KC's Adventure through HIST 390

Unfortunately I was not able to attend this weeks class because I was really hoping to get some good ideas from my fellow course mates on how they are setting up there projects. I also could have used some help from the professor adding some information to mine. There were no required readings for this week just the show and tell of our projects during the class period. I have my visit with Andrea at the Blenheim house coming up so I am looking forward to meeting with her and learning more about the house and hopefully pick her brain about information on my soldier as well. After the visit I am going to put the finishing touches on my project so I can get to studying for my other finals. I have really enjoyed this course and hope to apply many of the tools I have learned in my future endeavors.

During this weeks class we worked solely on our projects through the omeka website. We learned how to set up our exhibits for our final project. Most of the class was spent trying to organize how we were going to split up our soldiers life. Since my soldier didn’t move around too much before or after the war I decided to try and focus mostly on his where he and his regiment during the war. I personally feel that it is going to be challenging to really grab someones attention with my soldiers life because while no ones life is lesser then anyone elses, he really didn’t do anything too exciting during his lifetime. I am going to keep digging as I finish up my project to try and find as much information about Pvt. Coats in order to show the best representation of his life through my project.

In this weeks class we went in depth on the value of text mining in a document. We also went into detail graphing information from historical texts we were looking at. One graph the really struck my attention was one that pertained to the number of casualties each regiment sustained. This graph was broken down even farther to those that died from battles and those that died due to disease. I knew from past knowledge that the conditions these soldiers went through were harsh but it was still amazing to see the vast amount of soldiers who died from disease rather then the actual fighting itself.  In this blog we were supposed to text mine a document but for some reason I had trouble with the application we were supposed to use. I looked through I view of my course mates blogs to see there results and surprised by the mixed results that some of the got when they looked into their documents.

In the beginning of this class we were looking at maps of Harlem during the 1920’s that were developed by Prof. Robertson. It was really interesting to see how a community has changed not only from the 1920’s til now but during the short period of time that the map laid out. I liked the different ways the website used a map to tell different stories such as where particular arrests were made with detail of when and what the reasoning was for the arrest were marked on he map. After we got done looking at a few other maps we went on to Google to start developing our own maps for our soldiers. Since I have been looking into my soldiers file his movements before and after the war are limited to Allegheny, New York, but when I started to look at where his regiment went during there 3 years in the war it really put into perspective how much these guys actually moved around. Obviously these soldiers didn’t have automobiles so they did a bulk of there time marching during the war with very brief periods of actually fighting.

In this weeks class we were looking into a lot of various statistics that pertained to our soldier’s regiment. The example we did in class was comparing the deaths of our soldier’s regiments versus other regiments from their respective state. We also looked into whether more soldiers died actually in battle or from disease. We posted all the data into excel and were able to make different graphs to compare the data sets. In class we also set up an account with Daytum in order to record what we drank, wore, and people we communicated with from Thursday to Sunday. For starts this 4 days of recording I already knew was going to be skewed from my normal habits especially when it came to what I drank because it was my 21st birthday weekend. So as you could imagine I had a lot of alcoholic beverages in those days and unfortunately due to the amount and occasion I can’t accurately guess how man beverages I had but I do know a lot of water was consumed on Sunday. Also due the occasion I saw a lot of friends that I don’t normally see on a daily basis that came up to help me celebrate. My clothing was pretty much the same with myself wearing a t-shirt and jeans as well as a button up shirt on nights that I went out. I don’t see Daytum as being something I will use for the final project but it was a decent app to use in recording data.

This past class we received our mid-term grades and I did much better then I anticipated when I left class. My group is still in the process of finalizing our visit to the Blenheim house which we need to get done as soon as possible. In this weeks class period we set up our omeka sites which will contain our final projects on our Civil War soldiers. We did a brief example of how to post a picture to the site and decided to find my soldiers first pension document. While in the process of posting the picture we added meta data by tagging information to the photo such as where we got the information and other sources to be able to accurately identify the image. While looking through my soldier’s file and searching online it is very apparent that following the war Mr. Coats was not physically fit to continue work as well as he stayed in the same place he was when joining the army all the way to his death. I’m hoping that once I use my ancestry.com subscription it will have some more information giving me a better insight on what Mr. Coats did after the war as well as his family.

This week we took the midterm exam which I believe went over pretty well. For this blog we were supposed to go back and look out our soldiers files to see what they did after being mustered out. My soldiers file is filled when many pension requests because after his time in the army he physically was not able to do work as he used to. During the war Pvt. Coats spent a lot of time in the hospital because he came down with the Typhoid fever. That illness is what caused him to be placed at the Blenheim house in the first place. After he left the army he was still feeling some of the effects of that as well as problems from varicose veins and rheumatism. His brother who he not only lived by before and after the war, he also worked for him on the fields, made mention to how when Morris returned home he was not able to work as he once used to.

This week is Spring Break so of course there is no class.  I have used this time to get caught up on my blog posts as well as study for the mid-term coming up in a week.

This class started out by Prof Robertson getting every caught up on Zotero and helping us get our libraries set up in order to share with him. In class professor went to the waybackmachine and showed us how much not only the Mason site has changed but webpages in general. Then game the discussion on how everyone in class backs up the information they have stored on their computers and devices. I remember being in elementary school and having to bring a floppy disk to class in order to save my work and now we have thumb drives that can hold so much more information on them. Myself personally I store my pictures and music on both my laptop and desktop as well as an external hard drive. Not only do we have to worry about time destroying our information but we also but be mindful of our activity on the internet. We must be careful of what websites we go onto and the mail that we open while maintaining an up to date computer with an anti-virus system. Following our discussion we went over the terms that were going to be mentioned on the mid-term exam.

This weeks class started with a fantastic presentation by Andrea of the Blenheim House. She gave the class a lot of interesting facts about the whole history of the Blenheim house from pre Civil War to its current state that it is in today. We briefly went over primary sources again and went into learning about secondary sources. Prof Robertson really had us dig deep into websites to try and get us to find out who wrote the sites and whether they were actually trustworthy sites. To get us to focus on some aspects of our soldiers lives we might not have thought about we read an article called “Touched with Fire” and discussed it in groups. The article really helps you get a sense of what these men had to go through. They lacked a proper diet, had poor clothing, and due to there close quarters many of them died of illness rather then actual fighting. At the end of class we downloaded Zotero but I had trouble getting it to work.