"Crisis of Nations"!: Historical Gaming

       The country Malme donated money to Nerton, but Nerton spent the money inappropriately. Nerton, and as a result, Malme, suffered from an economic crisis. How were we to solve the crisis? Four different nations, including Nerton and Malme, pooled together to resolve the economic firestorm through a combination of diplomatic, economic, and various other means. With very little time, it was up to all of us to put the issue to rest as quickly as possible. The collaborative effort among nations was an exercise in crisis management. 

https://www.icivics.org/games/crisis-nations

                Sure, the crisis was not a real one, but it was certainly based in reality. It involved decision-making among various diplomatic players within the pressures of limited time. Sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? In some ways, one could argue that it’s reminiscent of the Eurozone crisis, or any other past economic crises. This particular game, “Crisis of Nations,” invites players to engage in the heavy decision-making of foreign policy. Produced by a website known as “iCivics,” it displays several games that engage players in scenarios of crisis management, voting, international policy, and lawmaking, just to name a few.       

                Historical gaming is a trend that has seeped into the digital world in the last several years. It seems to me, and we discussed some of this in last week’s class, that many of these games are steeped in choice. Take the example of “Crisis of Nations.” I chose to play as a single player, and three other remote players play simultaneously. These players and I represented four different nations with various capabilities, resources, strengths, and manpower. As quickly as possible, I had to send in various resources before the time on the clock ran out. The choices in resources that we made, and how quickly we chose those resources, affected the outcome of the hypothetical scenario.

                While there wasn’t a grand variety of interaction with the game and only so few buttons you could click on, “Crisis of Nations” encouraged decision-making, time skills, and character role-playing. It further facilitated interaction when the player is introduced to the terminology of the types of resources required to manage a nation. Though the interaction was limited, this is a great start in building and teaching perspective. History games such as this one need to have a great level of interaction. Doing so has the potential to teach perspective and decision-making as a window to developing those skills when “doing” history. Whether it’s studying real-life actors in historical events or placing yourself as a historical character in a game, it’s a skill in embodying multiple viewpoints as a means to understanding someone else's present and your past.

                 

Digital Storytelling

Prior to last week, I had never come across the term “digital storytelling.” As I did the readings for last week, I realized that I've actually come across digital storytelling without realizing it in videos, interactive websites, and a myriad of other examples. They tell stories about contemporary issues, personal life stories, and the past, but the list doesn't end there. Using storytelling platforms to present historical narratives is a multifaceted, dynamic, and exciting way to organize and convey the past in a way that resonates so well. Digital storytelling allows us carry on the human experience in a new platform that narrates and documents change over time to large audiences.

http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/view_story.cfm?vid=409&otherid=featured&d_title=Featured%20Digital%20Stories
               

The link above is a digital storytelling example that briefly recounts the history of the Kindertransport. This was relief aid effort that provided transportation for children to escape Nazi Germany for England before the outbreak of World War II. It includes a slideshow of several photographs and newspapers that describe life before and during the rise of the Third Reich. While the slideshow moves, a narrator recounts the story in a voiceover with muted somber music in the background. The voiceover was done by someone whose great-grandmother lived in Nazi Germany. Her voice, the music, and the pictures serve as an effective tool in invoking a sensory participation from audiences. Digital storytelling also allows for a narrative argument for how the chain of events are organized. It also provides a way to capture the simultaneity of events that vertical or horizontal timelines might otherwise omit or structurally be unable to represent.  

The combination of these elements of evoking the sensory elements invites the audience to participate in the story that is being told. Good digital storytelling examples, such as this one, use sight and sound to make audiences active participants in the story. By incorporating elements that encourage audience participation in digital history projects, we are making history a more inclusive space. That’s the hope, anyway.

What I wonder about digital storytelling, however, circles back to the debate about digital history as a whole: is it really all that new? Storytelling is such a fundamental part of human history that I hesitate to classify it as a completely new format. However, stories of all kinds can now leap to different parts of the globe in seconds thanks to the media revolution of the last twenty years. If nothing else, it has allowed us to share histories from all corners of globe made by both citizen and academic historians that would not have been as feasible in recent memory.

Mapping: Portuguese Immigration, Cultural and University Centers in the United States

            Between 1999 and 2008, I attended a Portuguese school in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. For eighteen years, my mother taught myself, my brother, and over a hundred students how to read and write Portuguese. Perth Amboy was a mixed neighborhood with a heavy concentration of Portuguese immigrants, many of whom came to the United States during the oppressive Salazar regime, which was overthrown in the spring of 1974. I was interested to see how Portuguese immigrants were distributed throughout the United States. To map Portuguese communities in the U.S., I researched Portuguese cultural centers much like the one the one I grew up near in Perth Amboy. I began by using rounded red place markers because they were one of the larger icons that would draw the viewer’s attention to these places.         

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zAM9F1dSXIh8.kG4ad6hKCu8E

A large view of the map I created to understand Portuguese settlement in the United States. The red markers indicate various Portuguese-American centers; the green circles indicate universities that offer Portuguese cultural studies programs; and the yellow flags represent Portuguese embassies and consulates. 

             What I found was not at all that surprising, at least initially. The heaviest concentration of Portuguese immigrants and communities is in New England, particularly in Massachusetts. There are also several communities spread out throughout California, but the Northeast is the most heavily concentrated area. This makes sense, seeing as Portugal bookends the other side of the Atlantic. The Azores and Madeira islands, situated in the Atlantic, were also the site of large numbers of Portuguese immigration. For this reason, I was intrigued about the frequency and reasoning for Portuguese settlement in California.

A map of northeastern United States, it has the highest concentration of Portuguese immigration. This is just a small sample of Portuguese communities scattered throughout the region. 

California boasts a large Portuguese community as well, particularly in the San Francisco area. What propelled Portuguese immigrants from the mainland as well as Azores and Madeira to relocate past the Northeast?

       While mapping these various cultural centers, I saw that many were founded between the 1920s and 1930s. This raises some interesting questions considering that immigration to the United States was curbed in the aftermath of the First World War. These centers are much more spread out in California, while the map shows that they are very heavily concentrated in New England. I wonder about any sort of collaboration, if any, that may have transpired among nearby centers. 

         After layering this first part of the map, I thought it would further enhance my overall understanding of this distribution by researching universities that offered Portuguese Cultural Studies programs. These programs are near local Portuguese cultural centers, found at universities such as Brown and the University of Massachusetts. Several campuses of the University of California also predominately offer such programs. After researching the programs, I saw that many of them had been founded in the 1970s. I tentatively argue that this may be due to a large wave of immigration to the U.S. from Portugal immediately before and after Portuguese independence in the spring of 1974. However, I venture that there may other reasons to support this, such as the counterculture revolutions within the United States that championed different and more varies types of cultural scholarship. 

        On a larger scale, I finally decided to map the various Portuguese consulates throughout the U.S. My suspicions were confirmed. The major consulate in the western U.S. is in San Francisco, but the remaining consulates are in the Northeast, with two in Massachusetts. I mapped these using yellow flag icons to represent them as a government entity.

         The process of mapping these various sites in layers raised several questions that would serve as fascinating research topics. Namely, what led to the creation of Portuguese cultural centers in the 1920s and 1930s? How did these community centers interact with the larger American culture? It would be interesting to see if and how writing this type of narrative would change how we think about the Northeastern United States during this period.  

            This semester, I am conducting research for a paper that examines the National Park Service (NPS), particularly between 1950 and 1970. I am really interested in how the idea of nationalism is infused in the NPS’s very existence. Following World War II, many of the nation’s parks were in disarray. Due to lack of funding, high visitor rates, and lack of national concern about its future, some questioned the longevity of what the historian and novelist Wallace Stegner had once considered “America’s best idea.”[1] In 1953 Harper’s Weekly published the historian Bernard DeVoto’s “Let’s Close the National Parks.” [2]

DeVoto was alarmed by the state of the nation’s various parks, and cautioned that if Congress would not increase funding, the Parks should close down. I was fascinated by this plea because I had assumed that there would in fact be a more impassioned nationalism to maintain the Parks in place. To analyze DeVoto’s motivations, thoughts, and word choice, I created a word cloud of his appeal.

         

        I selected a brown, yellow, and green theme because simply, it represents the colors of the NPS. But on second thought, it’s much more complex. The colors that the NPS chose for itself was a form of branding and by extension, nation-building. Furthermore, the word cloud revealed that DeVoto may not have been a believer of his own words that the NPS close down. Rather, it was a dramatic attempt to call Congress’s attention to the issues of the NPS. I contend this because of the lack of words with negative connotations within the word cloud. Furthermore, there is an emphasis on the national and the federal government. I organized the cloud so that the smaller words on the left appeared to be feeding into the larger words on the right. I hoped that this would create the effect of DeVoto’s words (“budget,” “Congress,” “housing,” “money,” “job”) servicing and financing the NPS through the large words of “Service,” “national,” “National,” “one.”

            Just a few years later, Conrad Wirth, director of the NPS, approached Congress with his Mission 66 plan. Essentially, he asked for a large budget between 1956 and 1966 in time to commemorate the revamp the NPS in time for its fiftieth anniversary. To compare Wirth’s Mission 66 plan to DeVoto’s plea, I created a word cloud of Wirth’s plan.[3]  

While DeVoto’s essay did not mention the word “Americans,” Wirth’s statement mentions quite a bit the plural and singular versions of “American(s)”.” Wirth invokes similar language to DeVoto, but Wirth’s use of the words “government,” “benefits,” and “business” suggest a more concerted effort to remind the federal government of its power and responsibility to build the NPS in a time of major national growth.

The United States entered a new period following the war that required it to revise the very terms of its nationhood. As the new global leader, it was in a process of rebranding and nation building. Mission 66 and the NPS in this period reflect these growing changes. These word clouds help us to see that the NPS had a direct role in redefining and strengthening American nationalism in this period. It was not only affected by the nation’s growing nationalism post-1945, but it was also contributing to and defining it.  

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[1] Wallace Stegner, “The Best Idea We Ever Had,” Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: The Making of the American West, Page Stegner, ed (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1998), 137.

[2] http://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/anps/anps_4d.htm

[3] http://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/anps/anps_4f.htm

Digital History Storytelling - Project Proposal

           During the summer of 2013, I interned at the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. Sarah Hagarty, the Memorial’s curator, had been doing a lot of great work organizing forums comprised of veterans and historians alike to educate the public about various topics of scholarship about the Vietnam War. In one of our conversations, she mentioned that she was organizing a forum that would address American women’s experiences in the military during the Vietnam War. I was immediately intrigued, and submitted a proposal to write my senior thesis on this topic.

            Through this Omeka project, I hope to transform my thesis for a digital platform. Between 10-15,000 women served in the military in Vietnam, but their experiences have all but remained on the periphery of historical scholarship. It is my hope to make my research and the research of historians on this topic available online for a larger audience.

            The 1960s and 1970s on the American home front was a time of social change and activism for various groups, including women. Through the site, I hope to infuse an understanding of these changes in how women understood themselves and their decision to go to Vietnam. I also hope to spark a conversation about what women’s experiences said about the relationship between the military and women. By including already published oral histories (both audio and transcript files), pictures, military pamphlets, and short narrative pieces about women’s lives before, during, and after their tours of duty, I hope to make this story an accessible one. I seek to use spatial mapping tools to place women's experiences on a map in various of areas served in Vietnam. Ultimately, I hope to make this Omeka site a starting point for citizen historians, veterans, and academics alike who want to learn more about the topic outside of my project. 

What is Digital History?

            Active humanists such as Susan Hockey, Lisa Spiro, and Adeline Koh voiced their thoughts on digital history, its genealogy, and its place in the humanities throughout the last several decades. However, the more I read through their thoughts, the less clear the definition of digital history became. What was clear in these different conversations is that the common thread is that digital history is a process. It is the creation and/or presentation of a historical narrative on a technological platform that serves an audience both within and outside the “ivy-covered tower.” Digital history has been and continues to be conducted by academics and non-academics alike, which ideally constitutes an inclusive framework of content creation and engagement.

            Another key conversation is the theoretical divide: is digital history really all that new? Many argue that digital history is just another methodology to enhance traditional forms of academic scholarship. While I agree that digital history is a methodology rather than an entirely new innovation, I also argue that it is in some ways a unique one because it allows those with a nonprofessional interest in history to contribute to our repository of historical understanding. The revolution of the Digital Age made this possible. What was once historical scholarship that required citizens to know the ins and outs of card catalogs, academic journals, and the right people to talk to, is now an open source of not only consumption, but production of history. It may not be a new field, but it is a methodology that is not only targeted to, but also utilized by the audience itself.

            While this week’s theoretical framework was useful for engaging in the conversation, examining examples of digital history projects is the best way to discuss such a framework. Developed collaboratively by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Center for Media and Learning SUNY Albany, and the American Social History Project, the “History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web” includes thousands of links to primary source documents, cultural institutions, and access to historians' take on their process and craft. 

Courtesy of http://historymatters.gmu.edu/

           In this example, historian Michael O'Malley recorded voice clips where he discussed how he goes about analyzing this particular cartoon, placing it in its context, and making sense of the larger picture. This exercise, one of many, helps to close the divide with the academy because nonprofessionals gain insight into how professionals do their work, giving them the platform to pass on their methodologies and primary sources. Not only does this website provide resources on historical methods, but it also provides thousands of diverse documents that can be used to construct a narrative. The combination of history teaching and learning with a direct link to historians makes this an ideal example of digital history.  

The Future of Public History - Where is it Going?

This week’s readings ask us to think about the future of public history. Just as the public we work with is constantly evolving, so too do public history professionals need to adapt to the different ways that people think about history and the world around them. While we need to be mindful of the specific needs of each place, “office” and public historians also need to be aware that the greatest immediate need is a nuanced approach to history.

            Several prominent historians including Gary Nash and David Thelen participated in a study on behalf of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) to examine the effectiveness of the National Park Service’s (NPS) history programs. What they found was shocking. While a large number of programs were living up to the expectations of what constitutes “good history,” these historians also found that respondents collectively agreed that history in the NPS is “endangered” (16). The historians who conducted the study argued that those working in the NPS profession need to be professionally trained in the academy. Additionally, “office” historians need to play more of a role in strengthening the NPS through collaborative work.

            In the same way that the study of the NPS called for much-needed changes, James Chung, Susie Wilkening, and Sally Johnstone envisioned the future of museums. As technology becomes ever-prevalent, women’s place in the work force is expanding, and the energy crisis continues, these events will all play a role, according to this study, that will shape how museums will contribute to the global community. These authors envision that future museums will play a role in helping people understand their role in societal shifts and “be oases of the real in an increasingly virtual world” (43).

            Major American cities such as Philadelphia have struggled to adapt to the very real changes in the nation’s cultural sector, particularly due to the Great Recession. The study did find that the most attended cultural institution was history, with over five million visitors. This says quite a bit about our role as public historians. With many Americans looking to major cities as a platform to learn both about national and local/urban histories, it provides hope that the desire to learn about the past is not gone. It also goes to assert the premise in Rosenzweig and Thelen’s The Presence of the Past that Americans are most trusting of museums when it comes to learning about history.

            Thus, Americans still continue to look to the public history sector as an important authority in how they understand their history. It is time that major institutions such as the NPS be more open to presenting historical nuances and controversies. The American public is certainly not given enough credit for their understanding of their own history. What I would like to see in the future is more of an emphasis on cooperation between museums in the international community. In an increasingly connected world, it only serves to the benefit of the American public history sector to create bridges with other institutions. It does not serve in our interest to become insular, for that leaves institutions and the public isolated from the nuance that is necessary to conducting “good history.”