
Database: AP Images
source:http://www.apimages.com/Search.aspx?st=k&remem=x&entity=&kw=robert+kennedy&intv=None&shgroup=-10&sh=14
Above is an image of Robert Kennedy meeting with colleagues while he was US attorney general. Years later he ran as a democrat for a presidential seat.
Database: The Wall Street Journal (1889-1994)
Source: http://search.proquest.com/hnpwallstreetjournal/docview/133434913/1395AD39F94679C7D2E/2?accountid=8500
This Wall Street Journal article was published in 1969 and it conveys the ideas and opportunities that we had been deprived of after the passing of Robert F Kennedy. He was a talented politician who many believed would have become president before he was assassinated.
Database: The New York Times (1851-2008)
Source: http://search.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/docview/118473235/1395AC711AF43337AB6/21?accountid=8500
The above article from the New York Times shows a mourning Mrs. Kennedy at the Arlington National Cemetary. This is a good example of the large media coverage and magnitude of the assassination of RFK. At a time in which our country was undergoing great changes and conflict it was a huge loss of a popular candidate.


“Medical evacuation of United States wounded troops” Image Copyright The Art Archive, Dept Defence Washington
I was able to locate this image through the Art Museum Image Gallery database. The photograph was taken 15 miles south west of Da Nang, Vietnam, on March 17, 1968, by an anonymous source. During this year the conflict in Vietnam seemed to reach a boiling point, with the highest casualty rate seen yet, sky-rocketing defense budgets, and the launch of the Tet Offensive by the Vietcong. The Vietnam War was undoubtedly on the minds of every voter in 1968.

“The All-Purpose Political Speech, 1968” – Copyright New York Times Company Jun 9, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2008)
The All-Purpose Political Speech shows how the game of politics was played in the 1968 election. Not much has changed since this time in our own modern political system, however, the article provides much meaningful insight into the minds of political analysts during the 1968 election.
This screenshot from the 1968 film Planet of the Apes was located within the Cinema Image Gallery database. Now while you may be wondering, and rightfully so, how this film could possibly tie in to the 1968 Presidential Elections, it may help to take a more examined view of the plot of the film. In a society where humans are helpless against the tyrannical bureaucracy of a ruling elite, apes to be exact, the lower caste must rise above and assert their right to a meaningful existence. Given the context of the 1960’s in America, the role of the humans in the film certainly reflects many of the sentiments echoed through the emerging “anti-establishment” viewpoints of the youth in America.
Democrats Weigh 1968 rights pledge
by Gene Roberts, The New York Times (1851 – 2008)
This article on the New York Times is fundamental because during the 1968 elections, the civil rights movement played a big role in the running for president. As shown in this document, the plan offered would bar delegations from south if Negroes were not included and promise to uphold federal civil rights laws, this sparks cultural conflict in the elections as committee leaders find it “ubnoxious” and “evidence of discrimination”
Ap Images. Credit Associated Press
Photo Taken During Democratic National Convention of 1968, in chicago Illinois.
This photo represents cultural conflict because delegates Delegates hold up signs referring to the VietnamWar, while the democratic party is selecting the presidential candidate for 1968 presidential election. This photo shows the delegates interest to stop the war, and can make an impact in the upcoming elections of 1968.
This photograph was taken shortly after the 1968 elections at a democratic-society sponsored protest in response to the results. The democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, was the face for an older generation, And was seen as someone who would not be progressive with his policies. The youth were not content with the progress that the country was making in regards to social and racial equality; as well as the war in Vietnam. With nixon and the republicans gaining control of the country, many of the countries youth were fearful that they may never see the country they all envisioned. This picture personifies the youth movement within the country, and their waning away from the values and beliefs previous generations have had.
In corresponding protests across the country this is a NY times article written by Sylvan Fox, about the protests that turned violent in NY. The previous passivity of the white middle class young adult was no longer seeing the desired results, and the movement became more angry in nature. With the liberal youth becoming frustrated with the lack of representation in government, and mor specifically the democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey
THE NATIONAL ELECTIONS AND COMPARATIVE POSITIONS OF NEGROES AND WHITES ON POLICY
South Atlantic Quarterly; Summer1968, Vol. 67 Issue 3, p405-418, 14p
These elections also dramatized the singluarity within the white and black youth movements. Despite being vehementaly against international intervention, when it comes to matters on home soil, they are beginning to find that intervention and conflicts with police is the only way they can seek desired results. This was the foundation for the youth movement and their political alliances that have held weight till this day.
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”
Source: CBS documentary
By 1968, television became the most important source of news for the American public, and, possibly, the most powerful influence on public opinion itself. TV brought the war from the frontlines and jungles of Vietnam into the living rooms of the American people. The intensely negative coverage of the war such bombings, brutality and civil casualties by US military influenced both politicians and the American public. This resulted in growing outrage and anti-war movement, which strongly affected 1968 presidential elections. American public lost trust in current administration, while new coming candidates were able to use this hot issue for their advantage.
Vietnam War with Walter Cronkite, CBS documentary
1968
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3mfXnFtwQc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPmwkprZMic&feature=relmfu
Source: Brown University
In this interview Governor Lincoln Almond tells us that by 1968 Vietnam war became very divisive for the nation and he personally was taking part in many anti-war demonstrations. The war was taking its toll on Lyndon Johnson and, as a result, he was forced to withdraw from 1968 presidential race and give up his chances for his second term in the presidential office.
Interview with Governor Lincoln Almond
Spring, 1998
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/1968/narrators/L.ALMOND.html
Source: AP Images database
This picture illustrates the police brutality against peace movement demonstrators in Chicago just few months before presidential election of 1968. This shows inhumane methods politicians used to suppress anti-war movement, which was unpopular topic during the political campaign. Picture speaks a thousand words!
Original caption: 8/28/1968-The “Black” Year (Tenth of Fourteen) – Police and demonstrators are in a melee near the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue August 28th during the Democratic National Convention.
Copyright Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images
http://www.apimages.com/police_demonstrators_Chicago_August_28th_DNC

This gif was my initial reaction when I first visited the ds106 website. From the very first moment when I click on the ds106 link from the assignment page, I was confuse and dumbfounded because I didn’t know where to start and how off. I thought to myself, here is this website with a vast amount of information, how can I gather the information I needed to for my assignment.
After doing some searches around the site, I found out that ds106 is a digital storytelling online class open to all people. The design of ds106 goal is to help participants establish an online identity, while documenting their process on blogs and sharing ideas and engaging in discussion with their peers.
After I got familiar with the ds106, I feel like the approach the ds106 community takes on intellectual property, fair use, and network ethics is pretty much nonexistent, where the only guideline i found was the “Honor Code“.
“Students are expected to conduct themselves in a manner consistent with the letter and spirit of the Honor Code. A violation of the Honor Code is a very serious matter.”
Which to me is a very broad statements, in which I felt participant are expect to know “better”. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing because I believe that where there are less rules and guideline in place, user are able to express more freely and creatively. In which I think ds106 community has achieve. For instance, when I was browsing through the site, I found the content created for participant, unique and distinctive. One example is the visual remix of Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic with Twight charcter Edward and Bella created by Darren Crovitz.
To answering the second part of the question, ” How does this community understand the “Commons”?”, I took to twitter and found some interesting tweets by Jim Groom and Alan Levine , which I think could be apply to the community understanding of the common. In which I came to the conclusion that the ds106 community understanding of the common is to experience it first hand and get involve, through weekly or daily assignment and assignment bank. By having user creating content and sharing it with anyone who can access it, its enhance the idea of “a shared storehouse of human creations” as Daniel J Cohen and Coy Rosenzweig talk about in Digital History “Owning The Past”.
Overall I think ds106 is a great site for people to learn and establish themselves on the web through blogging, making gifs, visual remixes , mash up and etc. As well as making the web a collective tool to educate the masses.
Final words, I would like to thank Mr. Groom, Mr.Levin, Mrs.Burtis and Mr.Branson for taking out to response to my tweets and my classmate tweets.
Sources:
- http://ds106.us/fall-2012-umw-syllabus/
- http://7741f12.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/remix-1-visual-twilight-gothic/
- http://assignments.ds106.us/
- http://ds106.us/handbook/success-the-ds106-way/open-participant/
- http://www.gifsoup.com/view/604678/overwhelmed.html
- http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/
From Mona Lisa holding a cat to altered World War II slogans relevant to modern times, there was something unique about what was going on. I wasn’t quite sure exactly what was going on just yet…
The website is an open classroom available to everyone where they can either participate as a student, teacher, or observer.
Upon looking through the courses I noticed something peculiar between the assignments. Each assignment starts with a product and the students are challenged to create something completely unique within set guidelines. Such as this assignment where students use copyrighted material or intellectual property and “remix” them or create a reflection of the piece. The completed product is displayed openly to the public and others are urged to participate.
If you aren’t sure exactly how to proceed or hitting a mental wall… Have no fear as ds106 offers a big remix button next to each assignment that offers you a theme to incorporate your assignment with.
Ds106 allows those with technical skills to create something original based on existing ideas. Those without technical skills are offered tutorials and a community of like-minded pupils to communicate and educate one another. The entire idea of being an open course and an education tool allows the use of sensitive material to promote creativity.
Any and all walls of a digital commons is broken and swept aside as all material is available and open to each other. Users can even remix another student’s work. Ideas and information is shared and archived available for anyone to view.
Upon first entering DS106 I was immediately struck by its header, which read, “Digital Storytelling – We Jam Econo.” We Jam Econo is the name of a 2005 documentary which tells the story of seminal California-punk band The Minutemen. The band operated on a streamlined, “by any means necesary”, economic system. This system reflected heavily on their insistence on playing affordable shows, as well as releasing their music at a fair price. Ds106 certainly reflects the same sentiments through its open source approach to real, honest online participation.
It seems evident that the community believes strongly in their right to operate and create material within the context of a more “free” internet. As participants in the never-ending experiment of the World Wide Web, DS106 seems to prove, alongside countless other contemporaries, that “another internet is possible.” The most impressive display of the importance of the site lies beyond the walls of the initial assignments page, Mission: DS106. After exploring each tab, I was most interested in the work being done through the audio, visual, and mash-up assignments. Where many classes might stay clear of any possible grey-area regarding copyright, DS106 does not allow any roadblocks on their path to honest digital storytelling.
My experience with DS106 was very interesting once I had a chance to explore it. I really like how the users are extremely creative, it is very interesting how something that is an online course and its at free will can have such a positive outcome. One thing that really caught my attention is in the INSPIRE part of the website, “We have knitted together an intimate community that is not only participating in its structure but also creating it”, it really reminded me of the objective for our class. As far as intellectual property and fair use, DS106 participants would probably agree that when using someone else work to create something new or in better words, remixing, it just gives more opportunity for someone to express themselves easier. The class understanding of the commons is demonstrated by the freedom of sharing their ideas and work of art where it can potentially be viewed by anyone. Overall, my experience with DS106 was positive and I think our professors are doing a good job at making our small class as interesting as DOS106.
After exploring DS106 website, I think it’s a great platform that allows people to be creative and inventive while freely sharing their new type of art with internet community.
Intellectual property. With the emergence of the Internet people start to rethink and change the ways intellectual property should be used in a modern inter-connected society. Members of the DS106 community do their best to recognize the rights of the owners of intellectual property such as images, video, music and other digital content. However, they feel that they have the right to create new media by using elements of intellectual property and this makes important additions to original contributions.
Fair use. Allows to maintain a balance between the free flow of information over the Internet while still protecting intellectual property rights. It is a shared opinion among the members of the ds106 community that the role of fair use is to prevent copyright from limiting the creativity, and from imposing other challenges that would prevent the creation and spread of knowledge and learning. Since DS106 is online teaching and learning site, it permits limited use of copyrighted material.
Network ethics. Everyday technologies like the Internet, and digital media affects how we work, play and communicate, and challenges us to think about ethical problems in new ways. Few users of DS106 site would argue that legal downloading and distributing copies of copyright-protected material is stealing, and thus ethically wrong. However, using pieces of others’ digital work like mash-up and remix allows for the emergence of new forms of creativity.
Commons. After browsing through DS106 site, I came to realize that site users understand Commons as being able to collaborate, explore, share, mix and re-use digital content in new creative ways.
Upon entering the DS106 site, I found it a bit overwhelming with so many different options and aspects of the site to explore. But after some use with it I became comfortable. The participants view the commons as a shared space that we can all use and which better us in the advancement of learning and sharing digital pieces. The site is like the center of a web that branches out and displays information and art from all over. There were many mashups and the underlying theme was ART. In terms of entering these pieces of art onto the site, http://ds106.us/handbook/blogging/ ,seemed to be of great use and help for participants. It grazes over the importance of including a url back to where you attained certain pieces, which is important in regard to fair-use. As Phillip mentioned in his post, I did find it a bit similar to our Digital History site in the sense that we are both collaborating with each other in a digital way to explore the web, share art, and at the same time take a class! In the future we will be seeing many more sites and networks similar to this.
In the BuddyPress.doc “Digital History Lexicon” document, we were asked by the professors to define terms associate with digital history. This was a new experience for me because this is the first time I was ever assign with a task to edit a document with my peers.
When I first visited the BuddyPress doc page, I saw a lot of the words has been fill out except for hypertextuality/ nonlinearity, so I decide define it, by rereading Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History, 2005, “Introduction,”. Next, I gave an example of hypertextuality by creating a link from that page to facebook.com. Following that I decide to add to inaccessibility because I felt like there’s could be said on that word.
I believe that using this tool for collaborative work has both negative and positive. The positive is that the different view people bring to the table. The diversity of people can bring a new perspective on an idea and issues or in this case, a definition of a word and the concept the author uses it in. The negative of this tool is that only one person is able to edit it at a time. It’s a negative because if everyone log on at the same time to edit the document, it would create long wait. Like traffic, no one likes to wait.
Overall, I find that editing the document with my fellow peers is an interesting and new experience.
When delving into the group edit assignment; I began to think about the credentials one needed to post an edit in the classes assignment. We have to log into a Baruch blogs account and be added to the sites user list. Now imagine if everyone on the Internet had access to our document. We would ideally like to think that these users interested in our assignment would provide us with helpful definitions and direction to our goal, but it’s naive to think that many people would not simply try to sabotage our assignment for a quick laugh at our expense.
A website like wikipedia requires less credentials than our Baruch blog to begin making changes on the site. All that is needed is an accessible email account; that’s it. The reason why a site like this can become and remain a source of quality and consistent information, is the utopian idea of a group working together for a common goal. Wikipedia has a large userbase that is committed to providing the Internet with a reliable open source enclyopedia. So in order to be successful in working on something that can be touched and accessed by so many people without checking credentials; is to have both a moderating staff and a dedicated group of users who are all working toward a similar goal.
In this case our class is looking to provide concise and correct definitions for our assignment. That is our common goal that we are working towards. Without a framework being provided for our assignment, I’m not sure how concise or correct we would be able to make a list of important key terms based on our reading.
Edited out some information and included pieces to Readability and Passivity.
The BuddyPress Doc lacks the ability to allow access and edits denying real-time interactivity and sharing of information.
However many basic functions are available to provide users with a tool with potential to create and grow upon itself.
After reading the article written by Cohen and Rosenzweig, I decided to expand on the definition of the durability of the digital media. In particular, I wanted to bring everyone’s attention to the real problem that is developing in our modern society. At the same time as we are celebrating our technological achievements and the shift towards digital media across all specters of life, we as civilized society moving ever deeper into dangerous territory. And this danger lies in the fact that potentially some or all digital content including digital history could be lost instantaneously if measures are not taken to preserve it!
I am really glad that for this class we have such a useful tool as this blog where many users can contribute their ideas to the same project. I think, it is great that we can collaborate with each other. It will help us to get inspirations and allow us to expand our horizons on this subject. And, at the same time, our blog can create debates and express new ideas and opinions. There are famous words that come to mind: ’’The society is shaped by the ideas that are generated by the individual members of this society’’.
Upon using this tool I find it helpful that we can work as a group and collaborate to come up with precise decisions and examples regarding the words assigned. I defined the word quality and used an example of a falsified picture from the article we read. I am looking forward to being able to collaborate with classmates to come up with new ideas and ways to look at digital history.
This space houses the work of HIS 3460: Digital History, a course co-taught by Thomas Harbison and Luke Waltzer at Baruch College during the Fall 2012 semester.
Here’s a description of the course:
This course will explore current methods in the field, and also imagine future possibilities. You will study a range of theories of new media and employ them as you collect, analyze, and produce historical scholarship. Throughout the course we will assess how and why the creation, archiving, and interpretation of historical data are changing in the face of new forms of digital communication. We will also examine how these tools impact the primary goal of the historian: producing narratives that explain historical change. You will learn about and work with emerging tools in the areas of data mining, graphic information systems, image and audio production, and social media. With classmates, you will produce a digital project using data and artifacts that historicize the 2012 presidential election.
Much of this course will be open to the public, and outside commenting is welcome and encouraged.
See our syllabus for additional detail.
Looking forward to a great semester!
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