Blog #11: The Dreamer

Today I want to talk a bit about an unlikely source, but one that I really believe in: The Dreamer. The synopsis from the website states:

Beatrice “Bea” Whaley seems to have it all; the seventeen year old high school senior is beautiful, wealthy and the star performer of the drama club. And with her uncle’s connections to Broadway theater, the future looks bright ahead of her. Little does she know that her future might actually be brighter behind her.
Bea begins having vivid dreams about a brave and handsome soldier named Alan Warren--a member of an elite group known as Knowlton’s Rangers that served during the Revolutionary War. Prone to keeping her head in the clouds, Bea welcomes her nightly adventures in 1776; filled with danger and romance they give her much to muse about the next day. But it is not long before Beatrice questions whether her dreams are simply dreams or something more. Each night they pick up exactly where the last one ended. And the senses--the smell of musket shots and cannons, the screams of soldiers in agony, and that kiss--are all far more real than any dream she can remember.

The Dreamer is a webcomic by Lora Innes. Her background is in fine art, but it quickly becomes apparent that she put a lot of historical research into developing this comic. In fact, her story is based on actual historical documents, such as The Life and Times of Joseph Warren. I enjoyed this paragraph by Innes:

You might never read The Life and Times of Joseph Warren (though I hope you do) but my desire is to make that world come alive for you. Let yourself be transported back in time. Let yourself go on an adventure. And let yourself fall in love with these characters who have become dear friends of mine. I’ve found that the people I spend the most time with these days have been dead for 200 years.

Now, using a project like this to learn about history has both strengths and weaknesses. I think that the main strengths are the unique medium, the appeal to popular masses, and the way the author can teach about the American Revolution without really "teaching". On the other hand, when reading The Dreamer or something similar, it is important to realize that it is a work of fiction. The author may have distorted events or historical facts to suit their story, may have taken a biased position in their storytelling (Innes seems very attached to her characters, for example, so as a result the readers naturally feel more sympathetic towards her heroes), and of course, as with any source, readers should realize that this is just one portrayal of history. Nevertheless, I think that The Dreamer would make a great supplemental educational aid in a classroom, especially for high school students (some teachers have already caught on to the potential). If a similar project were to be taken up by a group of historians and artists and done as a collaborative project, I could see a bright future for (web)comics as a educational sources.

Blog #10: Project Log

What I've accomplished over the past few days:

• Made a favicon! Now my website has a nice little book which appears next to the title.
• Fixed up the blog a bit. It's not perfect, but now it has links and a header, so it appears more or less as part of the site, and links up properly.
• Had a fight with the fancy scrollbar. May or may not end up keeping it, depending on if I can get it to work.
• Messed around with adding an image carousel to the front page, to advertise parts of the collection, but I couldn't get it to work (I tried about 6 different scripts), so I ditched the idea, at least for now. It was a minor detail that was taking up too much time.
• Asked for some opinions from friends and family on various designs I had been playing around with for the website. I think I have some good direction now, but I need to do some work to execute it.
• Figured out some ways to organize menu content in a clearer and more aesthetically pleasing way.

So I'm still working away at various things! I hope to start working on content in the next few days, since I'm feeling more confident about the design now.

Blog #9: Historical Twitter Feeds

Like Youtube, blogs, and websites, Twitter offers a modern platform for educating the public about history.
One of the main advantages of Twitter feeds is that they are concise and easy to follow. This way, history can be broken down into small doses. Someone is more likely to read one line of text than a paragraph. At the same time, this can be a disadvantage, as it can create a situation when information is oversimplified and lacks context. It can also be a confusing website to use.
There are tons of different kinds of historical Twitter feeds out there. The most broad is a feed such as @PocketHistory, which simply posts random facts from anywhere in the world. Another feed is Archeology Rome, which focuses on presenting various links and information related to ancient Rome.
Local museums and archives have also realized the benefits of Twitter. @WichitaHistory is run by a local museum and provides facts related to Wichita's history. Similarly, @NS_Archives is a feed which shares items from the Nova Scotia Archives.
@WWIIToday offers daily tweets on a "this day in history" type theme. This kind of approach makes history directly relative to today. These kinds of tweets also work well with Twitter's character limit.
One unique feed is @Wendell_Howe, which is the fictional twitter account of Wendell Howe, a time traveler and anthropologist. I felt like this twitter had a lot of potential to be both fun and informative, as the main character would be experiencing history for the first time, just like the viewers. However, I found it sort of confusing, and I think that is mostly because of Twitter's character limit. There just isn't enough space to explain any background context.
@historicaltweet is a fun feed, which actually posts links to their website, which posts pictures of photoshopped "tweets". So it's not really a historical twitter account, but it's a similar idea. I found some of these "tweets" funny, but I think that in a lot of cases it's only funny to people who already know the history behind the image. It's not really a great source for teaching history.

Overall, I think that Twitter can be a great tool for teaching history, but I feel that at the moment it is not being used to its full potential. I was not super impressed with any of these feeds. Many of them were inundated with personal tweets or retweets, which was annoying when I wanted to find original content. Many of the tweets were just links to a website or a blog, so the tweets were acting more as advertising. In this case, there's pretty much no point in even reading the twitter, when you can just directly read the blogs websites it links to.

Blog #8: Janet Stephens

I came across Janet Stephens's Youtube channel by pure chance - a friend had posted a link to a news article about her on Facebook. Stephens is a hair stylist who has merged her passion for hair with an interest in history. On her Youtube channel she posts videos depicting how to make historical hair styles with period appropriate tools. Her styles are based on both primary sources (mostly art) and scholarly secondary sources. She has even gained reputation in academics, for her theories on Classical hairstyles.
I think this is a great way to make history more accessible. The use of Youtube is also nice, as it makes her work available for anyone in the world to watch. Stephens's videos remind me of other (contemporary) hair styling videos I've watched, but she includes little tidbits of historical knowledge which makes them appealing to me as a history major, but likely also interesting to the public masses.

Blog #7: Project Log

I've been working on my website a lot since my last project log. Most significantly, I completely overhauled the design. I really liked the way the dates were set up on the old version, but I couldn't get the dates to go in a straight line without making them super tiny and illegible, and I didn't like how it looked with two lines of dates. I thought about making a horizontal scrollbar, but I couldn't get it to work, for some reason.
So, in the new version, I went with two vertical frames. The left frame holds the timeline, which is now vertical and scrolls. The content appears in the right frame. I also completely changed the fonts and the color scheme, to something a little easier on the eyes.
As of now, the cookbook pages are incomplete. I just copied and pasted the HTML from La cuisinere bourgeoise so that each page would have the correct formatting. Later on, I'll go back and update all the information for each page.
Currently, I'm working on making sure the design is consistent in all the pages. Next, I need to work out how to incorporate the blog into the website. As of now, it's a little glitchy, and I need to put the links at the top. I also need to make pages for the dates in the timeline frame. Lastly, I'll need to input all the information into the cookbook pages (titles, dates, authors, etc.) and do the write-ups. If I get to it, I'll also try and include some data on the research page - perhaps a map, some statistics, etc.
Any comments or constructive criticism would be great!