This video  offers a 20 minute history of perhaps the most famous drumbeat we have ever heard. The “Amen Break”  is six-seconds long and was originally released in 1969 by a funk and soul band known as The Winstones. Commenters of this youtube video recognized the beat being used in everything from the cartoon, “Powderpuff Girls” to serving as background noise in hardcore pornographic videos. I found it most interesting that members of The Winstones, the original creators of the beat, have not taken any legal actions in regards to copyright infringement. Though the video pointed out that this beat has been used and reused hundreds of times by artists and D.J.s, the creators never once pursued legal action.

This illuminates the musical industry concept of “sampling.”Everyone’s favorite, Wikipedia, notes that music sampling refers to taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or sound recording in a different song or piece.”But given the nature of our discussion on Wikipedia and validity of online sourcing, I orchestrated a quick google search for more on sampling. A more refutable source, NPR, recently discussed this phenomenon of “sampling” in a 2011 article titled, “Digital Music Sampling: Creativity or Criminality.”

The article brings up various interesting sides to the integrity of sampling and inquires about the copyright of sound, asking “How much of a sound can you copyright? A note? A phrase? And who owns the copyright?”

My favorite quotation from the article is as follows:

 “From Pro Tools to YouTube, have made everyone into a producer. We live in a world of remixes and mash-ups and samples, taking other people’s work, remaking it into something new.”

These words ring true in a society that listens to dubstep, Super Smash Bros, and remixes of remixes. Before signing off, I’ll leave everyone reading with a mash-up from everyone’s favorite musical television show: Glee.

So for this week, well technically last week, we were given the task of judging a Wikipedia article on a historical concept by looking at its sources, discussion, and history. I chose a Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln.

The article link can be found here.

Upon clicking the “source” link, you will find a reassuring lock image next to the message, “This page is currently semi-protected and can be edited only by established registered users.” This brings into question what exactly is meant by “Established registered users.” Is this referring to people who have created multiple valid articles in the past? Do these people have certain historical accreditations? Or is this simply talking about someone who has created multiple Wikipedia articles on any subject? Curious.

The “history” of the article brings me to believe the words on the page are accurate. In the past month, over 50 edits have been made to the article. Seeing that the page is being constantly edited, checked, and revised assures me that people are not simply making this information up, but rather, constantly ensuring it is the most accurate and authentic it can possibly be.

The discussion won me over. The article was a “former featured article” on Wikipedia’s main page, has previously been listed as one of “history’s good articles” which features historical articles with accurate, credible information, and no one discussing the article seems to have any outstanding objections to the factual information presented.

Overall, I give Wikipedia’s Abraham Lincoln an A for accurate.

This week’s readings proved to be just as interesting as professor Cohen foretold. In Errol Morris’ article Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg, Roger Fenton’s photograph of “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” was analyzed. The article discussed the photograph’s two slightly different forms:

The first photograph:

The second photograph:

The difference in the two photographs is pretty obvious. One features the post-war landscape with a clear, unobstructed roadway while the other has cannon balls lining the path. But the difficulty presented is answering the questions, “Which photograph came first?” Analysis after analysis throughout the three part reading dumbed down to two basic potential truths to the photographs:

1. The first photograph was taken first, chronologically. Unhappy with the uneventful picture, Fenton decided to take cannon balls and place them along the road, adding drama to the shot.
2. The second photograph was taken first. Fenton photographed the post-war area as it was, lined with cannon balls. After the first photograph, he removed the cannon balls from the road and re-shot.

Ultimately, I have NO idea which shot was actually taken first. Though many of Morris’ interviewees made logical claims and deductions as to which photo was taken first, technically George, Lionel and Marmaduke came to conclusions using evidence from psychology, photoshop, foot-print finding, and gravity. But in actuality, I don’t think the importance of this article came from which picture came before which picture. I think that the true importance is the idea that something seemingly “obvious” in relation to history and, specifically, historical photographs, is rarely anything close to “obvious.” Morris said it best:

“Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious. When someone says that something is obvious, it seems almost certain that it is anything but obvious – even to them. The use of the word “obvious” indicates the absence of a logical argument – an attempt to convince the reader by asserting the truth of something by saying it a little louder.”

Another interesting implication that this photograph controversy brought to my attention is the fact that photoshop is not the only method of photographical trickery. Years and years before photoshop, people were stumping viewers, whether knowingly or not, with “staged photos,” “movement of items,” and other things. Reading this article and viewing these pictures makes me question the validity and trustworthiness of basically every historical photograph I’ve ever seen in a textbook, magazine, or elsewhere. How do I know that what I’m viewing is authentic and actual? Short answer: I guess I don’t.

Morris’ other article Photography as a Weapon left me with similar thoughts and feelings. This article analyzed more recent images capturing Iranian missiles shooting towards the sky. However, though printed in prominent newspapers, these photos were tampered with. Morris brings up critical questions in response to this photographic lie:

“Do they provide illustration of a text or an idea of evidence of some underlying reality or both? And if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted?”

Though a photo expert like Morris are able to point out the repeating smoke patterns and other falsities to prove this photo’s photoshopped front, if I were to see this photograph in the newspaper or online somewhere, I would never question it as inauthentic. However, after reading these articles, I will definitely be viewing any and all images in a different light.

For this week, we were assigned to complete an online scavenger hunt. Initially, I was extremely excited to begin this journey. During my sophomore year of high school, our class field trip was a day-long scavenger hunt through historic Boston. Bandanas, team t-shirts, and all, I led my team of ten tenth graders to victory. However, this scavenger hunt proved to be much more difficult than locating hidden historical artifacts in downtown Boston. I’ve always considered myself a relatively advanced googler, usually being able to locate any piece of research I needed for classwork through googling. However, seeing that google was not bringing up the information I desired, I had to turn elsewhere.

1. Finding an op-ed on labor dispute involving teachers from before 1970:

I utilized our library resources, shocking, I know! And I typed some things into proquest. Specifically, I looked into The Proquest Education database. After searching through “1950 teachers labor union,” “1940 teachers labor union,” I finally came across a useable article when searching these keywords along with the year “1930.” Eventually, I came across this article: Yay!

But now comes the embarrassing part… That was all I was able to locate in my searching quest. Scavenger hunt: You got me. You win this time. But after wasting an hour of googling, I’ve learned that library resources and databases are the way to go. Until next time, torturous online search.

Chapter 3 of Digital History discusses the costs and benefits of digitizing the past. After reading the chapter and more specifically, this section, I’ve come to a personal conclusion that the benefits of digitizing the past outweigh the negatives. Though after our classroom discussion and mentions of issues pertaining to inauthenticity, decrease in excitement over seeing an actual historical document, on top of various other downsides to the growing digitization of historical artifacts, the sharing of knowledge is what triumphs for me. I believe that the most important thing about the realm of history is the fact that people know their histories. Due to digital history, everyone can have access to those topics they covered in middle school but have forgotten or can examine that historical document they never had the opportunity to view in a museum.  The book articulated this idea very well by saying:

“[Digitizing] can mean new access, for example, to historical sources that are otherwise unavailable because of their fragility. Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s original 1791 plan for the city of Washington is so brittle and deteriorated that the Library of Congress no longer allows researchers to examine it. But now millions can view the digital reproduction on the library’s website.”

Though I enjoyed reading this chapter far more than the previous weeks’ readings, what interested me most about our assignment this week was the searching through Proquest’s historical newspapers. Specifically, I have always been extremely interested in the Civil Rights Movement. The ability to look back at newspaper articles that discussed different events in the 1960’s as they were happening was pretty surreal for me. One article discussed the subdued attempts of African American civil rights activists to march for equality in Alabama. The article, “Alabama Town Halts Civil Rights March” was written on March 6, 1965. The article discussed another group of African American activists from the same town attempted to march, but got stopped by the police. However, these freedom fighters did not give up. Instead, they sat on the side of the road, all together, singing songs of freedom. Reading this text in its original format was extremely inspiring.

After reading this first article, I spent about a half hour searching through others written about the Civil Rights Movement as it was happening. I felt like I was living a part of history as I read through these documents. I read articles only from The Boston Globe, as that is my favorite newspaper. Each article that discussed the CRM reeked with scents of integration and pro-equality. I wonder if I had decided to read newspapers from southern cities, it the overall feeling of the works would be different?

Though the title made me believe the article would similar to As We May Think (extremely wordy and difficult to follow) I was pleasantly proven wrong. The concepts of this article were, at times, hard to understand. But I am beginning to accept that all things technology and mechanical do not come easily to me. Though the article explained many intricacies of this file structure, the article structure made the ideas easy to follow. In his intro, Nelson clearly laid out what the article would address, identifying a problem, an explanation of the problem, suggestions for solutions to the problem, and finally, implications of his attempted informational retrieval and data structure.

Overall, Nelson mentioned three main ideas to achieve the ideal filing system:

1. The information structure (Zippered Lists)

2. File Structure (Evolutionary List File)

3. FIle Language (PRIDE)

The ELF was drawn out to look like this:

Though the intricacies of each of the three parts are pretty complex, the fact that Nelson clearly outlined what he was talking about made things relatively easy to follow. Nelson even made sense of our first assignment with just a few sentences. He mentioned Bush’s article in his work, recapping the entirety of “As We May Think” by saying:

This idea is by no means new. To go back only as far as 1945, Vannevar Bush, in his famous article “As We May Think “, described a system of this type. Bush’s paper is better remembered for its predictions in the field of information retrieval, as he foresaw the spread and power of automatic document handling and the many new indexing techniques it would necessitate.

This simple, short recap of the difficult article made me feel very stupid. That’s what I was supposed to get from Bush’s work? At least now I can conceptualize the main idea from Bush’s work. So, thank you Nelson!

One quotation that I really enjoyed from Nelson’s writing was, “Writing is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.” Personally, I’d never heard this before and I find it to be extremely accurate and extremely poignant. Even writing this article, I’m finding that I have only a small amount of actual inspiration (Nelson’s article) and am working SO hard to make sense of the article and craft something that people will read and say, “Okay I got that.”

Oh my lanta, Bush’s article took me a long, long time to process. As a whole, I don’t think the specific ideas presented throughout the article were too difficult to understand or identify. However, what made it tedious for me to read was the way in which the ideas and thoughts were presented: they seemed to jump from one idea to the next, without a clear structure or ultimate goal.

Furthermore, as I sit here typing, trying to think of some lesson I learned or idea from the article that I will take with me, I’m coming up empty. When I think of information that stays with me after reading the long, wordy article, I’m remembering things like Bush’s statement that photographers of the future will have little walnut-sized bumps on their foreheads that take little pictures. This is something that extremely confused me. Why does he mention this? There is no further elaboration on the idea, but after mentioning the specifics of the walnut sized, forehead bump camera, he moves on to another area of focus. Does anyone understand this?

Though I was not a fan of the article over all, parts of it were interesting. Specifically, the beginning of the article addressed the idea of scientists contributing to the efforts of warfare. One of the few sections I fully understood, this part of the article brought up some really interesting points. This specific quotation from the article resonated with me:

They have done their part on the devices that made it possible to turn back the enemy, have worked in combined effort with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now, as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy of their best.

To me, this quotation basically asserts that scientists have contributed to helping their nation defend itself through means of creating specific machinery in order to defeat its enemies. Through this utilization of their skills, scientists are able to feel fulfillment as their side wins battles. The logic here is that “The country won the war because of its weapons. The country’s scientists created the weapons. Therefore, the scientists won the war for their country.” Clearly this would, as the quotation suggests, cause the scientists to feel achieved and validated. However, this idea brings into question the idea of finding fulfillment simply through scientific discovery. Ultimately, this section of the article left me with asking myself some difficult questions:

• Can scientists not feel achieved for simply creating or finding something new?
• Is there a way for scientists to create machines that do not fight for or defend their country and still feel accomplished?
• As a nation, should we prioritize scientific contributions to defense and militarism over basic scientific discovery and innovation?

All in all, this article proved to be extremely dry, confusing, and full of big words and abstract ideas. I probably actually understood about six paragraphs, but hey, I hope there are some people out there who really enjoyed the reading.