Digital_Humanities, Critical Reaction #6: Critical Review of Digital Projects in the American West

Unfortunately, there are not many Digital Humanities projects out there (at least none that I could find) that specifically deal with the American Southwest at the turn of the century or the medical field in this area. Generally, many of the more prominent projects follow more popular historical topics, such as war histories. A great deal of the Digital Humanities projects that I was able to find specifically addressed literature and text mining in specific texts of famous authors or notable figures in history which, while interesting, do not help my research or focus area out much. There are a few tools which can be useful for teaching, such as Lacuna Stories, tools which discuss digital cultures, such as Challenging Methods or research tools, such as HathiTrust which will prove useful on a general level, but, again, projects specifically dealing with my research interests of women in the American West at the turn of the century and traditional and professional medicine in the Southwest were few and far between. 

That being said, I did find a few notable projects that either slightly qualify as Digital Humanities or are very amazing projects that, while not very widespread, at least indicate ways that the field can expand into the Digital Realm.

The first, most readily available Digital Project are archival projects which contain numerous accessible documents. There are numerous kinds of archival projects available, but the one most relevant to my work is found with the New Mexico Digital Collections. This site features a fantastic searchable archive from collections across New Mexico and is a great way to get started on looking for primary sources for any project. I've used this before and will definitely use it again, and while the project itself does not have any larger purpose beside provide access to these collections, the site as a whole is fairly notable. Not only are all of the sources free to access, the overall search terms needed to locate certain documents seems fairly well put together, which, unfortunately, can't be said for all digital archives.

I have found two other Digital Humanities projects that deal with my research, both of them for medical history. The first is the Text Analysis and Topic Modeling of Martha Ballard's diary. Ballard was  midwife in Maine who kept a daily record of her life between 1785 and 1812. As the article linked above discusses, after cleaning the text to have a readable OCR that could be analyzed with topic modeling, a lot of useful information about the life of Ballard and the daily life of a midwife was revealed, even though some of the findings initially seemed mundane. This kind of analysis takes the information provided by digital tools and provides more context to what is initially provided, such as the frequency of housework being mentioned in her journals, for example, and discusses the changes of these kind of entries over time within the context of the time period. Not only is a remarkable understanding revealed of Ballard's life (that of a general married woman in Maine at this time), it also provides great insight into the life of a midwife and how they thought about and went about their practice. While similar diaries as complete as Ballard's are rare, there is potential in the field to take such practices and apply them to other works and daily records to analyze and understand daily life. Changes in frequency of words, further, can reveal just as much as words that are repeated most often. This project, as a whole, is a wonderful example of the kind of work needed in treating a historical document and the kind of information that can be mined from it.

The final project I wish to discuss is the Voluntary Hospital Database which, again, deals with medical history. This database provides searchable information about hospitals and healthcare from the 1890s to 1940s and presents a map which features the placement and change of amount of hospitals over time, which can be utilized to discuss the rise of professionalization in medicine and an increasing reliance upon science and professional medicine in a medical facility, as opposed to traditional healing or healing in the home. The project itself focuses on hospitals in the British Isles and while the research on display does not help me at the moment, the project can be applied to the geographic location I am studying and try to investigate similar changes and information. So, while this project isn't immediately useful to me now, in the future, possible projects along these same lines will greatly improve what kind of analysis I can provide of the intersection of traditional and professional medicine and how they interacted over time across categories of race, class, and gender, especially in areas with not as easily accessible forms of professional healthcare.

Again, I really was not able to find many Digital Humanities project that exactly pertained to my field. I was fairly pleased to find things that dealt with medical history and can be applied to future work in the field, but it seems that projects dealing with the Southwest or women in the Southwest are sparse. In the future, many of these projects can be more refined and broaden out their focus to encompass more interests and information. If anything, what the field needs most is expansion. The projects that I have selected really do seem to accomplish their intended goals fairly well, and the biggest notes of improvement are for expansion and to have more projects to look at to discuss and enhance the field.

New projects should be following along the lines of what these projects have done in utilizing digital tools to enrich the forms of scholarship available. If anything, more maps dealing with the Southwest that attempt to discuss or present complex ideas, such as the intersection of health and transportation in the West with TB at the turn of the century, or even information to discuss the racial composition of different areas during points of immigration, such as the Gold Rush, would be useful. Also, in general, I really would like to see more continuation of topic modeling projects that also seek to increase the availability of primary documents with clean OCRs, which can be used for further analysis and investigation. While more documents are being digitized and made available online, many still have to be printed out for any real analysis to take place and cannot be read by technology to reveal any other information outside of what can be gained from reading the text at face value.

I don't think this lack of sources or projects really is a bad thing, if anything, it is a note for improvement and acknowledgement that as scholarship progresses, we will probably see more projects similar to those mentioned above pop up. It is fairly exciting to know that while there isn't a lot out there now, current historians can make the next big contribution to enhance and enrich the field. As our technology becomes more advanced, so too, will our understanding and use of it to produce some extremely exciting digital projects and forms of digital scholarship.

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 12/1

This past week was a pretty notable week for failure blogs. Not only was I having trouble even completing the smallest command with Python, during my presentation, I realized that I forgot to format my website to a standard size so it will display correctly. If ever there was a moment where I felt like I had egg on my face, it was then.

But, it is the final week of the semester, so there is hardly room to let this hold me back. After struggling for hours on trying to get Python to do something, I finally managed to get it to replace some typos in a text file of a manuscript. I don't think I've ever felt more accomplished, to be honest. I don't entirely know what I was doing wrong, but I figure it was in the way I was going about trying to put the code in and get it to do what I wanted to do.

My first mistake was trying to do too much at once. For this portion of my portfolio, I forgot that the majority of our contributions must be done in small parts. Every step definitely counts and is definitely needed in order to make sure it goes through alright and accomplishes the assignment. So, after struggling with that very notion that I had to slow down and take it piece by piece, it was a lot of trying to figure out what string of code actually worked and what would be best to try to accomplish my goal. Of course, it involved a lot of Google searches for trying to figure out the benefits of opening a file in writing versus reading mode, for example.

As for the formatting on my website, I am still trying to go through to get it to work. Unfortunatley, "vw" and "vh" as recommended in class are not yet compatible for other browsers, so I've been removing width and height specifications and using percentages where I need to instead of pixels. It still is ridiculously stressful and takes far too long, in part because it displays fine on my laptop, but I have to constantly go back and forth between that laptop and an older one owned by my family to see if it shows up alright. I've gotten mixed results, but I suppose so long as it isn't too wonky, it will pass for now. It is rather hard to let things go, however, mostly because I've worked in graphic design before and as a naturally organized (and slightly Type A) person, it's hard for me to not want all elements of the page to align perfectly. I chose the design of my website for organization and aesthetic purposes, but it seems that choice is shooting myself in the foot.

Either way, I'll have things ready by the end of the week. It is just taking longer than usual to try to get everything fixed and redo a lot of my CSS code.

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 11/23: Like Riding a Bike... Sort of

It seems that putting together my Digital Humanities Portfolio is a series of really small steps that will hopefully form a cohesive whole over the next two weeks. At the start of every day, I always intend to build an entire page or section to cross it off of the requirements list, but there are smaller things that first need to be constructed before I can begin to work on an actual part of the project. For example, this past weekend, I spent most of my time building the HTML pages not just for my research and general website, but also for a landing page for the portfolio itself, making sure to construct directories that I can then just insert the information I need as soon as it is available. This is a needed step, I will admit, but it's interesting how this portfolio has really become a collection of really small additions and cannot be rushed for that very same reason.

However, I do seem to have a general layout for my pages, which makes it easier to construct the different sections using slightly modified css style sheets and streamlines the process a bit. Hopefully, once I start putting together the other aspects of my portfolio, it should be simple to adapt my already established pages to display what I need it to in order to meet requirements.

At the moment, outside of this HTML triumph (or potential triumph), I am currently trying to work with QGIS and get it to display data. This is more frustrating than what I anticipated; I have a vague memory of loading data and a map into the program and displaying things, but I feel like I am relearning how to use the program all over again at the same time (I'm also reminded how much I really dislike the program as a whole). I've spent far too long trying to figure out how to use OpenLayers to display a map and now I can't seem to figure out how to get it to focus on Albuquerque. Again, it seems this addition to my portfolio will be another series of small additions as opposed to one large contribution. We'll see how this goes.

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update: 11/17

This week, in addition to general work on the ABQ Airport project and my portfolio, I mostly focused on working on my research trailer. The first draft of this product is below.

Overall, during this process, I was reminded of a few things. First, regardless of how familiar you might be with making videos, using any new program to edit film is going to take a while to get used to. I have made videos before and had become quite familiar with a video editing program called Roxio. However, this research video was created using Adobe Premiere, a program I had not used before. I assumed that I would be able to utilize the software with little to no issues, but I quickly realized that this small change from one video editing program to another would take some adjustment. Once I got the hang of the program (although I am still learning), it got easier to put the video together, but it served as a reminder that any new program or tasks requires adjustment. This resonates with all of the new forms of technology we've been learning over the course of the semester -- familiarity with technology or a certain type of technology does not always guarantee a universal understanding. I'm sure I'll have to keep this in mind in the future as I progress in my work in Digital Humanities and continue to build my online portfolio.

The biggest frustration I faced with my research trailer was accessing and finding images to include. My research topic isn't too well documented in images and I found myself pulling from related as opposed to directly linked photos to at least try to convey my message. In the future, given more time, I'd like to try to have photographs that are directly associated with my topic and what I am talking about and have more integration between what I am saying in the narration to what is being displayed on the screen. After this project, I do want to continue making similar videos about my research and general information for the public, and so this is important to keep in mind moving forward.

While this week wasn't filled with my general level of frustration, I still was able to pull valuable lessons away from this video project and keep in mind what I can do in the future to improve similar endeavours. It's not exactly a failure as it is an acknowledgement of a learning process that is sure to continue over subsequent years.

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 11/10: Keep Moving Forward

I don't know if everyone else feels this way, but, most likely due to the fast-approaching end of semester, I feel extremely behind in all of my work for this course. I've been completing the assignments and am diligently and frantically trying to meet all of the requirements for the portfolio, but I can't shake this feeling. I'll be going to the after-class meetings starting next week to try to get on the same page as everyone else and will devote as many hours as I can to actually making progress on the ABQ Airport project, my portfolio, and my research video this weekend, but I still feel pretty stretched for time. I don't know what the end result will be of all of this frantic working, but I hope there is a light at the end of the tunnel and whatever I produce will at least be adequate and satisfying. 

Regardless, I've been working on my portfolio and website as of late. I decided to try to completely revamp the design. It took a bit longer than anticipated, and I spend an embarrassingly long amount of time trying to figure out why my visited link colors were not updating. Apparently I just misspelled "visited" and forgot to add an "i." Spelling definitely counts in HTML and proofreading is a necessity. After jumping that ridiculous hurdle, I'm updating the other pages to now match the design and it's been slow progress, but still, progress none the less. Eventually, I should be able to actually add more content and fill the general requirements of the portfolio before the semester deadline hits. 

The ABQ Airport Project is going just as well as my portfolio, where I've been making small discoveries and baby steps to actually putting something together of value. I've been collaborating with the ABQ Museum to try to get a copy of the Oral History video to put online of Harry Davidson, but there was an error in trying to find a jumpdrive big enough to hold the file. I'll be going back on Monday with an external hard drive to get a copy once and for all. Hopefully during one of the get togethers after class, I can try to organize my work with everyone else's and prepare for Friday's deadline. 

Either way, this weekend is going to be pretty full of work, both digital and non. I don't imagine the workload will decrease anytime soon as well, so I guess the only thing I can really do at this point is keep moving forward. That's not exactly a positive message to end it on, but I am making progress. As of now, I've yet to really run into any technical roadblocks, outside of trying to figure out how to have a dropdown menu bar on my website and make the page resizeable, which I'm sure can be solved with some Googling, but the night is still young. 

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 11/3: Small, But Successful Progress

I still feel like I am behind in Digital Humanities, in part because I am still working on my website and portfolio and balancing that progress with my research on the Albuquerque Airport. It can be a bit overwhelming and time consuming, and considering the semester is very quickly coming to a close, it is no surprise that I feel this way. However, I finally seem to have made a breakthrough with my Albuquerque Airport research.

I found an oral history video of Harry Davidson as conducted by the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. Davidson is a local expert on airports in Albuquerque, and this video reflected that. While he does focus on all airports as opposed to just the Sunport and the fact that my initial question of "What does the Albuquerque Airport mean to people?" is still unanswered, I'm honestly very pleased with this progression. I think it will pair rather nicely with a page about the general history of the airport and at least gives some insight to why the airport is important.

Of course, I'm still struggling with finding good oral histories to use, so I am going to stick with collecting newspaper clippings that concerned the airport and putting them together on a webpage, most likely grouping them by theme, similar to Maggie, Candolin, and Kaveh's project, but with text as opposed to images. It can still be a tad interactive and tells personal stories as filtered through the newspapers at the time and at least attempts to find the local voice contained in oral histories.

So far, so good. I'll be working on that this weekend and also updating my website, working on my portfolio, and making my trailer as the weekend and week progresses.

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 10/27: Hitting Walls

I've been progressing through the most recent work in my Digital Humanities course fairly smoothly, so of course, there is some other aspect that is proving difficult. In the class, we are putting together a website about the history of the Albuquerque Sunport, and my initial goal was to find some oral histories that pertained to the topic and shed some light on what the airport meant to different people in Albuquerque. However, as I've discovered, my topic has resulted in more dead ends than a horror movie.

Not only did I hit walls in the difficulties of posting oral histories online, which was one of the reasons why I pursued the topic in the first place, I've also had general complications on finding the oral histories I need. I've yet to find an oral history that specifically addresses the Albuquerque Airport, and half the time, I feel like I'm fishing for small tidbits or soundbites that at least mention the airport and generally come out with nothing useful.

Because of this relative lack of success and overall failure, it has become far too easy for  me to put off even working on the project because of the walls I've already hit. While it would be nice to listen to every single oral history in the Center for Southwest Research or spend countless hours shifting through transcripts, it is far easier to put off the useless fishing and work on other, more pressing, and productive work instead. 

It wasn't until this week that I really decided to, instead of working through hours of material which may or may not prove useful, broaden out my topic and change my overall goal for the sake of producing at least something small by the end of the semester which is fast approaching. Instead of strictly looking for oral histories, I'm now going to look at newspaper articles and try to find sections which address the airport, which can then be put online either in a PDF/image, transcript, or as a sound recording. It is a bit of a cop-out, but at this point in the semester, I can't really afford to be picky. 

This adjustment, I feel reflects in other work in the Digital Humanities. Sometimes, it is better to just reorient your question or whatever attempt you are working on and try something else, or at least expand what you are trying to accomplish. It is a constant cycle of working and reworking until something sticks and works out. The small failures are meant to reorient how we think and adjust our approach in order to eventually achieve success, however small that success might be. 

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 10/20: Positivity Among Failure

Sinking my teeth into Mallet and Overview was relatively painless. There still were some issues that arose, mostly with directories, but overall, the process of getting to know these tools was easy. I think, after experiencing productive failure so often for the past few months, I have become used to the feeling. Instead of rage quitting when something doesn't work, I backtrack and reconsider what step I skipped or what part of my code threw the computer off. I get frustrated, to be sure, but it isn't as paralyzing as before.

In my first experiment with Mallet, the Command Line did not want to run the program or even list what items were in the directory. It was in my C:\\ drive as instructed, but I was missing the Java installation required to run the program. Similar failures occurred throughout the process, from trying to convert txt files into a readable mallet file as recommended in the Programming Historian tutorial (great tutorial, by the way. I highly recommend it. Check it out here.) to simply listing what was in a specific directory or txt file. But, with patience and a lot of back and forth between the tutorial, the GUI of the mallet directory, and my command prompt, I was able to extract the information I wanted and get some pretty interesting results.

The documents I analyzed were just for the purpose of the exercise and won't help me in my research, but I'm starting to see how text mining might be useful in the future. I guarantee that whatever files I deal with will have to be cleaned to make them suitable for these tools, but it could reveal some interesting connections that I would not have normally considered. If I do come across a large corpus, these tools will enable greater analysis and will also help my own process in understanding exactly how these documents are connected and how they might be useful. 

The content of the documents can also be made clearer by such tools as Overview. I did find this tool easier and more appealing than Mallet, in part due to my own avoidance of the Command Prompt (it's a bit hard for me to read the text in this format, even if I open it in a Notepad or Word doc). But, I could see its limitations. The tool is very specific in what it can do with text files and with text modeling. It shows the same strings of words that Mallet does, but a portion of the original connections is lost; Overview breaks down the texts in a greater degree and makes distinct divisions between different documents, which is useful in understanding what kind of files you might be dealing with, but may not reveal as clear distinctions of how they connect or how certain topics are addressed in the material as a whole. This view of Overview might just be to my own novice status with the program, but that was my initial impression none the less. 

I still plan to use this tool in the future, but in conjunction with Mallet to see what different information each tool can extract. The user-friendliness helps for this tool as well and can be a great way to initially approach digital tools and text mining, so long as the other programs are not ignored in the long run.

My own preferences and views of these programs aside, I'm starting to feel how much my toolkit has grown over this past semester and how my general understanding and approach to these once foreign tools has developed. It's a good feeling. I still have a long way to go (there are many more failures to make and moments of frustration to experience), but it's a start.

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 10/13: A Mess of Words

This post is a bit late, but hopefully no one will really mind too much and forgive the tardiness. I've been playing around with Voyant, Google Ngram, and Bookworm recently. Bookworm remains the most stubborn, but, mechanically, I've been able to adjust to the former two with ease. The question remains, however, of how I will integrate this into my research and if the effort for using such tools will result in adequate payoff. 

In Lara Turner O'Hara's post, "Cleaning OCR'd text with Regular Expressions," [link] she discusses the process of cleaning up a text document in order to utilize it as a CSV file. She admits that the input of work needed to clean up text files before they are ready for analysis can be taxing and may not be worth the effort in order to interpret texts without the aid of digital analysis tools. I have to agree with her on this point; in Voyant, I loaded several editions of the Daily Lobo's archives from 1890 - 1910. I've used this collection before for research, and all of the editions available are scanned and searchable by keyword. The PDF files are saved in a format that recognizes text, which is why it worked in Voyant. I attempted to do the same with other newspapers through different online archives, but these PDF files and records did not have the same attributes, illustrating one main problem with using these digital tools. Even if a newspaper is digital and searchable via keyword, the file itself does not guarantee compatibility. 

I was expecting this issue, however, so it didn't cause much alarm. For the sake of the exercise, I stuck with the Daily Lobo newspapers and selected several ranging from 1890 - 1910, primarily to see if the issue of New Mexico statehood and enfranchisement of Hispanic males and females was a common topic that fluctuated throughout this period. Neither one of these topics, however, appeared on my word map (though they were contained in individual articles, just not at a high enough frequency to generate interest). Instead, my word map looked something like this:

This prominently displayed the second issue with using such tools and archival material. Not only were more common words, such as "the," featured more prominently than any word that would actually generate interest, the text was read with several errors and errors were throughout. Just because the document was a PDF which recognized text does not mean that it could read the text correctly. This is where cleaning and manipulating data is crucial.

After establishing several stop words that removed common words and errors, my word map started to develop into something significant. It still did not really tell me anything, aside from the limitation of using a university newspaper, which found more references to words such as "varsity" and "university" than events that I found to be significant. 

It does, at least, paint a more interesting picture and potentially raises some questions that could encourage further research. The significant frequency of the word "phone," for instance, seems unusual, and while this word does not come close to my original intended query of statehood and suffrage, at least shows how such tools can be useful. As Ted Underwood notes in his blog post, "Where to Start with Text Mining," [link] tools such as Voyant and Google Ngram can provide insights to textual sources which might otherwise be overlooked. This can be the simple generation of a future research question or it could be something more complex that potentially negates historian interpretations and estimations, as my text mining exercise illustrates. I had originally hypothesized that, due to the debate and issue of statehood, there would be a significant frequency of its mention in these records. I was wrong. This could be, in part, due to the editions I chose rather haphazardly and could also be a result of the limitations of the tools. Voyant shows frequency of words, for example, but, unlike Google Ngram, does not display the changing rate that a certain term is mentioned to really see any rising discussion. In my opinion, Voyant is better suited as a tool to look at a wide body of textual documents and see if a pattern emerges; any pre-formed conception or intent should not be the driving force of using this tool. Other text mining tools have their own limitations and strengths which encourage multiple tools in order to analyze the same body of word. Interesting conclusions might be drawn from the results, but there is a lot of work that needs to be completed before any interpretation of data can truly occur. 

Cleaning a document, of course, is key. It is a daunting process. In the interest of time, I did not even attempt to clean up the texts I used. For more serious research outside of this exercise, however, I may dabble in this textual cleaning and make the mess of words actually form coherent sentences that can then be analyzed. In spite of the questionable yield of this work, the exercise alone is valuable to any historian. At a very simple level, it can open up new questions and insights. As a community, making such archival documents and information (copyright permitting) available can also enrich the field and allow for further investigation by other historians and digital humanists in a new way. And, if something true does result from text mining that supports your research, it can seem like a truly significant addition to a body of work. Text mining and its uses does need refinement and my own abilities with these tools needs further development, but its potential as a historical tool of analysis is apparent. 

Digital_Humanities: Albuquerque Airport Resources and Research

When I interned at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, I completed projects that involved going through oral histories and videos and seeing how they could be used for museum exhibits. I don't know how much of this will be useful to the DH project and course, but I felt it would be best to share what I know for now and see if it can be valuable to anyone else in the class.

Oral Histories

Below are some Oral Histories I looked through with information on what they discussed. These were recorded on cassette tapes, however, which could make it difficult to transfer it online. The heading before each in bold is information about where this was collected. I truncated the text below it to only refer to what would be applicable to the airport. The time period that each one of these oral histories talk about is pretty uncertain, but it seems to be around 1950 - 1970, depending on the person and what they are talking about.

Albuquerque Museum, South Valley Oral History Project, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Item Number: SVP-TP-F28July97. Document: Tape Log. Team: “Valle Grande.” Fieldworker: Tomas Pena. Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico. Informant: Florencio Baca, SVOH. Florencio Baca, South Valley Oral History Project. 28 July 1997. Inter: T. Pena. Miscellaneous Files and South Valley Oral History Project (Indexes of SVOHP). Actual Tape: 2002.025.001, Oral History “General Tapes, Alpha A-L, Box 1 of 2

         Tape 1, Side 1

                        Sandia Base

                              5:10     Sandia was a fair employer, they never deviated from equal opportunities. When that act came through, we had not problem transitioning because they were already doing that. I worked there for 31.5 years. I started in April 1952

         Tape 2, Side 1

                        197 

197 Tower Road was named for the towers used in the 1930s to navigate planes

                        316 

316 Aircraft school. At the old airport, near the Atomic Museum in ABQ, NM

         Tape 2, Side 2

                        517 

                                 517 Flew planes as a test mechanic. Flew various planes.

Albuquerque Museum South Valley Oral History Project, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Item Number: SVP-TP-19July97.2. Document: Tape log. Team: “Valle Grande.” Fieldworker: Tomas Pena. Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico. Informant: Vincente Apodaca, South Valle Oral History. 1 Nov. 1996. (Tape originally in Spanish)

            Tape 1

                                    292

292 Worked on airport in Albuquerque, for about 3 years

KRQE Channel 13 Collections

These are basically B Roll film of what Channel 13 would show on the news. These were all on VHS, though some have been digitized since then. In general, a lot of the videos lack real content, and are mostly goods as supplements to other information. Most of these took place in the 1970s, I believe. The numbers refer to the minute location in the tape.

Tape 4

Random Informational video about airplanes                                                39-40

                        Contains info and footage of the 1^st commercial flight

                        Not really New Mexican (?)

                                    However, Amela Earhart was on this flight, and she did visit NM

                        TWA—celebrating old era of transportation

                        Talks about Amelia Earhart

NM National Guard Claiming Discrimination                                                       124-126

The National Guard in NM has been plagued with other suits and accusations concerning discrimination

Today, an affidavit was filed against Col. Sands for being involved in a cheating scandal

                                    Filed w/ department of airforce

                        On-going investigation of international guard

                        Sign reads “Enchilada air force, home of the ‘tacos’”

Tape 5

775 days in prison, man returns home                                                                    35-36

                        See the man getting off the airplane, meeting family

                        Dedicates his time in prison to NM

                        Tuesday, July 27, 1971

Reies Tijerina, activist for Hispanic rights and land rights; worked to restore land grant rights to Hispanic and Mexican owners and was part of the chicano movement

Tape 8

Spirit of St. Louis                                                                               100-101

                        Shots of the small aircraft and pilot, John Linberg

                        Speeches about him

                        Shots of him doing a photo shoot

Tape 9

Energy Crisis w/ airplanes                                                                           28-30

Possibly owner of Sunport talking about how to reduce energy usage @ the airport

i.e. use less aircrafts, have less take off times, use bigger aircrafts with more seats

It shows the Albuquerque Sunport; it is definitely not as developed as it is now, and generally deserted of people and planes

ABQ Women Project

This was a project I did myself where I basically looked up numerous women who were influential for Albuquerque and listed biographical information about them. I generally include information on the sources that I draw from and also list and images from the Albuquerque Museum Photoarchives that have these women in them. These women range across time period and general connection to Albuquerque. 

Aviation

           

            Mary Carroll

                        First Woman Pilot of Albuquerque

                        Time Period: 1930s

First woman pilot in Albuquerque. She claimed that her first solo flight was “the most thrilling event of her life.”

                        ABQ Affiliation: ABQ pilot.

                        Sources:

                                    Balloons to Bombers, Don E. Alberts

Jerrie Cobb

                        Pilot and Potential Astronaut

                        Time Period: 1960s

Jerrie Cobb has been flying since she was 12. When she turned 18, she received her Commercial Pilot’s license and went on to earn her Multi-Engine, Instrument, Flight Instructor and Ground Instructor ratings as well as her Airline Transport license. By 19, she was teaching men to fly, and by 21, she was delivering sleek military fighters and four-engine bombers to foreign Air Forces around the world. She went on to set new World Aviation records for speed, distance, and absolute altitude. She became the first woman to fly in the world’s largest air exposition, the Salon Aeronautique Internacional in Paris, her fellow airmen named her Pilot of the Year and awarded her the Amelia Earhart Gold Medal of Achievement. Life Magazine named her one of the nine women of the “100 most important young people in the United States.” She was picked by the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque in 1959 to be the first woman to undergo the same physical and psychological fitness testing regimen as the Mercury Astronaut Selection Tests for America’s first space mission. She passed all three phases with flying colors. Due to her high performance, she was asked to recruit 25 other qualified women pilots. Twelve passed the first series of tests, but the American space program did not open the ranks of its astronaut corps to women until 1978 and the project was shut down. Secretly, however, the women were known as the Mercury 13. Jerrie was later appointed by the Administrator of NASA as consultant to the nation’s space program in 1961, but NASA’s requirement that astronauts have military jet test pilot experience eliminated all women since women were not allowed to fly in the military. After this loss, she decided to serve primitive people in the Amazon. For 35 years, she worked doing this, and has been honored by governments of France, Brazil, Peru, Columbia, and Ecuador. President Nixon awarded her the Harmon Trophy as the top woman pilot in the world. For her humanitarian work in the Amazon, she has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

                        ABQ Affiliation: Trained at Lovelace

                        Sources:

                                    Quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/cobb.html

                                    www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mercury/missions/astronaut.html

http://userpages.aug.com/captbarb/astronauts.html

           

            Mrs. D. E. Dalbey

                        Wife of General Manager of the First Company that Owned the ABQ Airport

                        Time Period: 1930s

Wife of general manager first company that owned ABQ Airport. She supported People’s Ticket against mayor Clyde Tingley. IN addressing a women’s political meeting in Albuquerque, she reported that Tingley was furious and had threatened to fight the airport and TAT unless she got out of the election campaign. He asked her if she knew that he had done a great deal for the airport and incidentally her husband and TAT and she told him that she had nothing to do with her husband’s business and that TAT only leased a section of the airport’s land for a field. Finally, she related to the audience, after the czar of the city had threatened, cajoled, and attempted to intimidate her in every way possible, he pleaded: “But Mrs. Dalbey, you’re going to vote for me, aren’t you?” The laughter of the women present at the meeting drowned out the speaker’s answer.

                        ABQ Affiliation: Husband general manager of first company that owned ABQ 

                       Airport. 

                        Sources:

                                    Balloons to Bombers, Don. E. Alberts

            Amelia Earhart

                        Pilot

                        Time Period: 1920s-1940s

Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas on July 24, 1897. She spent her childhood in various towns, including Atchison and Kansas City, Kansas and Des Moines, Iowa. At 19, she attended Ogontz School near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Two years later, she left school and took a course in Red Cross First Aid. She enlisted as a nurse’s aid at Spadina Military Hospital in Toronto, Canada and tended to wounded soldiers during WWI. The next year, she enrolled as a premedical student at Columbia University in New York. She later moved to California where she learned to fly. In 1922, she purchased her first airplane, a Kinner Airster with the help of her mother and sister. After her parent’s divorce, she moved back east where she was employed as a social worker in Denison House in Boston, Massachusetts. She was selected to be the first female passenger on a transatlantic flight in 1928 by her future husband, the publisher, George Palmer Putnam. With pilot Wilmer Stultz and mechanic Lou Gordon, Earhart flew from Newfoundland to Wales aboard the trimotor plane Friendship. Upon the completion of the flight, Earhart wrote the book 20 Hours – 40 minutes. In 1931, she married George, but continued her aviation career under her maiden name. George organized her flights and public appearances, and arranged for her to endorse a line of flight luggage and sports clothes. He also published two of her books, The Fun of It, and Last Flight. After a series of record-making flights, she became the first woman to make a solo transatlantic flight in 1932. That same year, she developed flying clothes for the Ninety-Nines. Then, she began designing her own line of clothes “for the woman who lives actively.” In 1935, Earhart became the first person to fly from Hawaii to the American mainland. By doing so, she became not only the first person to solo anywhere in the Pacific, but also the first person to solo both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Also in 1935, she joined the faculty of Purdue University as a female career consultant. It was the purchase of a Lockheed Electro, through Purdue University, that enabled Earhart to fulfill her dream of circumnavigating the world. In June 1937, Earhart embarked upon the first around-the-world flight at the equator. On July 2^nd, after completing nearly two-thirds of her flight—over 22,000 miles—Earhart vanished along with her navigator Frederick Noonan. They took off from Lae, New Guinea, bound for tiny Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. The distance from Lae to Howland was about the equal to a transcontinental flight across the US. A great naval, air, and land search failed to locate Earhart, Noonan, or the aircraft, and it was assumed they were lost at sea. To this day, their fate is the subject of unending speculation. In 1939, George authored Earhart’s biography, entitled Soaring Wings, as a tribute to his wife. As a whole, Earhart also tried to combat stereotypes by stressing variety of women involved in aviation. Throughout her life, Earhart believed women needed to step forward together and open doors for one another. She spent much of her career speaking and writing to promote women’s opportunities in aviation and other fields. Other records that Earhart holds are as follows: 1922, Set women’s altitude record of 14,000 feet; 1928, became first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger; 1928, was the first woman to make a solo round-trip flight across the US; 1929, took third place in the first Women’s Air Derby in her Lockheed Vega; 1930, set women’s speed record of 181 miles per hour; 1931, set autogiro altitude record of 18, 451 feet; 1932, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic; 1932, received the National Geographic Society’s Special Gold Medal; 1932, Set women’s transcontinental speed record for Los Angeles, California to Newark, New Jersey; 1933, broke her previous women’s transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to Newark; 1935, became the first person to fly solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City; 1935, became the first person to fly solo from Mexico City to Newark; 1937, broke her previous women’s transcontinental speed record from Oakland, CA to Honolulu, HI.

ABQ Affiliation: Visited ABQ @ certain points. Stopped here at times.

List of Images:

1.      PA1968.001.043

                        T.A.T. Ford Trimotor inaugural flight ceremony

20th Century, 1929
Print, B/W
4.75" x 7"
Locale: Albuquerque Airport

Gift of Clark Speakman

T.A.T. Ford Tri-motor, NC 9646, refueling. T.A.T. terminal building in background, inaugural flight ceremonies at airport, July 1929. Catherine Stinson (Mrs. Mike Otero) made speech. W.A. Keleher was master of ceremonies. Amelia Earhart on this plane.

2.      PA1978.141.268

T.A.T., Tri-motor, Clyde Tingley, Amelia Earhart
Hanna

20th century; Depression, 07/14/1929

Clyde Tingley, Amelia Earhart and others IN FRONT OF T.A.T. AIRLINES TRI-MOTOR, INCLUDING MAYOR CLYDE TINGLEY & AMELIA EARHART PUTNAM. The University of New Mexico Centennial Project.

3.      PC2012.15.1

Proclamations (2-sided)
Amelia Earhart proclamation signed by Mayor Harry Kinney and Governor Bruce King,

American, 20th century, 1982
paper, ink, silk ribbon

Gift of Ed Dibello

Two documents dry-mounted to cardboard into 1 sheet. One side is an Amelia Earhart Day proclamation by Mayor Harry Kinney, January 28, 1982, and the other is a state proclamation signed by Gov. Bruce King for the week of January 24-30, 1982. Paper, ink, embossed foil, satin ribbon.

This city/state document complements a photograph of Earhart taken in Albuquerque in 1929. There are ongoing efforts to locate her aircraft which could be resolved soon.

4.      RS1989.5.1

Painting, Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart
Hella Broeske Shattuck, 1906

20th century; 1970s, 1971
Oil paint
Overall: 24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm)

In Memory of Beryldine Shollenbarger

Oil on canvas painting of Amelia Earhart by Hella Broeske Shattuck, b. 1906, painted 1971. DS 10/09.

                        Sources:

                                    Ameliaearhartmuseum.org

            Laura Ingalls, Jacqueline Cochran, Ruth Nichols

                        Women Pilots

                        Time Period: 1930s/1940s

Well-known women pilots in Albuquerque. Ingalls established the women’s east-west transcontinental speed record during the 1930s, landing at the airport after dark en route to LA. She also made a big hit at Oxnard Field in 1941. During a nationwide anti-war publicity flight, she stalled her Locheed Vega aircraft just before touching down on the field’s east-west runway. The resulting crash looked bad, but she was fine. Parts of the plane hung for many years in the shop area of ABQ high. Jackie Cochran set a new world speed record in 1940 at 249 MPH

                        ABQ Affiliation: ABQ pilots

                        List of Images:

1.      PA1993.001.003

John Fertig

1940
PRINT, B/W
Overall
Locale: YALE AVE, S

REPUBLIC AIRCRAFT ON GROUND AT Albuquerque Municipal Airport, JACKIE COCHRAN, WHO JUST SET SPEEDRECORD AT 249 MPH, TWO UNIDENTIFIED MEN

2.      PA1993.001.018

                                                John Fertig

1940
PRINT, B/W
Overall
Locale: YALE AVE, S

JAQUELINE COCHRAN AT ALB AirPORT, AFTER SETTING WORLD SPEED RECORD OF 298 MPH. FIRST THING COCHRAN DID WHEN SHE LANDED WAS PUT ON LIPSTICK

3.      PA1993.001.019

                                                John Fertig

1940
PRINT, B/W
Overall
Locale: YALE AVE, S

JACQUELINE COCHRAN AT ALB AirPORT, AFTER SETTING A WORLD SPEED RECORD AT 298MPH IN A REPUBLIC AIRCRAFT

4.      PA1993.001.020

                                                John Fertig

1940
PRINT, B/W
Overall
Locale: YALE AVE, S

JAQUELINE COCHRAN AT ALB AirPORT, AFTER SETTING WORLD SPEED RECORD OF 298 MPH IN REPUBLIC AIRCRAFT, HAS NITRATE (?) NEG. The University of New Mexico Centennial Project.

5.      PA1993.001.025

John Fertig

1940
PRINT, B/W
Overall
Locale: YALE AVE, S

JACQUELINE COCHRAN RECEIVING FLOWERS AT ALBAirpORT, AFTER SETTING NEW WORLD SPEED RECORD OF 298 MPH, HAS NITRATE (?) NEG

6.      PA1995.053.014

John Fertig

1940
PRINT, B/W
Overall
Locale: YALE BLVD, S

FAMOUS AVIATRIX JAQUELINE COCHRAN

7.      PA1995.053.015

                                                John Fertig

1940
PRINT, B/W
Overall
Locale: YALE BLVD, S

FAMOUS AVIATRIX JACQUELINE COCHRAN

8.      PA1968.001.045

1930c
Print, B/W
Locale: Albuquerque Airport

Gift of Clark Speakman

Ruth Nichols Lockheed Vega, R436N, by Hangar #2.

9.      PA1968.001.156

1941
Print, B/W
Locale: Albuquerque Airport

Lockheed Vega, belonging to Ruth Nichols, NC7954, nosed over the runway.

10.  PA1978.341.152

Clyde Tingley, Ruth Nichols
Cobb Studio

C 1930

CLYDE TINGLEY WITH RUTH NICHOLS, AVIATOR, & 2 OTHER MEN.

                        Sources:

                                    Balloons to Bombers, Don E. Alberts

            Anne Noggle

                        Albuquerque Aviator/Photographer

                        Time Period: (1922-2005), 1940s

Noggle began her career during WWII flying for the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots, one of first women to do so. She later acquired an interest in art and photography and moved to Albuquerque where she gradated from UNM with a degree in art history. She taught at UNM from 1970-1984 and produced three books: For God, Country and the Thrill of It, A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II, and Silver Lining.

ABQ Affiliation: Moved to ABQ, graduated from UNM w/ degree in Art History. Taught at UNM 1970-1984

Sources:

            NM Biographical Dictionary, Vol. I, Don Bullis

Digital_Humanities, Critical Reaction #5: Progress, Always Progress

I still feel behind in my Digital Humanities course, at least in terms of the quantitative "ah-ha" moments I am supposedly expected to have regarding new technology and its application to my own research and online portfolio. I completed the Python tutorials without a hitch and my general understanding of our previous tools is fairly sound, albeit rudimentary, especially where QGIS and Javascript are concerned. However, in spite of this completion, I am having trouble understanding how navigating a computer without a GUI will help my research in any way or how it can be incorporated into my own research. Perhaps this will link up with data mining in some way, but I have not had adequate time or the resource of a file to data mine that is relevant to my research to really test this out. That being said, in spite of the lack of satisfaction I feel in completing and understanding Python and command line text, I should be excited. In one night, I picked up a new tool that I had never before used, understood the language, and completed the exercises. Perhaps this underwhelming feeling is progress. 

Roughly two months ago, I had no real conception of HTML or CSS or how the language syntax really worked. Now, while there is still a lot to learn, I have at least a basic understanding and I seem to be picking up new techniques and aspects of this digital language, such as with command line, fairly easily. If anything, that shows an adjustment from before and illustrates, at least, the potential to advance and attempt to utilize more complex digital tools in the future. 

I still don't exactly know how to apply what I am learning to my own research or even the ABQ airport project just yet. But maybe that, too, will come in time. If anyone has any suggestions, I am definitely open to hear them. 

Digital_Humanities, Critical Reaction #4: The Power of Maps

I'm probably part of a very small group of historians who really don't care for maps. 

I know, I am a disgrace to the field. I understand their importance and know that they can be a vital tool, especially in spatial history, or any history for that matter. They can be interesting to look at, especially as an artifact, but I don't seem to have the same love of it as some of my other colleagues. It's not that I don't like maps, I just am not overly fond of them and do not have the mindset in place to do any real or successful analysis with them.

Take this extreme apathy and add that to a task that requires to make maps, which has primarily filled the time of my Digital Humanities course over the past two weeks. I am dealing with unfamiliar history territory in an foreign digital one. It's a double whammy of difficult. GIS, admittedly, was a lot more difficult to grasp than Google Maps Engine Light, which lays out the features and use fairly nicely (although trying to use javascript in order to embed it onto my webpage was another story). Perhaps, with this easier entry point to digital mapping technology and maps in general, I might find an interest in this field I was never able to find before. Already, I am getting a bit excited about the potential for what kind of maps can be created and the relative ease that they can be put together and presented to the public. 

Of course, in order to create a map, you need an idea and a reason to do so. That is also possibly one aspect that has deterred me from pursuing any extreme interest in maps in history. I've yet to really find a compelling narrative or historical aspect to layout on a map to provide for greater understanding or to point out something that would have otherwise been overlooked. Census data on a map would be the most obvious choice, but I would like to think there is the ability to go a step further than this. This is, in part, why I am especially excited to see what my colleagues produce. I'm sure I will come up with a good map-making idea sometime in the future, but for those who are truly passionate about maps and spatial aspects of history, it'll be intriguing to see how they take these tools and apply them, going beyond what the tutorials we've been looking through provide. 

I'll still keep on pushing through this map section and hope to build up an eventual passion as I progress in my work and research. But, more importantly, I'll be looking to what others produce and excitedly applaud their achievements, techniques, and digital map-making abilities. 

Know Your Limits

Graduate school is a practice of many things. You become well versed in the academia and current scholarship, hone your ability to discuss and write about complex themes and ideas, discover first hand the effects too much (or too little) caffeine can have on the human body, build a strong network of peers and scholars, and, mostly by necessity, learn your limits and the dangers of taking on too much. I've always had a problem with not overloading my plate and saying no, but, as I realized last year, which is quickly being reinforced this semester, the ability to say no, understand your limits, and take a break now and then is a valuable skill to learn, not just to ensure your success in school, but to also ensure your general survival throughout your academic and subsequent career. 

There are dozens of opportunities available out there that can benefit professionally and academically, and many of which can really boost the quality of a CV. Especially at the beginning of the semester, before work picks up and homework is relatively light, it is far too easy to sign up for too much, asserting your own personal capabilities and reasoning that another responsibility really wouldn't be that much work. And this may be true, to an extent. Graduate school should go beyond your general experience in the classroom. Academic and professional enrichment will, in the long run, prove to be a benefit and, for a history major such as myself, diversity in different skill sets is being pressed as a result of the declining job market in academia. The amount of stable, open positions in an academic field for history is extremely low at the moment, so recent graduates are having to look elsewhere for employment, such as at museums or non-profit organizations. Having a diverse set of skills and experience outside of coursework can be valuable to ensure future success and stability and will provide more options in case Plans, A, B, C, and D don't work out, at least not at first. 

However, there is a fine line between going beyond your coursework and taking on some extra responsibilities and overloading your workload, which will inevitably result in declining health, anxiety attacks, a vanishing social life, and the slow and painful crushing of your spirit. I can fully attest to these effects. Every semester during my undergraduate, I would constantly take on too much, nearly kill myself attempting to finish it all, rant about how I would never do that again, then rinse and repeat. As a grad student, I wanted to change my bad habits (which really were affecting my overall health). 

The success of this attempt, however, remains to be determined. As always, I still took on too much, but I was a bit more considerate in thinking about my responsibilities and I spent far more time truly weighing the responsibilities I had and I wanted to have before committing to them. It did take some reinforcement from friends, family, and mentors, many of which told me to just stop when I attempted to take four classes in one semester and adamantly persuaded against taking on more than what I could handle. As a result, I have scaled back my general workload considerably, which was very quickly taken up by my graduate coursework which ended up being more of a mountain than the molehill I originally anticipated. 

I still struggle with saying no to new obligations, however. Last week, I actually had to drop out of a fellowship that I was apart of due to the stress and extra work it required, which really did not benefit me as much as I was hoping and the overall expense of my time and effort was not worth the rewards. I am not saying that quitting was a proper solution; I should have said no from the start if I thought that it was going to be too much. I hate quitting myself and can be very stubborn when it comes to letting something that I've started go uncompleted. However, I do consider it a slight success that I was able to decline a responsibility and acknowledge the detrimental effect it was having on the rest of my work. 

There is no ultimate solution to not taking on too much. You should be open to new opportunities, but mindful of the workload you currently have as well as your own personal limitations. This is something that I am still struggling with and will most likely have to deal with for the rest of my life, which is fine. I'm honestly glad that I am at least more aware of my personal limits and am somewhat alright with saying no and focusing on the work that really matters, as well as trying to enjoy the non-work-related aspects of my life. It isn't easy, but finding this balance or at least being aware of it is vital to learn as a scholar and academic.