1. "I Was a Feisty Mother" - Mary Lou Melloy (06:45)

Date:
2018-01-29
Main contributors:
Indiana Disability History Project
Summary:
“You don’t have the right to deny them the opportunity to try this.” Mary Lou Melloy's daughter, Cindy, was born in 1958. Doctors told the family they should put Cindy in a residential facility. Mary Lou and her husband, Don, had other plans for their daughter. In this clip, Mary Lou discusses the work it took to get Cindy accepted into public school. After completing school in Indianapolis, Cindy went to a workshop for a while until she landed a community job. Although Mary Lou was initially hesitant about a community job, in the end she said it was a wonderful opportunity for her daughter. Mary Lou started encouraging other parents to let go of their fears and give their children the opportunity to find a job in the community. She was interviewed in 2017.

2. ‘Who Isn’t Having Trouble Logging In?’: Lessons learned from Digital Scholarship Outreach to Unde... (55:21)

Date:
2018-10-31
Main contributors:
Homenda, Nick, Meiman, Meg
Summary:
Have you ever wondered what it's like to troubleshoot 100 simultaneous account creation problems in an undergraduate lecture hall? Recently, undergraduate humanities courses at Indiana University Bloomington have shown increased interest in incorporating activities and assignments designed to enrich students' understanding of the course material, foster their creativity, and allow them to learn techniques and technologies associated with digital scholarship. Nick Homenda and Meg Meiman worked with two undergraduate courses in American history and art history, partnering with IUB faculty members interested in retooling course assignments using the open source digital exhibition software Omeka . This presentation will describe the collaborative process developing these assignments and highlight the ways we engaged with instructors and students to expose them to concepts such as digital exhibition design, web development methodologies, visual literacy, and responsible (fair) use of digital resources. Additionally, we will talk about our failures and successes, and offer recommendations for librarians, faculty, and students interested in working collaboratively on future digital exhibition projects.

4. 02_Soldiers Write the War: World War II, Vietnam and the War on Terror (46:53)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, John Bodnar
Summary:
This paper will explore the way American soldiers from three different wars wrote about their experiences. It will attempt to unravel the fragile relationship between patriotic accounts of war that tended to uphold noble ideals validating the nation's war effort and thepossibility that war could actually produce laudable traits andmore tragic stories that refused to efface the confusion and pain military conflict imposed upon individuals. As such, it will explore the problem of memory and trauma and the significant tension soldiers faced when they attempted to recreate their experience for a public audience that could not know what it had been like. The part of the paper devoted to World War II will focus on the fiction of Norman Maile and the autobiography of William Manchester--both combat vets. Mailer's renowned novel, The Naked and the Dead, recast the "Good War" in a highly critical light that exposed the deep strain of violence that he felt marked American society and explained why it spared no expense in bringing ruin to the Japanese. Manchester acknowledged the violence and carnage but sought to extract from it tales of heroic men and who cared deeply for each other. Such narratives contrast sharply with those coming from the experience of Vietnam. Vets like Ron Kovic, Tim O'Brien and others mounted withering attacks on any notion that patriotic service could result in anything positive or nurture admirable character traits. In some ways the World War II stories were actually more conflicted than those formed in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. The final part of this brief paper will explore the outpouring of literature produced by men who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Again, significant differences are evident among the fighters themselves. A greater effort is made in this most recent contest to restore some faith in traditional patriotic ideals. This effort has had some success but has been hotly contested by tales that absolutely reject any attempt to use patriotic honor to wipe out the memory of pain and loss.

5. 03_Empowering Citizen Scholars: Lessons Learned from the History Harvest (47:57)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Rebecca Wingo
Summary:
The History Harvest is a community-centered, student-driven archival project that empowers community voices through material-based oral histories. Over the course of a semester, History Harvest students partner with a community to run an event in which community members bring artifacts of significance. Students record community members as they tell stories about their objects and digitize the artifacts for a shared online archive. The community members then take their items back home; there is no acquisition. This one-day event is a bit like Antiques Roadshow, except everything is valuable. More than a singular event, however, the History Harvest can be a litmus test for the success of a community partnership.

6. 04_Remembering Vietnam: An Experiment in Civic Engagement (43:46)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, David S. Ferriero
Summary:
Ferriero will discuss the planning process for a major exhibit on the Vietnam War within the context of the mission of the National Archives. Particular focus will be on how the principles of Open Government—transparency, collaboration, and participation—impacted that process. Building on the success of the National Archives Citizen Archivist Project, Ferriero will share how the lessons learned have influenced his agency’s approach to exhibit and education planning, with an emphasis on the exhibit commemorating the Vietnam War. Remembering Vietnam is a media-rich exploration the Vietnam War, featuring interviews with Americans and Vietnamese veterans and civilians with firsthand experience of the war’s events as well as historic analysis. It is a fascinating collection of newly discovered and iconic original documents, images, film footage, and artifacts that illuminate 12 critical episodes in the war that divided the peoples of both the United States and Vietnam, covering the period 1946 to 1975. The exhibit encourages visitors to answer these questions: Why did the United States become involved in Vietnam? Why was the war so long? Why was it so controversial? The sacrifices made by veterans and their families, the magnitude of death and destruction, and the war’s lasting effects require no less. Remembering Vietnam is a resource for refreshing our collective memory. National Archives records trace the policies and decisions made by the architects of the conflict. Its collection of evidence provides an opportunity for new insight and greater understanding of one of the most consequential wars in American history.

7. 05_Rediscovering American War Experiences through Crowdsourcing and Computation (46:57)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kurt Luther
Summary:
Stories of war are complex, varied, powerful, and fundamentally human. Thus, crowdsourcing can be a natural fit for deepening our understanding of war, both by scaling up research efforts and by providing compelling learning experiences. Yet, few crowdsourced history projects help the public to do more than read, collect, or transcribe primary sources. In this talk, I present three examples of augmenting crowdsourcing efforts with computational techniques to enable deeper public engagement and more advanced historical analysis around stories of war. In “Mapping the Fourth of July in the Civil War Era,” funded by the NHPRC, we explore how crowdsourcing and natural language processing  (NLP) tools help participants learn historical thinking skills while connecting American Civil War-era documents to scholarly topics of interest. In “Civil War Photo Sleuth,” funded by the NSF, we combine crowdsourcing with face recognition technology to help participants rediscover the lost identities of photographs of American Civil War soldiers and sailors. And in “The American Soldier in World War II,” funded by the NEH, we bring together crowdsourcing, NLP, and visualization to help participants explore the attitudes of American GIs in their own words. Across all three projects, I discuss broader principles for designing tools, interfaces, and online communities to support more meaningful and valuable crowdsourced contributions to scholarship about war and conflict.

9. 07_Who Gets to Tell the Vietnam War Story (18:55)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Heather Stur
Summary:
For as much as has been written and produced about the Vietnam War, the voices telling the story have remained much the same. Historians and journalists have privileged American male combat veterans of the war and high-ranking U.S. policymakers, while in Vietnam, the official state story is one of U.S. imperialists versus Vietnamese freedom fighters. Lost in these tellings of the story was South Vietnamese veterans and their families, anticommunist Vietnamese citizens, political activists of all stripes in South Vietnam, American women who served in the war, U.S. support or rear echelon troops, U.S. Embassy employees, and troops of the "free world" forces in Vietnam. These voices are crucial for understanding how the conflict developed and played out, what its consequences were, and what its legacies are.

10. 08_Blood Sacrifice and Clashing American Narratives of the Vietnam War (18:31)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Edward Linenthal
Summary:
The mass slaughter of 1864-1865 in the American Civil War eroded traditional belief in martial sacrifice as redemptive, blood shed for the new birth of the nation. Narratives in tension continued through both World Wars and the Korean War and gained intensity with the erosion of popular support for the war in Vietnam. The “dope and dementia,” “quagmire,” and “atrocity producing context” narrative templates clashed with traditional patriotic narratives of America at war.

11. 09_War and Memory: The Meaning of Winning and Losing in Narratives from the Other Side (18:00)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Larry Berman
Summary:
I have been writing about Vietnam since 1982 and learned much about the war and peace from participants on both sides of the brutal conflict.  In my presentation, I want to share how participants in the war from the so-called “winning side” have helped me to better understand not just the war, but also the sense of loss that is often shared with those on the “losing side”. This despair for “what might have been” or “hope and vanquished reality” unites both sides.  I am especially interested in participants’ stories as told in memoirs, oral histories and personal interviews.  For this presentation, I will focus on those individuals with whom I have engaged in extensive and multiple interviews/discussions and who, with one exception, have also produced memoirs from their experiences in war.  The one exception is Pham Xuan An, whose memories and stories are recorded in my book  Perfect Spy.  Each of these participants helped me understand the war through the eyes of a Vietnamese and altered my own narrative for how I speak and write about the war.

12. 10_Telling War: An Exploration of Form (17:22)

Date:
2019-01-15
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Lisa Silvestri
Summary:
With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Telling War, a veteran based initiative, explores manifestations of the veteran voice through a variety of story forms such as papermaking, six word war stories, podcasting, and documentary film. Telling War’s mission is to cultivate creative opportunities for veterans to tell their story. This presentation will review some of the project’s initial outcomes. For example, when participating veterans used the ancient art of papermaking to transform their uniforms into paper then bind into book form, they were able to access stories often untold in the public sphere. The books they created held personal imagery and artifacts from their time in the service. The papermaking process allowed them to metabolize and story their experiences. In other cases, veterans wrote six word war stories following in the legacy of Hemmingway’s famous six word short story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Although brief, these first-person memoirs captured aspects of deployment–from the everyday to the extreme–that shifted the communicative priority from eloquence to essence. By sharing these examples and others, this presentation argues that in order to enrich collective knowledge and memory of war, the stories told and heard about war must be expanded and diversified.

13. 2018 Indiana State Fair Master: Kathy Rucker (Clogging and Dance Instructor) (06:14)

Date:
2018-07-10
Main contributors:
Kathy Rucker (Master), Jon Kay (Director), Traditional Arts Indiana
Summary:
Though born in Indiana, Kathy Rucker traveled around the world, following her father during his naval duty in the submarine service. When she was sixteen her family returned to Indianapolis. Throughout those young years there was one constant—Kathy was always dancing. She recalls, “I was either dancing with the cabinet, dancing with the refrigerator handle, dancing in my room— dancing all over the house.” Years later she would study square dancing and round dancing but clogging “caught her eye” when she saw a group performing at a local festival. So, she began taking clogging classes on the southside of Indianapolis and soon discovered that she was “pretty good at it.” “Why would you want to start clogging when you are forty?” some asked her, but Kathy recognized that it was fun way to exercise, and to meet people. Eventually, several fellow students suggested to her that instead of driving all the way to the southside to take lessons, they could clog with Kathy at her eastside home. What began as a small group, soon outgrew her garage. Before long, she started teaching classes for older adults. First one, then a second, but as quickly as she added a new session, it filled. Finally, she was up to teaching twenty-one classes each week. As she jokes, “It keeps the body in shape… it keeps the body tired.” To fuel her teaching, Kathy traveled around the country taking clogging and dance workshops and classes, in addition to learning how to dance better, these experiences also taught her how to be a better teacher. She explains, “You can be a great dancer and a lousy teacher, and you can be an average dancer and a great teacher. I was going for the great teacher, I didn’t care if I was a superb dancer, I just wanted to teach someone how to do what I love to do.” In 1995, Kathy volunteered to manage a small dance stage at the Indiana State Fair. That first year, the crowds wanting to see clogging were so big that it blocked the roadway and the fair shuttles could not pass. To accommodate the popularity of the dance stage, the fair moved it several times to larger and better locations. Today, the dance stage is located in Celebration Park and has grown to as big as it can get at the fair. Throughout the run of the fair, the stage features a variety of dance groups, and serves as a great promotional tool for dancing groups around the region. Two of Kathy’s groups, The Circle City Cloggers and Still Kickin, are regular acts at the fair; performing several times each week. While the Circle City Cloggers consist of dancers from their teens on up, Still Kickin is for older adults, 55 and older. The idea of an older adults group emerged when several of the members of the Circle City group felt the routines were getting too hard on them. Kathy too was getting older but recognized the elders desire to continue clogging. While some are alumni of the Circle City group, others are older women and men who didn’t start dancing until they were in their sixties or seventies. Kathy also teaches line dancing in the Indianapolis area. One of her groups, the Heritage Place Ladies of the Dance is a group of older African American women who love to dance. They dance to classic Motown as well as more contemporary popular music. Kathy started the class nearly twenty-five years ago, and several of the original dancers are still with the group. Odessa Higginson, the “elder of the club” is 92-year-old, explains “I love dancing, and I intend to keep dancing as long as I can keep moving.” For several years, Kathy taught twenty-one dance classes each week, but as she got older she slowly pared them down to the ten groups that she teaches today. At 73, she explains that dancing is more than a hobby or a job for her. It literally saved her life. She explains, “I’ve had cancer twice, and the doctors told me that if I hadn’t been so physically fit I wouldn’t have made it. I credit dancing with saving my life…I will probably continue to clog until I can’t lift my foot anymore!” Kathy and the Indiana State Fair have fostered a wonderful network of dancing clubs throughout the greater Indianapolis area. Kathy teaches the class and organizes the groups, and the fair helps promote the benefits of dance through its dance stage. Nevertheless, Kathy Rucky has made an incredible contribution to the cultural vitality and the health and wellness of all the communities in which she works.

15. [United States, Indiana, Bloomington, 2018] (1:28:00)

Date:
2018
Main contributors:
See Other Contributors
Summary:
Presentation about the İlhan Başgöz collection (ATM accession number 93-114-F) which contains Turkish folk music, Alevi music, riddles, and folk stories. The moderated discussion is focused on Başgöz's fieldwork experiences and memories with his interlocutors, and Başgöz discusses interesting examples that shows how he navigated fieldwork projects during the early years of his career.

17. A Conversation with Tom Davenport (1:53:29)

Date:
2018-10
Main contributors:
Rankin, Tom
Summary:
A Conversation with Tom Davenport, an interview sponsored by the American Folklore Society and the AFS Oral History Project of Tom Davenport (Folkstreams) by Tom Rankin (Duke University) about his life and work. Tom Davenport received the 2018 Judith McCulloh Award for lifetime service to the field at the Buffalo meeting. This interview took place at the American Folklore Society's 130th Annual Meeting at the Buffalo Niagara County Convention Center, in Buffalo, New York, on October 18-20, 2018.