Category: History
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Discussion of Numbered Lives, Ch 2: Counting the Dead (Rachel V. Willis)
This post is part of the HASTAC Scholars Collaborative Book Discussion on Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (MIT Press, 2018), by HASTAC Co-Director Jacqueline Wernimont. — “Transactional forms for counting human bodies, whether alive or dead, are at the heart of the modern reality that tables of numbers are poor vectors for […]
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Discussion of Numbered Lives, Introduction and Conclusion (Rebecca Uliasz)
This post is part of the HASTAC Scholars Collaborative Book Discussion on Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (MIT Press, 2018), by HASTAC Co-Director Jacqueline Wernimont. — An accessible and elegant read, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media stakes out an ethical engagement with media history, plunging into deep time in […]
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NGA Exhibition Spotlights the Work of Woman Artist and Depictions of Plants
The National Gallery of Art’s current exhibition The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists provides an opportunity to view many watercolors, paintings, and drawings that engage with the plant world. The exhibition takes the writings of the art critic John Ruskin and the aesthetics of the British Pre-Raphaelites as a point of departure for examining works by […]
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Review of The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media
Social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson describes his new book as “the culmination of [his] thinking about the rise of social photography, written from within and outside academia, within and outside industry” (113). The latter half of this description, taken from the last pages of his new book The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, […]
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Place and Space in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon
In the introduction of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” she writes: After three days, they were incarcerated in the barracoons at Ouidah (Oh-we-dah), near the Bight of Benin. During the weeks of his existence in the barracoons, Kossola was bewildered and anxious about his fate. Before him was a thunderous and […]
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ZORA! Festival Facebook Page: Space, Genre, and Online Presence (Introduction)
I think it’s interesting how online spaces are carriers of cultural identity; no matter where a person is on the planet, online spaces are used to ritualize a unified sense of place through social practices that seek to preserve and expand culture, while at the same time reaffirming social identity. Cultural festivals provide a time and space […]
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The Best of Enemies in Trump’s America: Memorializing an Unlikely Coalition
If an Exalted Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan (yes, that’s a real thing) can denounce his membership and become an advocate for civil rights, then so can you, racist America. The 2019 film The Best of Enemies offers a story of redemption—indeed, the white man’s redemption—through the interactions between the formidable black civil […]
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Still Looking for Digital Justice
This year marks the ten-year anniversary of the LastRoadtoFreedom website, which I designed to tell the story of America’s Civil War contraband camps and to digitize transcribed registers for the camps. I remember one of my lofty goals was to have the term contraband camp become a household word. That goal itself was tied to […]
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Review of Mapping Movies
Communications and Media scholar Jeffrey Klenotic’s Mapping Movies provides a pioneering model for digitally marking, quantifying, and demographically identifying US movie theaters in the early twentieth century. It includes options to limit searches based on gender, immigration, and location. Arguing for a relationship between population demography, film exhibition, spectatorship, and space, these maps complement historical […]
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Mapping and Geocoding, Part 2: Map Warper and ArcGIS
Mapping 101: Aligning Historical Maps and Visualizing Geographic Data Selecting a map. I was fortunate to find a gorgeous, high-resolution image of a historical map of Paris on Wikimedia Commons. The image is provided by the dealer Geographicus Rare Antique Maps. The Parisian firm Hachette published the map, titled Nouveau Plan de Paris Divise en […]