This, friends, is the competition. Where are our Whitman remixes?
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Learn more about Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking.
(thanks to Claire for taking these notes)
Posts this week were exemplary, in terms of interpretation, contextualization, conversation. Another thing people did well with this week was incorporating multimedia material, for example, photos, and citing them by linking back to the source.
In the future, remember to cite your sources. Use MLA format.
The theme for today is mapping, as a way of getting at Whitman’s New York. Readings for this week included Whitman’s journalistic works in the collection Walt Whitman’s New York. Next week we will look at Whitman’s Brooklyn through the lens of his biography.
Chuck comments that we have not focused on mapping for a few weeks… this is a lens we will using going forward.
The Material Culture project will count as the midterm. Think of it as if you are a museum curator presenting an object to the world. Eventually, you will create an entirely new blog for your museum exhibit. Rather than writing posts, you will write pages. In this way you are building a resource that is more like a website than a blog. Each of the pages will deal with a different aspect of your object, whether your object is Whitman’s opera dandy shirt, Grace Church, Bowery B’hoys, etc.
1. Create a new blog.
2. When you go in to edit your new blog, rather than creating a new post, create a new page. You may end up with 5 or 6 pages.
3. Password protect your pages when they are still in draft form.
4. Pages are handled differently in different themes. Sometimes they will show up in the sidebar and other times as tabs at the top.
5. You can go into widgets and change the settings so that the only thing that appears in the sidebar are the names of the pages. So there would be no list of blog posts, no list of categories.
6. You can also go in settings and change which of your pages is the home, or front, page.
7. Remember the tag – digitalmuseum
Claire’s presentation on Flickr and Flickr Maps
— New flickr group: Whitman’s New York
— everyone is now an admin on the WWNY group
— you can move your photos from your photo stream to the group
— then you can map them
— Adding photos to group map:
1. Upload image to flickr
2. Name it, tag it ww20
3. Send it to Whitman’s New York group
4. In your photostream, go to image and click “Add to your map”
5. Zoom in on map (can search for address) to find spot where you want to put image
6. Drag photo from bottom of interface directly onto map
7. It will show up on the group map within 5 minutes. To see it there, go to the Flickr group and click the “map” link at the top of the page.
Mapping has been something of an undercurrent in our class so far:
Mapping sites/applications
Material Culture Museum Assignment
Due Dates:
10/13: Topic Selection Due
10/20: First Draft of Entry Due (password-protected blog post)
10/27: Second Draft of Entry Due (password-protected blog post)
11/3: Final Post Due (tagged “digitalmuseum”)
Assignment Background
Students in all Looking for Whitman classes will build exhibits in a digital museum that presents Walt Whitman’s life and work through examinations of discrete material objects relevant to the time Whitman spent in a particular location. Our goal is to tie the study of history — and Whitman’s history specifically — to very concrete objects, in the same way that someone in the future might learn about our present culture by studying an iPod or a television set.
If you’re wondering what a “material object” is, the term basically refers to any physical object that can be found in the world — a pen, a book, a piece of clothing, a building, a manuscript page. Looking at history by examining everyday material objects represents an alternative way of thinking about history. People used to study history by looking at the stories of “great men” and large industries. In recent years, historians have shown that we can learn just as much, if not more, about a culture by looking at the everyday physical objects it contained.
In this assignment, you will pretend that you work in a museum and that you are putting together an exhibit on an object related to Whitman’s time in New York. Your goal should be to produce a well-fashioned and informative piece of writing that fulfills the following objectives:
To see examples of the general type of work we’re looking for, please visit the virtual museum built at the University of Mary Washington in Prof. Jeffrey McClurken’s History of American Technology & Culture class.
Requirements
Warnings
Topics
Please choose an object from the following list. If you would like to research something that is not on this list, please get in touch.
New York Daguerreotype Galleries (Brady’s and Plumbe’s)
P.T. Barnum’s Museum
American Phrenological Journal
Bowery B’hoys – Assigned to Danique
Snow Scene in Brooklyn Painting by Francis Guy
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
New York Aurora
Franklin Evans and Temperance Novels
Operas and opera singers reviewed by Whitman in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle – Assigned to Nicole F
Prison Ship Martyrs Monument – Assigned to Fabricio
The vault at Pfaffs – Assigned to Chuck
Grace Church – Assigned to Pedro
99 Ryerson Street
Plymouth Church – Assigned to Jennifer
Perris Real Estate Atlas
Whitman’s hat – Assigned to Fia
Rufus W. Griswold’s review of 1855 Leaves of Grass
Nina (Whitman’s horse on Long Island)
Compositing Type
NY Tombs and McDonald Clarke – Assigned to Amber
“Our Future Lot” manuscript
Circulating Library
Long Island Clams – Assigned to Nicole G
Steam Frigate Fulton Explosion – Assigned to Chase
Firefighting / The Great Fire of 1835 / Its Effects on the NYC Newspaper Industry – Assigned to Oktay
General Lafayette Tour of 1825
Addendum
NYC area museums and resources (list courtesy of Prof. Karen Karbiener):
1. Brooklyn Historical Society
2. New-York Historical Society
4.Lower East Side Tenement Museum
5. Museum of the City of New York
9. Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and Garden
10. National Museum of the American Indian
11. Museum of American Financial History
Blog posts — please add context to your posts — include an introduction that introduces readers to the subject of your post
— Image citations: at bottom of post, include a line that says (Image credit: Site Name) — a nd make “Site Name” a link to the webpage on which you found the image
— Insiders and Outsiders NYC
Insiders
Philip Hone — describing the Great Fire of 1835 — burned down printing houses — forced WW to move back to L.I. and begin short-lived teaching career.
Hone’s son — NYC commerce
Outsiders
Charles Dickens
Dickens visits 1842
— compares NYC to Boston — faded town. p. 51
— Tombs — surprised by condition of the prisoners. Suicides. lack of exercise. dark.
— pigs — comparing the pigs to people —
“He is in every respect a republican pig, going wherever he pleases, and mingling with the best society, on an equal, if not superior footing, for everyone makes way when he appears, and the haughtiest give him the wall, if he prefer it. He is a great philosopher, and seldom moved, unless by the dogs before mentioned. Sometimes, indeed, you may see his small eye twinkling on a slaughtered friend, whose carcass garnishes a butcher’s door-post, but he grunts out “Such is life: all flesh is pork!” buries his nose in the mire again, and waddles down the gutter: comforting himself with the reflection that there is one snout the less to anticipate stray cabbage stalks, at any rate.”
— America as dirty, uncivilized
Who is Dickens’ audience for this travelogue? How these passages about the Tombs and pigs compare to his descriptions of colorful clothing and bright colors on Broadway
Dickens’s tone — condescending — interview with Tombs guard
How did Whitman deal with the pigs?
— pp. 92-3 —
“Why what have you thought of yourself?
Is it you then that thought yourself less?
Is it you that thought the President greater than you? or the rich better off than
you? or the educated wiser than you?
Because you are greasy or pimpled—or that you was once drunk, or a thief, or
diseased, or rheumatic, or a prostitute—or are so now—or from frivolity or
impotence—or that you are no scholar, and never saw your name in print . . . .
do you give in that you are any less immortal?”
— Weren’t there slums in England? Why would Dickens be so harsh about NYC slums when London had similar slums?
Fanny Kemble
Edgar Allan Poe
Frances Trollope
City Tech students: by now, you should have received an email notification of our assignment for this week, which I posted on the wire of the City Tech Whitman group. If you have any questions, please let me know. I’m looking forward to seeing your work!
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