Since I know have my own website for Clio II (still under construction) – I’ve moved my blog over to my new site. You can find it here. See you there!!!
Some prelimiary graphs and thoughts December 5, 2010
Paul Boyer proposed an interesting theory in the epilogue of his seminal work, By the Bomb’s Early Light that has been influential to most historians of nuclear culture and nuclear film historians and theorists. I really have yet to see a major author outrightly disagree with his theory, although a few would maybe tweek his timeline a little. Written in 1985, the theory has been surprising long-lasting in a discipline that tends to ignore works older than 20 years.
Boyer states that American cultural awareness of the bomb has done through a few cycles of awareness and amnesia since its invention and use in 1945 against Japan. He claims that the period from 1945-1950 was of intense cultural awareness of the devistating effects of the bomb. After 1950 this obessive awareness quieted to a “diminished cultural attention and unwasy acquiesence in the goal of maintaining atomic superiority over the Russians.” Then in the mid-1950s the issue resurged dramatically, “once more becoming a central cultural theme.”
Boyer claims this second period of nuclear fear and activism abruptly ended in 1963. He says that what one sees after 1963 “is a sharp decline in culturally expressed engagement with the issue.” Boyer does admit that in the late 1960s the Pentagon propsals to build a city-based anti-ballistic missile system aroused a brief flurry of activism and media attention that quickly died again with the signing of the ABM Treaty in 1972. Despite this blip, Boyer claims the period from 1963-1980, The Big Sleep as he calls it, was “one of apathy and neglect.”
Boyer also recognizes that the mid-1970s also saw the nuclear power plant as a focus of demonstrations and protest but he does not believe that this effects his argument as it was generally viewed in a positive light and he primarily concerns himself with the fear and paranoia that nuclear weapons awareness produces. A few other blips in this mid to late 1970s occurs which begin to breakup the previous 15 years of amnesia. India joined the ranks of nuclear nations in 1974 and the arms-control process lost momentum after 1972 and ground to a halt in 1979 when President Carter withdrew the SALT II treaty from the Senate. The late 1970s was also witness to a vigerous anit-nuclear weapons movement in Western Europe. Finally, the grassroots opposition to nuclear power that had begun a few years prior gained momentum and visibility in 1979. This all added up to a dramatic return to the foreground of American consciousness of the bomb in the early 1980s. According to Boyer, (again writing in 1985) this awareness has yet to dissipate.
To recap, Boyer believed that:
1945 – 1950 = Awareness
1950 – 1955 = Amnesia
1955 – 1963 = Awareness
1963 – 1980 = Amnesia (with a possible slight resurrgance in the early 1970s)
1980 – 1985 = Awareness
So, thinking about this theory and its surprising influence, I thought it might be interesting to be able to try to graph it out and visually represent this cycle. For the purposes of this project, my inquiry will be brief and slightly superficial, but already I think I have some interesting evidence to bring to the discussion. The graphs below represent Washington Post editorials. I did a basic keyword search of editorials from 1946-1990 to see how often these terms occured. Editorials, more than articles, I believe represent what is really on the minds of the writers as they are picking and choosing what to write about. Before I post the graphs a few caveats. This was a basic keyword search only. I did not take into account the context of these words being written as for one I beleive that the mere mention of them shows the awareness of what those terms imply and second (well to be honest I just don’t have the time haha). Second, I did not account if articles that mention one term also mention another.
The first graph depicts the use of the term “atom* bomb” which could mean either atom bomb or atomic bomb.
The second graph shows just the instance of the tern ‘nuclear.’ This could either be in the context of nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, etc.
The last graph shows the two-word phrase “nuclear war” as I believe this implies a more specific apocalyptic mentality that would be interesting to pick out from the general ‘nuclear’ phrase. I’m also playing with the notion of creating a fourth graph to depict “atomic energy” but have yet to decide if that is truly beneficial for my case (beyond just showing Boyer’s blip in the 1970s). So without further ado you’ll find the graphs below. If you have any comments, queries or observations, I’d love to hear them.
Final Project ideas November 29, 2010
So I’m doing my final project on proving Paul Boyer’s theory of nuclear awareness and amnesia. I plan on looking at Herblock’s cartoons and graphing out their occurance to see if they match Boyer’s cycle and doing the same thing with Time Magazine’s corpus. Does anyone have any other ideas of what resoures I can look at to try and prove this theory? Any ideas would be helpful of cool internet tools you’ve come across in your own search.
Thanks!
How to mix the old with the new November 8, 2010
So we’ve been looking at websites that put history “online” at varying levels of depth all semester and I thought this would be a good time to explore some of my thoughts and trepidations of really what doing history on the web means.
My first experience with online history was a methodology course during my undergrad where the last few weeks was a brief foray into digital history. We all had to look at a few examples of digital history and then we discussed them in class. I remember being particularly struck with The Great Chicago Fire website. It had a great balance of “traditional” forms for analysis (essays), new ways to explore history (galleries) and places to go for more information (resources). I remember thinking; this is the wave of the future. Being able to show your sources at the same time as your analysis to let other follow your argument to agree or disagree with your use of primary evidence. Oh how much farther we have come. Which is why Erin’s blog post struck such a cord with me. I too sometimes feel like a historian up a creek without an argument. How can we or do we try to keep our traditional ways of historical interpretation, presentation and analysis (both as a writer and a reader) in this digital age where almost anything goes and there are no solid rules of scholarship and presentation yet?
I don’t have any answers and I know that neither do a lot of other people, but it is definately something we need to always be aware of as we look at these websites: what’s effective? What works? Does it work for all audiences or maybe better suited for high school students to at least get them engaged while something a little more traditional would be better suited for scholars and researchers? I will probably struggle with these questions for years to come but I have to always remind myself of these questions to try and figure out what would work best for me and my material.
Need your help!!!! October 11, 2010
So we’re all grad students who have done LOTS of research in our times. What would you want from an advanced search on my site? This is what I’ve got so far, but it feels….inadequate. Please let me know what you guys would want as a way to organize and access Herblock’s cartoons beyond just the casual surfing the rest of the site is geared towards. Thanks!
The second option would have a pull down menu of all (and more) of the keyword tags available on the “Who” “What” “Where” category pages.
Some revisions October 5, 2010
Wow you guys! Thanks so much for your help and advice. I too was concerned with how cluttered the third panel looked. I’ve decided to take Heather’s advice to heart and just have each category with a classic cartoon to represent it and then when you click on either the “Who” “Where” or the image it will take you to the third panel.
Erin, you’re totally right about the cost-benefit ratio of having something autogenerate. Especially since I want to have more ‘tags’ than I necessarily want to have links to those minor people/places/events. To that end, I think I’d like to have a frame (as you can see in my redone mockup of panel 4) with only the “big things” for the casual viewer, but in the advanced search (which I have yet to do the mockup for) all the other tags that I have will be in the database and searchable. Or even show up in the more basic ‘search’ if typed into the box.
Tammy – there is more to the bio (and I actually stole that one from the LC’s Herblock page) but it wouldn’t fit on the screen and I just wanted to provide an example of what each page would look like “above the fold.” I wrote a bio of Block for my thesis that I might use on the final page as it contains a lot of the same facts and dates but also have a few more anecdotes and is a little more “approachable.” I picked those colors because I liked the mutedness of the yellow and the blue I thought was a nice contrast. I wanted the ‘Advanced search” option to stand out which is why it’s the only thing that’s red. Powerpoint limited my options a bit as I actually created links to various slides within the presentation to more closely mirror an actual website but it wouldn’t let me choose different colors for things so all links are blue and all plain text is black. Ideally I’d like just the four main sections “Bio, Cartoons, Share and Links” to be Blue and the rest to be black.
Anyways, here are the revamped slides for 3 and 4. Let me know what you guys think. You’ve been really helpful with me to clarify what I want it to do (function) with how it looks) form.
Some “Screen Shots” of my website October 4, 2010
So I’m playing around with Powerpoint to try and see what my website will look like. Here’s what I got so far. Would love your opinion. Each “shot” is “above the fold.”
Further ideas about my project September 27, 2010
I wanted to take this time to respond so some people’s comments on my last post and maybe further hash out some of my own ideas.
Alexa- You mentioned how this is an already stringly researched topic…here’s the thing, I don’t think it is. There are A LOT of websites out there that offer to sell you the copyrights to political cartoons and a few good ones about how to use political cartoons to teach history in the classroom which I would link to. But what I envision (and I guess this goes to answer your first question about defining my audience) is something for older students to utilize as well as professional historians. I want it to be about Herblock now for this project and for myself, but I guess ideally and maybe that’s what I need to do to rethink this a bit, is to have a database with ALL major cartoonists, not just Block. But create a searchable database to look at all major cartoonists in the 20th century. (yes a lot of work and I don’t even want to think about the copyright issues right now) This is really what I would want this “website” to evolve into it. A great resource for people who can’t fly all over the country looking at archives or who don’t want to spend HOURS in front of microfilm or on their computer scrolling through every day of the LA Times to get a sampling of Conrad’s cartoons. A one stop schopping research resource for political cartoons for the historian and serious student (graduate or undergraduate).
I’ve been toying with the idea of having the audience help with the work by either crowd sourcing the cartoon’s interpretation and historical context (pending my, or someone else’s review) wiki style. What does anyone think of this?
Linel – I agree with you completely about organizing it as an online gallery. (Maybe even having the option of scrolling through like the cooking webiste with the salient external material popping up when you scroll over the image). But I definately agree that the visual component of presentation is crucial. The way my site would differ from the one I linked to last time would be that it is a much more comprehensive sampling of Block’s work (not just the really famous ones everyone knows). Everyone knows Black’s work on Nixon and Watergate and McCarthyism. Not a lot of people know what a huge advocate he was for education reform, DC Home Rule or even his very savvy comentary on Stalin and the Cold War. So much of his material gets overlooked for the “obvious.” I want to bring out and make available the rich complexity of his work and how it was representative of his political alignments. The website would be about the man AND his work. And like I mentioned before, I think it would be great to have multiple cartoonists on the site (as an eventual ‘ultimate’ pipe dream).
So that’s what I got. I’m working on trying to visualize what i would at least want the homepage to envision and once I get that done, I’ll post it for critique. Thanks for reading me rant. 
A spouting of ideas on Herblock database September 20, 2010
So this is going to be my attempt to get some of my ideas about my project down and to ask your opinion.
Before anyone comments on it, please look at my ideas without the issue of copyright and access, that’s something that will take a bit of time to figure out and right now I want to operate under the assumption that I can do what I want with the material I want if nothing else for my own private use.
I want to create a searchable database of Herblock’s political cartoons while he worked at the Washington Post which was from 1946 until his death in 2001. That is a lot of cartoons. Because I study the Cold War Era, I cannot really downsize this project, although it will, of course, be a very long process but since its for my dissertation, I got time. If I decided to do this for a Clio II project, I would set up the database initially with a small sampling of his work and then later add to it as I can.
Here’s what I want to be able to do with this database. I want to be able to search my database quickly and easily to pull up all applicable cartoons by date, theme, and mentioned personages. To do this, I image I would have to imput each cartoon individually and then create key word links.
For instance this picture would have the keyword, “Joseph Stalin” maybe the theme, “Death of Stalin” and a tag for the date, “March 5, 1953.”
Then if I wanted to find all the cartoons Herblock did that depict Stalin, this would pop up, or if I wanted to quickly see the cartoon on the death of Stalin this would be easy to find. Now, here’s my first question to everyone – what do you think would aesthetically look more appealing and/or be easier to navigate not only for myself but to an outsider – a tree chart where things are arranged in various different ways and a continuous click of links will eventually bring someone to a subset of the cartoons, a google type searchable box or something similiar to how we can search for articles on JSTOR or some such database (enter keywords within a date range) or some combination of all of the above?
Another aspect that I want for this database, although I envision this to be more relevant if the site could be public, would have the keyword links also bring you to a mini-explanation of the keyword. For instance a brief biography of Stalin. Or in any McCarthy mentioned cartoon, a bio of him and an explanation of McCarthyism. When a user would click on a specific cartoon I would also like that page to have a brief ‘in context’ explanation even if it is as simple as, “This cartoon was drawn on the occasion of Joseph Stalin’s death.” Kind of like how Herblock’s page does it but on a much larger scale.
Finally, I want to be able to somehow easily graph the information in my database. For instance, I want to know how many times a cartoon concerning the Red Scare was drawn in the 1950s in comparison to cartoons on other topics in this time period. I imagine that this would involve having to make sure that when I keyworded each cartoon, I had a broad, general theme posted as well as something more specific. For instance, ‘The Korean War” and “General MacArthur” would be listed for the same cartoon that mentioned MacArthur, but a cartoon about the Korean War without him would also be listed under “The Korean War” thereby allowing me to pull up anything and everything that centers around the Korean War without having to know all the various different issues and debates Herblock commented on.
So what do you guys think? If you could access a database like this what would you want to see? What would you want to be able to do? Any suggestions or ideas on how to conceivably organize this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Zotero Zotero Zotero! September 13, 2010
So Laura briefly mentioned this in her blog, but after seeing that a few of you grappled with the problem and Linel also blogged about it, (and Dan hasn’t beaten me to the punch) I figured I reach more of you doing a quick blog post about my FAVORITE web tool Zotero.
I learned how to write research papers old school. I had an index card for every fact, quote or idea and then would spend hours organizing them by keyword into order and then doing the “type/flip” to write my paper. This worked fine for me during my undergrad where I didn’t have to write too much more than a 15-20 page research paper, but last year as I began to grapple with my Master’s thesis I realized that this was NOT going to work. I had to find something else that would let me access my material at all times (for instance if I was at school but had forgotten my notecards what do I do?) and help me organize it and keep track of what I had looked at, what info I already had and what still needed to be done.
Then a fellow CGU student came to my class and gave us all a tutorial on Zotero and I fell in love. This tool was developed here at our own Center for History and New Media. It is an application that attaches itself to Firefox (and to Microsoft word but more on that in a minute). Any webpage that you are on you can create a link to it in your Zotero database and then create a note on that item to write your ideas, quotes, whatever. You can apply multiple tags that you can them use to see all the notes that have that tag no matter what source it came from. You can input images, video files, anything and keep it all under one library and you can have multiple libraries! I have a library for each class with all my reading books listed under it and any notes I have on those books. Also, if you’re on, say WorldCat or the GMU library page and you want to add the book you’re looking at online, Zotero imports all the bibliographic data which it will then use in Microsoft word to create the perfect footnote!!! (I’m not joking this program is so cool!)
Click on the link above to explore the program or shoot me a comment or message if you want more information. I’m sure Dan would also be willing to talk to you about it.
But if you’re struggling with how to take notes on digital material, this is the way to do it.
