Hey guys,
Here’s the link to Contra’s final project: War on Drugs
If you guys have the time, we would love to hear your opinion on the issue.
Best of luck on your finals, and happy holidays from the members of Contra!
This graph represents the effects of a smoker who decides to quit smoking. It lays out exactly what your body does and how it heals as you’ve had your last cigarette. This graph is very powerful because it is very easy to read and it sends a very strong message. The image on the top righthand corner is also an attention grabber and can be used as motivation for someone to quit smoking.
This was quite an interesting experience for me. Frankly, I was unaware that I was able to create my own personal maps on Google Maps and I had quite a lot of fun learning in the ins and outs of it. Personally, even though the professors showed us a couple of tutorials on how to create our own maps, I did not bother to look at them. I have always been like this, especially when I start using something new or start a new game, I never bother to look at the instructions or the tutorials — I find it a lot more satisfying when I take the time to go through everything, learn all the different functions that were available to me through trial and error. I think that I did just fine considering.
The reason why I decided to do poll sites in Kings County, was to get myself to try to look at a lot of data and try to combine it together. For some reason, the poll location list given by NYC listed almost all of their locations several times, and thus I had to keep track of which locations I had already inputed into my map, and which were new. This would be a valuable skill for me when I am working on my group project, as it ties in with data mining, in the sense that there will be a lot of material out there for my group to research, and we have to keep track of what information we already have, what information is new, and what information will ultimately be useful for our final work.
I also learned that being a historian, or someone who inputs data constantly, has quite a tedious job. There are 20 assembly districts in the Kings County, but I decided not to input them all for this assignment (the whole point of the assignment was to try a new tool, right?). In my map, I inputted the voting polls for the 41st, 42nd, 47th Assembly District and then the 48th Assembly District as I am registered to vote within that district.
With all the debates that the presidential candidates do before the election, usually, it ends up that there is just too much data for any one person to process and analyze. In order for our group, Contra, to attempt to answer the correlation with the War on Drugs and Presidential Elections, we would seek to use data mining software to weed out information that is not pertinent to our project when we analyze presidential debates.
As the War on Drugs is not a widely talked about topic for presidential elections, the use of data mining softwares will be beneficial in helping us find out exactly how often phrases such as “drugs”, “cartels”, “anti-(fill in whatever drug)” come up during the debates. Then we would use this information to come to a conclusion on how much emphasis is put on the War on Drugs during the presidential elections and hopefully we can answer some of the questions that our group posed for our project.
Who created the artifact?
– Zubeida Mustafa
When was the artifact created?
– First Quarter, 1969
Where was it created?
– In the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs / Pakistan Horizon
Why was the document created?
– To express the author’s take on the Presidential Election of 1968 and the cause for its outcome.
Why is the document a primary source?
– It is the firsthand account of the 1968 Presidential Election.
How trustworthy is the source?
– Very. It is a “non-official, non-party, and non-profit making body”.
What other questions might you ask the source in order to better understand what it reveals about the events of 1968?
Did Nixon win the 1968 election solely because of the public’s views of the Democrats and their policies on the Vietnam War?
I would look for other artifacts that would possibly contain surveys done on the American public to see if they actually felt strongly against the Democratic party during the 1968 election. Also I would wonder if this is the only reason why the Republicans won the election, or did the people who voted for the Republicans strongly believe that they had a better campaign for that voting year. In order to find out more, I would conduct more research and see if there were voting polls taken during that time period, and if so, what the general public thought.
I would also try to find out if the Republicans won because of the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, or they would have won regardless of who the Democratic candidate was because either (a) Nixon had a stronger campaign, (b) the general public was upset at President Johnson’s actions in the Vietnam War, or (c) Hubert Humphrey was not a very likable candidate and/or his platform was weak.
Javits and Burns See Vietnam as Key Issue of 1968
Database: ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2008)
This article states that one of the most pressing issues of the 1968 election is the current stand of the parties on the Vietnam War. As many people were opposed to the Vietnam War, it would be interesting to see how, if any, the politician’s stand on the Vietnam War during election time may or may not have played a role as this plays into the candidate’s stand on foreign policies.
Romney speech typifies GOP split on Vietnam
Database: Financial Time: Historical Archive (1888-2008)
The Financial Times (London, England),Thursday, May 11, 1967; pg. 3; Edition 24,230
This is another article talking about the pressing issue of the Vietnam War on the 1968 Elections. In this article, it talks about Governor George Romney, a Michigan favored candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination of 1968.
Vietnam, Political Accountability
Database: ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The Wall Street Journal (1889-1994)
October 12, 1967, pg. 10.
This is yet another article regarding the ongoing issue of the Vietnam War in the 1968 election. This article is interesting because it starts off by stating: “President Johnson, Mr. Bailey avers, is seeking to prevent World War III while ‘most Republicans are busy trying to win the 1968 election any way they can.'”
JSTOR – The American Presidential Election, 1968
This attributes the Vietnam War to many events that led to the Republicans winning the 1968 Presidential Election. Some of them include:
“The failure of the American policy in South East Asia which forced President Johnson to announce his decision not to seek re-election”
The Vietnam War “led a serious split in the Democratic Party and the announcement by Senator McCarthy and Kennedy to seek the party’s presidential nomination on a peace platform”
Hubert Humphrey losing the election largely “on the account of his close identification with the Johnson policy in Vietnam”
At first when I accessed DS106, I had the impression that it was just an website where you can access materials for class like Open Learning Initiative from Carnegie Melon or MyAccountingLab from Pearson. How surprised was I when I finished watching the YouTube video on their About page! Turns out that was not what I thought at all, but it was (to put into simpler terms) an online database where you use digital tools to tell stories!
What I noticed about DS106 is that they do not list an exact guideline for when they come into questions regarding intellectual property, fair use, etc.. However, I feel that they incorporate fair use and intellectual property into their entries without causing trouble to the original owner of the materials because of the nature of their assignments. They edit the materials in such a way that encourages creativity and encourages comments and criticism. This community understands the “Commons” by realizing that their material is open to everyone to see. They are posting in a database whose main purpose is to showcase their creations.
This is the first time that I have actually collaborated on an assignment with my classmates. I have heard of people using drop boxes and Cloud storage to edit files but I have never worked with it firsthand.
For my contribution to the assignment, I defined the word passivity in relations to Digital History. Before I started, I looked up the definition of passivity on Merriam-Webster but I realized that the definition would not suffice for the purpose of Digital History. I re-read the prior assignments and even though it mentioned passivity very briefly, I was able to infer the author’s definition of passivity. I did further research and found another definition of the word from North Carolina State University’s Wiki page and I incorporated their definition with my own.
For what it’s worth, this assignment frustrated me a great deal. I tried to edit the doc file but it was being edited by the same person for over 40 minutes. As a suggestion to anyone who reads this blog entry, if we end up doing another collaboration assignment, please, please have your contribution written out before you decide to edit the document. Once you have everything written out, just copy and paste everything in. Save it and let another person contribute.
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