Author: admin

My biggest issue with creating this just the amount of time it took. Once I got in a rhythm I was fine it just took time. All of what we just did will definitely be on my final project. They help explain my topic super well.

Story map

In the creation of my Omeka exhibit I believe I am doing well. It has taken time to understand how it works but now that I have been adding images it is not as hard as I thought. I am however struggling to format the home page of my exhibit. I am not thrilled with how it looks and I am not sure how to change it. Besides that everything else has been working well. The research has been interesting and I am glad I chose West Virginia coal mines to be my topic.

Link

For my project I am studying the history of coal mines in West Virginia. I am doing this because I want to better understand the history of that state and what those mines meant to the state. To do this I have conducted research into the history of coal mines and company towns and what the significance is. My goal is to educate people on the importance of the coal mining industry and what the miners faced.

For this project I will have it broken up into a few parts. The first part will be about the treatment of coal miners in West Virginia. I will begin with explaining what company towns are and what they did. I will have some quotes from an article written by Mack Gillenwater. His article goes into what company towns were and what they did. Company towns themselves were towns owned by the coal company in which the miners lived. These towns trapped the workers in these towns as the money you earned was only good in these towns. They also were not part of any centralized government meaning they had no oversight. 

Next I will be explaining the extremely weak safety standards. In the early 1900s coal mining was an extremely dangerous job. To help illustrate this I will be using a graph from an article by Paul Rakes. In his article he has compiled graphs with data that show the amount of deaths that have happened in this industry.

Lastly I will have a section on the Battle of Blair Mountain. This was the largest labor uprising seen since the civil war. This battle was fought between miners and the government. For this I will be using first hand reports from The Washington Post from 1921. This image is an article from them that I will be using to show the start of the battle. I will also be using reports from Brandon Nida, Trevor Harris, A. Rochelle Williams, and Lou Martin article called “What Did the Miners See?: Archaeology, Deep Mapping, and the Battle of Blair Mountain”.This report goes into what the experienced and details of how the battle happened. I will also be using an article by Brandon Neely of Gettysburg College. I will be using his work to help better educate myself so I am able to write an informative report on this. I will also be using an article posted in the U.S. Department of Labor by Chris Williamson for information and images. Lastly I will be using an article written by Jessie Wright Mendoza. I will be using a picture that was used in the header of my exhibit and I believe it is the most eye-catching picture. I will be using all these sources to help write a detailed summary of the events of Blair Mountain.

In conducting research for this project I used numerous databases to help dictate my research. I was able to find an ample amount of information about the Battle of Blair Mountain and company towns. My goal is to educate the audience into what these miners went through and how their struggles bettered the industry as a whole. I want my project to have some images and quotes from the articles but a majority will be written. 

The goal of my website is to help bring light into the history of coal mining in West Virginia. The coal industry is what built West Virginias economy. What is not taught in school is what those coal miners went through. They had to fight for better working conditions. My goal is to bring attention to this. My primary audience will be those in my class and my secondary audience will be those that want to learn about the history of coal mining in West Virginia. I want to show people photos of the working conditions and to see how company towns worked and how they trapped their employees.

After todays class I believe I have an understanding on how I want to set up my exhibit. I will start with just an introduction into the history of coal mining in West Virginia and its importance. I will on that home page have two tabs, one for company towns and one for Blair mountain. While I may add more I will start with these two. In each I will have pictures and other metadata sources. I want it to be a collection of pictures that will help describe and educate the reader.

When reading the articles about who owns the past there is no definitive answer. No one person or group owns the past but they can help preserve it. Museums, historians, and people can do their best to help make sure history is not forgotten. 

For my copyright for my website I chose to do CC BY-ND. I was not sure what I wanted it to be but after taking the creative commons quiz, it said that CC BY-ND would be the best. I would agree with this because I want people to be able to use my website if they need to but I would like to be cited. This copyright grants people the right to share my website for whatever they please just as long as I am credited. The only restriction I have implemented is that you cannot remix, transform, or build upon my website. This means that you cannot distribute a modified version of my site. When I get to my final project I will do a similar or same copyright because I will have done research on my topic. If people want to use my work in the future that is fine I just want to be credited. I do however not want people to edit my work as I have done all the research and do not want to be credited for misinformation if someone uses my work and changes it. When looking at the copyrights of the sources I have used so far for my research they are all up to date. They allow for people to use the work as long as they are properly cited. 

Coding is not something I enjoy or believe should be required for students to learn. It is like learning a new language and that is something I greatly struggle with. There is so much to remember and one mistake can ruin everything. For example I could not get my styles ccs to work with my program. The only reason I was having an issue is because I misspelled a word. I am someone who relies on autocorrect as I am not the strongest speller. So for my website to not work just because of a spelling error bothered me.

Coding is not something that students should be forced to take. I believe some people are naturally gifted when it comes to working with computers whether that be in coding, programming, or IT. I believe some people are just better at it than others. Some people even talk about how coding is beautiful. In “Hello Worlds (why humanitarian students should learn to program” it is stated that, “Many programmers talk openly of the aesthetics of code, using terms like beautiful.” I however am not one of those students. What I believe to be the most important item to learn when it comes to computers is how to work the microsoft applications.

We live in a world where everything is done with “Word”, “Excel”, and “Powerpoint”. These skills are not taught in school. These skills should be required to learn in college because they will help everyone when it comes to working in the real world. If students want to go into coding it should be a choice not a requirement. Coding is not a skill that is required for every job, while being proficient in microsoft applications is. I would love a class that teaches how Excel works or how Word works. These are skills that will help every student regardless of major. While I do believe coding is a good skill to learn, I believe that it should not be required. 

When reviewing “Hearing the Americas” it was able to give me some ideas on how I would want to structure my own project. Their site is very user friendly in that everything is labeled and easy to follow. They have tabs to explore the different artists, styles and they have an in-depth “About” section. When reviewing this site in the eyes of Organization of American Historians guidelines we are able to dissect the site. Content is the first guideline that it meets. This source is very recent in that the work was done up until 2023 and was done by George Mason University. The content is shown as a way for the readers to learn about the history of music in the Americas in the early 1900s. The goal is to find and share music from that time period with the original audio. Next is design. The design of the site is easy to follow with tabs that show you around the site. Each tab has a function that works.The site is also very user friendly because of how basic it is. The tabs explain what they are showing and you can go around each tab and explore the musicians or just the music. The audience of this site would be those interested in early 1900s music. This site helps bring the original sound of the music up to the present day. Next is digital media. What makes this site unique is that it uses original sound from the 1900s records. People are able to go to an artist and listen to their music. A lot of the music is hard to find as this was done before records became popular. Because of this the site is preserving history. The creators of this website is George Mason University with the help of many others. 

Karush, Matthew, and Michael O’Malley. “Hearing the Americas.” Hearing the Americas · Welcome · Hearing the Americas, 2023, hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/welcome. 

“There will come soft rains” by Ray Bradbury seems to be a continuation and or from the same world as his other work called “The veldt”. They are both set in a time where the world is automated. Everything in their house is done by robots. We see the house is able to transport humans into any room in the house, lights turn on and off automatically, it even makes food and cleans the house. What makes it seem as a continuation is the fact the house is now being run by itself and no longer has humans living in it. In “The veldt” we see the nursery which is supposed to display what the kids are imagining into the room. However it seems that the room has made these thoughts reality as the parents have found items such as a blood soaked wallet which they cannot explain. The way it ends is that the kids lock their parents in the room. We are left to assume that the parents died in the nursery via the lions. In the “There will come soft rains” we see the house continue its everyday life. It is a very dark story of the house going crazy in doing its repeated motions as if it still had someone living in it. We see how the house has been continuing daily life as it makes food and cleans itself. We see the house continue to remind its owners they are late for work and school even though no one lives there. We see later on during a storm that a tree crashes through a window causing the stove to catch fire. The stove leaks this fluid that is very flammable and is easily spread. The house then starts to do its best to stop the spread of the fire but the water just helps guide the flammable liquid around the house causing it to spread worse. We see it struggle to contain the fire as it begins to spread to every aspect of the house. We then learn that the “brain” of the house is in the attic. Once the fire gets there and lights the brain on fire we see the house explode. The story ends with the house no longer being there and the rest of the houses around it no longer exist either via a bomb that is inferred. This story is very dark and is a very odd story to begin with. What the author wrote is just very odd yet creative at the same time. While I did struggle to read this story as it was so out there I will say it was interesting. I myself was not a fan of this story. Besides it being such an odd story I had trouble following what exacting the purpose of this story was. It read almost like a bad dream. The only thing it reminded me of was the movie “Monster House”. In both cases we see a house take a sentient form in which it tries to protect itself. In both cases we see the house eventually fail and explode.