Here are two out of three of the timelines used for my project. TRIGGER WARNING: Some of the images may contain sensitive materials such as bodies, guns, pills and various other paraphernalia, alcohol, riots, and potentially other topics. Please continue at your own risk, and if there is anything too out there, please let me know.
Citation: Mapping Theatre in Australia by the University of Melbourne (UoM)
Summary: The point of this project is to map the different performances at various venues throughout Australia. It tracks performances from 1965 to the current day along with where and when the performances took place, what the venue was like, title and genre, demographic data of the areas, and school data of the areas. It was intended to provide information “to better understand the theatre ecologies that shape regional and urban Australia,” meaning it wants to provide the information to breakdown the demographics of not only the shows and venues themselves but who is coming to see these shows or can be convinced to see the shows in the future. It is meant for theaters, schools, and governments to help further understand what people want to see and are willing to pay for based on their demographics.
Claims and Evidence: Mapping Theatre in Australia seeks to answer the questions of what theatres are available to people based on region, who lives in these regions, what shows have been performed and been successful, and what is the impact of theatre on young people. These questions are fundamentally what is explored throughout this project as the map that is utilized showcases the data visually, the table showcases the data numerically, and the graphs that analyse this data break down into six subsections which are then broken down by state. While the formatting takes a while to get used to, the evidence provided is well thought out and visualised in several different ways which appeal to multiple audiences. UoM provides a well broken down analysis of what they’ve set out to accomplish and proceed to either answer their questions or give enough information for prospective users of their information to draw their own conclusions. As this project appeals to a very wide but also limited audience, Mapping Theatre in Australia does a good job of blending professional and scholarly with breakdowns that are not just meant for academia or government allowing for those not in the major fields to understand what is occurring. It also remains grounded in the theatre and how it is affected by these demographics which creates a unique look as to what factors influence how certain ideas are chosen.
Technology: The digital tools that are used in this project are several fairly interactive but easy to use items that help to breakdown the data. The map is the central tool of this project as it holds the majority of the information such as where the theatre venues are, how many events each has held since 1965, and by clicking on the locations you can see the breakdown of information. There is also a sidebar which enables the user to look at more individualized data such as demographics or selecting a more narrowed time scheme. There is also tabulated data which may have been created with Flourish that has 5,000 entries. The information in this table is much narrower as it breaks down the information by name (which is not fully explained as to what name they are referring to), company name, event data, genre, venue, and demographics. The graphs use a wide variety of formats with items such as pie charts, bar graphs, word maps, and dot graphs. While some look as if they were created in Excel, others could have been created with items such as Voyant. Mapping Theatre in Australia documents where the data is taken from, but not what tools were used which is a little disappointing due to the nature of some of these tools that could be useful for my own project.
Issues: While there were no glaring issues, one of the items that I had an issue with was not saying which tools were used. While I know that this information does not have to be shared, it would have been nice to be able to dig deeper into their process and see how they arrived to their conclusions and depicted them. The only other issue I ran into was the lag that was present on the site due to how much information was on each page. Everything still ran fairly smooth, but there were pages that took longer than others to be able to interact with.
Website Breakdown
On the Home page I hope to have a mini-breakdown of the project including my definition of protest music that will be used for the basis of the site. This will then link to the different sections About, Timelines, Music, and Data. The About section is broken down to the About Project, About the Fellowship, About Me, and Sources. Within these sections, it will link to the next About, but also to Timelines. The Timelines section will be broken down by decade and the event breakdown connected with the songs. These pages will link to the Artist and Song Selection page. In the Music section, the pages will be Reasoning and Artist and Song Selection. Both pages will link to all three of the Data pages. The Data section pages will be Breakdown, Graph, and Analysis. Each page will link to both of the others.
Page Breakdowns
Artist and Song Selection and Data Breakdown pages will be comprised of graphs, either Excel or Flourish embeds. The Home and About pages will mainly be text and image based. Sources will be text based. The Timelines and Event Breakdown pages will include a TimelineJS embed and hopefully a scroller with the individual events. The Graph pages will be mainly graph embeds with some text. Analysis will most likely be a combo of a lot of different media.
Project Name: “The Times They are a-Changin’”: A Look into Protest Music’s Evolution Throughout the 1950s-1970s
Project Owner: Heather Stokes
Project Summary:
Research Question: What was the evolution of protest music between 1950-1979 due to the events that occurred and how did the music connect with each other based on messages, themes, and events.
The aim of this project is to provide a definition of what protest music is in order to analyze how the music has evolved and how it is used to express opposition to injustice and unifies people from different backgrounds. To do this, there must be a basis for what protest music is, hence the definition, along with an understanding of what events took place over these 3 decades which will be presented as a timeline and event breakdown. There must also be a selection of songs that fit into this category, even those that are considered counterculture to traditional protest music, in which these songs will be broken down to their fundamentals, such as artist, genre, themes and messages, to provide a data analysis of how this music has evolved and stays connected to current events of the time. This analysis will provide context as to how music provides a voice to those who are not typically heard while also allowing for a large platform of the cause that is being sung about. The audience for this project will most likely be current or previous activists along with those who lived throughout the time period who would like context for the music of the time and the response to certain events.
Deliverables:
Timeline:
End of Life/Future Plans:
This project is primarily centered around music from 1950-1979 which is intended to be fully complete for the data achieved by the end of these 8 weeks. However, a plan for after the DHF is done would be to extend the timeline into the modern day to further see an evolution of this music. For example, asking the question, does protest music exist in the modern day? If this is unattainable, there are plans to preserve this project as it is by either archiving the website or keeping up with the data and tools used in order to ensure bugs or issues are not encountered.
Part 1: Create some basic information about your user. Be creative (and feel free to use humor!), but think about who may potentially view this website (professors, reporters, editors, students, etc.).
Name: Troy Mitchell
Age: 64
Location: Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada
Education: Master’s
Occupation: Retired Lumber Mill Operator and Mechanic
Family status: Married, 0 Kids
Income: $95,000/yr
Hobbies: Fixing odds and ends, drinking a beer with friends, enjoying life
Tech experience: Good at fixing mechanics like cars and fridges, not so great with a computer
Part 2: Drawing from the demographic information above, craft a 4-8 sentence narrative about your user. Explain who they are and why they would use the website you are creating. Think of the following concepts:
Troy is a retired Lumber Mill Operator and Mechanic born in 1960 in Scottsdale, Arizona who wants to show his wife the songs he grew up with as Norway had a very different music scene. While he knows how to pull up Spotify, he has some difficulties finding an all encompassing playlist. He himself was too young to get involved with the protests and hippie culture, but his parents were firm activists during the time, so he grew up with songs ranging over decades about what was wrong with the world at the time. He finds a playlist that has plenty of songs from his childhood which also has a link to a project looking at these songs. Though he was not intending to, he goes down a rabbit hole into his childhood and his parents’ lifestyle while also learning plenty he didn’t know.
For me, DH represents an encapsulation of man made items to create and collaborate with other cultures in order to document and preserve humanity’s creations. Let’s elaborate on this. DH allows for collaboration to places and people previously thought to be inaccessible. This is due to the “Digital” part of Digital Humanities. This new era of digitizing has given people a widespread reach not only to communicate but also to understand ideas and give answers that were only available to academics or independent cultures at one time or another. This reach can then lead to a group of people from different backgrounds to come together and create new projects in order to document and preserve these older ideas and answers with newer technologies. However, DH does not just represent older areas. New ideas for DH are being come up with every day which helps to have an ever evolving meaning and purpose for DH. It is important to recognize the ephemeral nature of DH as this is at its very core. DH in and of itself is a very new subject only created within the past few decades with the expanse of the Internet.
A curious question that has arisen for me is what discipline DH would be posed under, or is it now it’s own separate field? For me, DH reads as a subfield of Cultural Anthropology. Now, do I realise that this would give me a lot of heat just by others in Gettysburg’s Anthropology department? Absolutely. But let’s look at the similarities. The purpose of Cultural Anthropology according to Britannica is, “the study of culture in all of its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world.” While this definition does not encapsulate everything both DH and Cultural Anthropology does, many similarities can be drawn between the two. They both study culture in some way along with using very similar methods and concepts with a combination of linguistics that combines the diverse peoples around the world. To me, this is the easiest way to understand DH as it combines a field that I am familiar with while also expounding upon and bringing that subject further into the digital. Again, I do recognise these are slightly fighting words, but DH seems to have a different meaning and classification for everyone, so what does DH actually stand for? I don’t think there will ever be one solid answer to this question.
DH, like the Internet, is going to constantly evolve and become more prevalent as the Digital Age continues. This can be a very good thing if used wisely, but like all things on the Internet that has to be said with a grain of salt. That being said, I am excited to see where DH ends up and expect to help be a part of that evolution even in the small time I am working in the field.
