The readings this week made me a tad nervous about my own project, since nearly all of it would require the audience to read articles relating to the kosher meat riots. I’m trying my best to find supplemental photos to depict street life in the Lower East Side, but so far I’ve been unsuccessful. I think the fact that my project is so wordy is forcing me to find ways to make my website seem more “fun.” If I can get the Google map application to work, it might make my project more interactive.

My project is a group of images, mostly newspaper articles with a few supplementary photographs to establish geographical/social background, documenting the 1902 kosher meat boycott by Jewish housewives on the Lower East Side.

Between May 15th-June 5th, 1902, following the failed attempt of kosher butchers to combat the raise in price of meat from 12 to 18 cents/lb., thousands of Jewish women, most of them housewives, took to the streets of the Lower East Side of New York and violently boycotted kosher butcher shops. The boycott quickly spread to Brooklyn and other northeastern cities and received considerable attention both within the Jewish community and in larger urban society. Given that these Jewish women were not a unionized group, very little documentation of the event remains outside of descriptions of the event published in local newspapers.

I’ve been trying to change the background color on the Default (Thanks, Roy) theme, but I’m not quite sure which field I should be replacing for the background. So far I’ve change nearly every other color. Any suggestions on where it might be or what it might be labeled as?

I’ve also had trouble formatting the image in Paint.net so that it will be large enough to read. Might it be a better strategy to print out the articles from their PDF form and re-scan them myself?

Am I missing something? Is there something else I should be doing on mysql?

Now for the technical question: Will we have the ability to override the Omeka template with some HTML overrides?

While cliometrics is helpful when used to add to historical description of a person or event, when left without context (example: IBM’s Many Eyes) this information can be easily exploited. While a “wordle” showing the words most used in a presidential speech may be visually appealing , it is folly to try to extract any meaning out of this kind of visualization.

How might digital archives use similar cliometric images to add to their websites? What kind of information about an archive might be worth turning into a visual representation?

Will the withholding of documents, both published and unpublished and even after the death of the author, be detrimental to the study of our era in the future? Are these authors who are extremely protective of their “intellectual property” doing themselves a disservice, and could this possibly be helpful to those organizations who work outside of the box and promote “free culture”? Or, do we simply assume that because an author or company spends the money and time to preserve a work that it is worth the price?

Collaborative work is almost necessary for scientists, but is it really necessary for the humanities? It seems that one benefit of collaboration would be the ability for a group of academic researchers to amass more information on a given topic, but is it possible for this same group of researches to come to a single conclusion about the information they amass? Are we ideologically overlooking the prominence of the scholarly ego?

Perhaps I’m settling into the curmudgeonly and individualistic ways of scholars, but it seems to me that scholars already learn from the process of disagreement. Most works are inspired by the author’s disagreement over the thesis of another scholar. If we put too much focus on collaboration, will we miss the opportunity to fill in “holes” in academic study as we have with more individual driven studies?

I think I would be less skeptical if I knew how humanities scholars were able to collaborate on a single essay or an entire book. (Did they conference electronically or in person? Were they assigned to specific areas of focus? Did one person put the study into words or was each sentence come to by consensus? Is it important that scholars come from the same field and same interests, or did they benefit from their differences?)

I just recently received “The Jesus people movement : an annotated bibliography” by David Di Sabatino. I’m hoping that this will provide me with a wide range of sources. I am also trying to find a copy of the Jesus People International magazine or The Hollywood Free paper produced by the Jesus People International though interlibrary loan. I’m positive that I should be able to find relevant photographs, but that will require a bit more research on my part.

The Jesus People Movement also produced a large amount of “Jesus music” (Christian rock). Hopefully I will be able to use music in a digital archive, as it was a very important part of the movement.

Neglecting the question of HOW to archive such a massive store of information, how do we decide what to save? Who has ultimate authority over what should be archived? What criteria should be put in place for web material to qualify? (Fifty years from now will we be clamoring to see what a 13-year-old girl wrote in her LiveJournal in 2002? Will Sarah Palin’ intelligible twitter messages show up in history books?)

If you consider Levy’s argument (information overload takes away time for contemplative thought) and the limited time we have to preserve online data before it disappears, do archivists and historians have enough time or enough resources to figure out what material will be culturally, socially, or politically significant even ten years from now? This pre-emptive decision making about what will be historically significant may pose a serious problem to digital archiving from online material.

my delicious username: jcmonjeau

With this pull away from the physicality of history, in what new ways can the modern archivist present historical material for critical review?

My main historical interests are the Progressive era politics and labor movements in America, especially in Manhattan. I’m also interested in political and labor relations of Jewish-Americans in New York.

As for my tech experience, I’m about as competent as any other 22-year-old. I’m quite comfortable working on social networking sites. I regularly update Twitter and Facebook accounts and read a number of blogs (mostly political). In the past I’ve dabbled in Photoshop. I’m looking forward to ACTUALLY learning the language of the internet and especially learning new and fun ways to explore history online.