Contra Sunday Assignment
By midnight Sunday, your group must post to the blog a description of how your final project is fulfilling the distribution requirements. Remember, your projects must combine spatial history, data mining and analysis, textual analysis, and visual and aural artifacts:
Spatial history
http://www.denverpost.com/news/marijuana/ci_21950699/map-national-medical-marijuana-laws?source=pkg
For Spatial History,we plan to use this interactive map, because it showcase changes in national medical marijuana laws from 1995 to 2012. In addition, the color code is easy to follow, ranging from green to white gray. The green and lime green stats have legal medical Marijuana while gray and white gray stats represent where it has fail to pass and have any legalization medical marijuana bill. Next, is the interactive of the map, where when you click on a state it show the stats regulation/law regarding the medical marijuana. For example if you click on New York State on the map, a small text box pop up, with information stating New York is considering legislation for medical marijuana, with brief information about the bill, what is then name of the bill and when was it introduce. Next is the easy to use handle bar on the top of the map, where it allow user to travel back in times to look at the map when the first medical marijuana was passed in 1996 in the state of California.
This map help strength our group argument because it showcase the changes over time on the stances on illegal drugs being more accepted into society. It show before 1996, there was no stats allow the uses of medical Marijuana, now in 2012, there are 17 stats that allow the uses of marijuana for medical purpose.
visual
For visual we decide to showcase a TV ad by the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in Colorado, because in this video, it embody a messages that what is consider illegal drugs by federal standard, help US veterans to combat with the effect of his post-traumatic stress disorder.
data mining analysis, textual analysis, and aural artifacts.
This post does not appear to be complete. I don’t see anything on textual analysis or data mining. For spatial history it is expected that you do much more than point to a single map. I agree that this map is a good one, and it covers a change that could potentially be central to your argument, but it is a single secondary source, far too little to cover this entire area of the project. The single video you have posted does not explain how you will be tackling the visual source requirement. You need far more than a single video to show the type of change over time that is demanded by a digital history project. If this video is representative of others you will be using for evidence, I am not clear how they will serve as evidence of a *historical* (as opposed to a policy) argument. We can discuss ideas for developing each of these areas during class.
In addition to Guang’s stated visual artifact, we can also use this video where Romney talks about the War on Drugs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26YCHvwRNxQ&feature=player_embedded
For the textual analysis/data mining, we can look at what others Obama and Romney’s perceived stance on the war on drugs to be; it was very difficult to find speeches by Obama and Romney talking about the war on drugs in 2012 (the general consensus is that there aren’t much, if any).
Romney:
Harcelrode, Kelsey. “What Would President Mitt Romney’s Drug Policy Look Like?” The Atlantic. The Atlantic, 2 Mar. 2012. Web. 03 Dec. 2012. .
Smith, Phillip. “Drug Policy in the 2012 Elections II: The Parties and the Presidential Race” Stop the Drug War. Stop the Drug War, 12 Sept. 2012. Web. 03 Dec. 2012. .
In this article, I particularly liked the following statement: “The relative quiet around drug policy in the two campaigns is reflected in the Democratic platform and the Republican platform. There are only a handful of mentions of drugs or drug policy in the Democratic platform — and the word “marijuana” doesn’t appear at all — all of them having to do with either combating international organized crime or touting the Obama administration’s baby steps toward a slightly more progressive drug policy.”
I also particularly like that website because it first asks you about your current opinion of Obama’s approach to the war on drugs, then it lets you read the current debates for the 2012 presidential candidates, and upon finishing, it asks you if your stance changed in any way, in addition to giving you the statistics of the people who changed their mind or not.
Obama:
McGuinness, William. “War On Drugs Debate: Is The Obama Administration’s Approach Working?” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 04 Sept. 2012. Web. 03 Dec. 2012. .
The link above mentions the arguments that the presidential candidates had for the 2012 election. We can analyze their current stance using the techniques that we learned in class.
In addition to Guang’s spacial history map, we can create a map using Google Maps or Fusion Tables showing the percentage of people in each state that favor the legalization of marijuana, and other drugs.
We were also thinking of creating a discussion board, or a poll where people can voice their opinions on the war on drugs. I am not positive that we can pull this off in the given time frame that we have left, but it would be something that we are greatly considering.
In addition, since we are steering towards advocacy that the war on drugs not working as it currently is, we can create debates and arguments citing sources like this:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/oct/22/war-we-arent-debating/
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/10/03/939921/5-questions-that-should-be-asked-at-the-presidential-debate-but-probably-wont-be/?mobile=nc
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/01/opinion/mexico-city-postcard/index.html
http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/40-year-war-drugs-its-not-fair-and-its-not-working