretation of actual material artifacts in this one large room.  Still, you can tell those decisions had to be made and limit objects due to the footprint of the small building. The books themselves take a lot of space in this room and one of the smaller rooms.

In the room about James Monroe’s revolutionary years, the highlight in this room for the historian is the first known document bearing his signature. Across the hallway, the next room includes a pianoforte, his desk that they think he wrote the Monroe doctrine, and beautiful furniture from the White House and Paris.  A few objects from the enslaved and James Monroe’s role with the American Colonization Society are tucked away in the corner of one of the rooms.  Interestingly, some of the wording about why James Monroe did not free his slaves due to financial hardship rang false after seeing the beautiful French furniture and jewelry in the next room. The placement of objects matters in the layout for interpretation.  Overall, with its large posters explaining segments of his political life, the material cultural artifacts, and the multiple portraits, the museum feels like a regal presidential library with minimal room for historical discourse on James Monroe.

For the website, James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library – James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library (umw.edu), the University of Mary Washington has a layout with headers and drop-down links for the museum, exhibits, collections, news, research, and a 3d tour by Matterport that does an excellent job of capturing the actual museum.[1] However, the smell of old books cannot be recreated on a website. The physical museum has a quaint old building smell that screams history is housed here! Nevertheless, the website is significantly more detailed and interactive than the physical site.

You are more easily aware of the museum’s argument as on their mission statement page, and the claim is that this museum will show the context of his life within society.  “James Monroe Museum and Library is dedicated to the study, interpretation, and presentation of the life and times of the fifth President of the United States.”[2] The keyword in this mission statement is interpretation. There is very little discourse about James Monroe in society that is not complimentary in all contexts of his life.  The website has a specific teaching section for lesson plans and student learning that dramatically expands the utility. The audience is also researchers, as the website leads to a request page to access the collection from the curator.

The website for the museum has a flow into the different headers for sequential access to the museum exhibit, then to research links to blogs, YouTube videos, and multiple resources for students. While the museum website does have a professional virtual tour of the museum and images of material objects, I found that the section for teachers is the best part of the website. While the argument on the website and the museum is consistent with the vision of James Monroe as an essential president, and minimal controversial discussion, it took tenacious will for this reviewer to search through past video lectures and one lesson plan offered to get even a glimpse of his role in slavery or the American Colonization Society.

The website for the museum is produced by the University of Mary Washington, and it is more robust with links to James Monroe’s writings and even another digital history site of his papers. [3] If you are a museum purist, which I am not, the website is the clear winner over the physical museum.  Considering the current initiatives by Glenn Youngkin, Virginia governor, to monitor historical teaching about slavery and race, this review may be a little overzealous in noting the deficiencies on the website for a more critical view of James Monroe.  Highlights on the website were the links to videos buried in different menus. Curiously, there are extensive videos about the objects taken out of storage by curators that lead a dimension to the depth of the museum’s archives.  Unfortunately, the website seems to have stopped being updated in the menu headers. The YouTube channel for the James Monroe Museum is more updated than the current website. I hope the University of Mary Washington releases new material here instead and continues updating information from James Monroe’s objects and legacy.

[1] Matterport. Capture, share, and collaborate the built world in immersive 3D (matterport.com). 2021

[2] University of Mary Washington. James Monroe Museum. “Mission and Vision Statement.” James Monroe Museum umw.edu).  January 23, 2013.

[3] University of Mary Washington. “The Papers of James Monroe.” James Monroe Papers – Papers of James Monroe (umw.edu). 2015-2022.

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Assignments

Introduction to Spring 2022

My current student experience started in 2017. My research interests in digital history began when I went back to college to pursue a second undergraduate degree in history at the University of Central Florida by online study. Digital history was critical to my education, and I used archives that had been digitized for primary sources and traditional secondary book sources. I applied to George Mason in 2019 and was accepted to start my Master’s in Applied History with a USA concentration in Fall 2020. In my second year, I have just started the digital humanities certificate, and my research interests initially included early American history, Southeastern indigenous tribes, and military history. Several professors recommended I also consider medical history since I have the medical background to understand primary sources written by medical people. I have done preliminary projects in this field and hope to continue this niche for this semester. My learning goals for this class in Digital History are to expand on Intro to Digital Humanities knowledge, improve my website development new software knowledge, and have an interesting digital history project.

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Independent Scholar Research

Sixteenth Century Conference Recap

After graduation in May 2023, I continued to work on the Death By Numbers project from my last internship. Death by Numbers: My professor encouraged my fellow grad students and me to submit our side projects. I have only been to two history conferences and had not presented before. Like my fellow students, digital humanities is lived online, not necessarily presenting posters at a conference that was more geared towards papers, books, and traditional mediums of historical research. We presented our posters at a small panel that mainly consisted of my fellow students as digital humanities/digital history had not had a presence in this society before. We were the first posters presented per our panel leader. Hearing other professors’ research and participate in this conference for the first time was fun.

My topic focused on the sex ratio documented from London’s Bills of Mortality and John Graunt’s numbers with his observations on what biologists now call the primary sex ratio. Other significantly more knowledgeable historians know the historical context of John Graunt and his life, so this work was explicitly on the numbers published in London’s Bills of Mortality and Graunt’s observations. Graunt seems to be the first in Western literature to notice that more males are born, or rather more males in the numbers were at christenings than females. Graunt made conjectures that are not dissimilar to later biologists’ theories of why more males are born than females across populations. The poster took a sample of four years from the Bills of Mortality from the Death By Numbers project, and I placed it in Excel to do a cursory statistical analysis and just historical observations like Graunt did in his work. Once more of the front of the Bills are transcribed, I plan to do more of these numbers for evaluation. Graunt was correct that more males were born than females, realizing that christening numbers may not be fully substituted for births due to religious dissenters or deaths before christenings. The fascination with the sex ratio at birth and a comparison to the adult sex ratio in biology and history has lasted until today, with biologists studying multiple populations of humans and animals with theories of why there are always more males than females. Why the fascination? Why so many theories? A future project lies in reviewing the long history of biological science, fascination with the sex ratio, and Graunt’s role as the first Western observer of the now natural law that more males are born than females in all populations. 

https://github.com/mss2111/Christenings-data

This is where my excel data, blog, and graphs are located for further review.

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Assignments Graduate Work

April 2023 Blog Post

  •  What insights do you have about working in digital public humanities as a result of this experience? What new questions or ideas do you have as a result of this experience?

I have now almost completed two internships for my digital humanities certificate, one in traditional digital communications at The Health Museum and one in digital humanities at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Both experiences taught me that change is constant in this field. New software, social media marketing, and research methods are constantly emerging. Digital humanities can be like computer science in that it is constantly evolving. It can include anything from podcasting for public education to creating computer databases of historical data for researchers.

Specializing in one area of digital humanities can limit your career options. Learning textual analysis, website building, podcasting, and transcription software will expand your skills and knowledge.  It is also important to be open to constant change in the field and to be willing to educate the public in new ways.  Learning how to use Omeka and WordPress is a gateway to other easy-to-use website builders. Solitary work, while common in traditional history writing, is uncommon in museum work, science communication, and digital humanities projects. From my museum internship,the working on podcast was to improve community building around health and education. For the current internship,  datascribe, hugo and github tools and platforms can enable scholars, and researchers to collaborate on projects and share resources and knowledge. This can help to create a more inclusive and diverse public humanities landscape and promote the co-creation of knowledge.

I’ve come up with some new ideas from my experiences. I want to learn better how to promote public engagement and tailor digital projects that educate about history that is less known and, in some areas of the country, being actively suppressed, like enslaved histories or gender history. How can we use digital public humanities to reach even more people?  I want to focus on how to engage the general public. Digital humanities projects are many, and the engaging ones include visual graphics, interactive pieces, blogs, and yet many are for an academic audience and unseen by the public. With the assault on history education, how can digital humanities fill that knowledge gap that will occur in states hampered by political suppression of this knowledge? The two very different internships show the reality of trying to convey knowledge in the vast sea of information on the internet and make available, accessible large databases for further education to the public.

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Assignments

March 2023

  • What skills or knowledge from your coursework are you using in your internship?  Have you noticed a difference between theory and practice?  Why or why not?  

The skills for a digital humanities internship that I have learned through this course, including textual analysis and website exhibits are constantly evolving due to new software or programs.As new software and programs are constantly emerging, it is important to be able to adapt and learn new things quickly. 

Project management skills are paramount. It is necessary to be able to plan and organize tasks, set deadlines, and manage resources effectively. This includes managing time and prioritizing tasks to ensure the project is completed and I did not fully appreciate how fast these projects should be done in learning the theories of digital humanities work. 

 In theory, exhibits and writing on websites marketing these exhibits for museums or my work is similar to marketing for a business or marketing in general. The use of social media and marketing skills, in theory is similar to how it is in reality. The significant differences in approach are one person versus a team working on a website and project development.

In the current internship that I am now in, the role of the team is much larger than I had learned in the coursework. It takes many different skills to work on the database, the website, the writing, and the transcribing. In theory, one digital humanities person could do this work, but the speed and diversity of knowledge base shows the large difference in completion of projects and database building that only happens with a team of people. 

The skills from my history coursework are the same as in theory and as in practice in writing about research topics I have found within the transcription work. The transcriptions and the database can be used to write and further discover trends of early London and the plagues, geographic differences or causes of death. Individual historians of science or medicine can use their skills of research and apply that in practice as the database and website for the bills of mortality become fully publicly available. 

Death by Numbers

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Assignments Graduate Work

Blog Post Prompt 1: Spring Semester 2023

This semester I started a new internship closer to home at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I learned last semester about museum work and brainstorming as a team for science communication at the Health Museum. This semester I am working as a digital public humanities intern on a project called “Death by Numbers.” The project led by Dr. Jessica Otis involves multi-step transcription, data analysis, and historical evaluation of the bills of mortality from London for 150 years, ending when the calendar changes in 1752. Dr. Otis has been working on the bills of mortality for over a decade, and I am excited to be a small part of the transcription team and write a blog on a research topic of my choice from the bills. One segment from the grant is the plan to digitize and transcribe all the bills into a dataset that will be free for researchers that I am proud to be a small part of.  

My interest in quarantine historiography and medical history fits well with this project. Being part of this project will help increase my knowledge of early medical history in Europe and increase my technical knowledge of statistical analysis, website building and design, and transcription of primary sources. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to transcribe primary sources from London’s bills of mortality. These documents provide a unique window into the lives and deaths of people in the past, and I am eager to learn more about the history of London and the use of numbers that they followed, which is eerily similar to how people followed the numbers of Covid early on in the pandemic. As Dr. Otis explains this well,  “There was a transformation in symbolic systems, the culturally agreed upon symbols and syntax used to represent numbers; there was a transformation in mathematical education, enabled by increasing literacy rates and the printing revolution; and most importantly there was a transformation in technologies of knowledge, specifically the way the people of early modern England conceived of and used numbers in their daily lives.” (Otis 2013)

From a technical knowledge base, I am actually excited to transcribe. In the past, I have joined open crowd-sourcing projects online for transcription.  Open projects that anyone can help transcribe are listed on these two websites I have been a part of. By the People Active Campaigns (loc.gov) and FromThePage. Transcribing primary sources requires close attention to focused detail while feeling like a part of a team to improve access to future researchers’ work on this subject.  I am excited to be able to bring these important documents to life and to contribute to the larger goal of digital preservation that will be available to future researchers.

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Assignments

Blog Post #2

Internship update: With the start of this internship, we are now in the midst of developing an online resource on a health topic that for many can be controversial. There were many project ideas, and we are still brainstorming how to be a resource for a specific audience, and easy to understand communication. Sexual education has a history of its own that started in the military and I plan to do a blog update on this history if I have time. We meet every week and discuss the best way to find the audience and appeal to that audience. I am enjoying the interaction with a science communication intern who is approaching topics from a different aspect than a historical one. Medical and science historians can bring an added dimension and a creative positive experience to scientists and social scientists in regard to public health. Learning how to communicate online while retaining your audience can include historical information to increase interaction with the subject. This is the positive impact to this internship that I enjoy, and I like bringing more information to the discussion each time on the history of sex and sexual education.

For the work style aspect of this internship, much of it is on my timeline. We are still in the project’s initial phase and narrowing the focus and audience. We meet weekly, and the rest of the time is spent researching other websites and evaluating the resources already out there. Some good resources have included:

For information about sexual education

Honest Sex Education – Advocates for Youth

Working to Institutionalize Sex Ed (WISE) | WISEtoolkit

#TalkingIsPower 2022 | Power to Decide  scroll to the bottom to see a list of resources

AMAZE – Age appropriate info on puberty for tweens and their parents

Texas specific

Teach The Truth: A TFN Campaign for Accurate Sex Ed

I also have coordinated talking to the University of Texas in Public Health to the Health Museum for a possible combined resource. We meet with them next week and hope to see how this project will go. I have to set aside time to talk to my fellow intern and my mentor, but my work style preference has been very informal. We reach out by email and have a teams meeting weekly. We text regularly about other online resources and how to be a different resource for a specific audience yet to be determined but age 17-30 age group. My work style is usually not informal but for this remote internship, communication by email and texting has prevailed overall.

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