I’m hoping to focus my research on the “Jesus People” movement in America in the 1960s and 1970s. This was an evangelical Christian movement within the hippie counterculture. Unfortunately, this movement was contained primarily in California (though I’ve read that German youth really caught on to the movement)

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.

I think Wright’s “evolution” of knowledge transference offered a new way to look at this week’s readings. While I think some of Wright’s arguments are a bit over the top, (Irish monks are like bloggers ?) his tracing of the shifting balance between oral and written cultures as well as human relations based on hierarchical or network formations allowed me to view Levy, Rosenzweig, and Anderson’s texts in light of this evolution. It seems apparent that we are living in a world of mass human global networking, as Wright suggests. But how are archivists and historians to document this new on-line networking culture?

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

Tonight’s discussion of Wikipedia and the pros and cons of “neutral” authorship reminded me of Friedman’s discussion of libertarian/socialist cyber utopia and the ideal that the transfer of knowledge online should be free and open to everyone. Sites like Wikipedia not only provide us with huge amounts of facts (and speculation), but that information is coming from myriad of sources, be they from published records or Wikipedia vandals. While this type of open store of historical and technical knowledge has the potential to reach a much larger crowd than any historical document or textbook, it also has the potential to draw people away from thinking critically about historical topics. When presented with an Encyclopedia-type article, one is first inclined to take the information at face value. There is no need to wonder what information isn’t there, or what information may be false and inevitably the links on the page only take you to another Wikipedia source. Wikipedia entries have effectively (at least in more popular topics) taken away the authoritative narrative voice. Instead we are presented with ten paragraphs which hundreds of people may have edited.

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

Hello all. My name is Julianna Monjeau. I’m a first year Master’s student in the Archives and Public History department. I very received my Bachelor’s from NYU in History and Russian studies this past May.

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.