digital humanities is a modernized cultural effort to collect and preserve the human experience via digital technologies. It is an effort to permanently encapsulate historical texts, relics, and history in general. specific tools could include 3d renderings, virtual reality experiences, interactive timelines and many many more. Not only is it an effort to preserve, but also an effort to inform and spread historical information, there are even efforts within the umbrella of digital humanities to equip these technologies with easier accessibility.
Author: khurd
Ice cream timeline:
The oldest ice cream parlor in America dates back to the 1860s, small scale of course but with more modern refrigeration came an uptake in popularity, but it was far from being a common product, until the 1904 world’s fair allowed for a culmination of electrical power and sudden demand in a large city like saint louis, the Pevely dairy company (which opened in the 1880s as a butter/ milk route in saint louis) had its first site opened in 1915 which later included an ice cream manufacturer in 1916. The Velvet freeze ice cream company opened in 1934. These are the two oldest ice cream manufacturers in the saint louis region, and what do they have in common? They opened after the worlds fair.
Water filtration timeline:
Until 1831 saint louis relied on springs and cisterns for water, as the population grew the city contracted water supply channels to be built in 1835. The efforts to purify the water ended for the most part in failure. These are accounts of saint louis residents in 1858 describing the water.
“St. Louis is supplied with water from the Mississippi River. A steam engine of considerable power draws it from the river and forces it to the reservoir. The water is taken out in the upper part of the City, above the entrance of any sewers, at a place where the river is deepest and the current is swiftest, and therefore the water taken out is the purest that can be obtained.”
“The appearance of the water when first taken from the river, or when the supply from the reservoir has not had time to settle, is rather muddy and thick, from a great mixture of light sandy particles, and strangers generally dislike it; but it soon settles on becoming stationary, and then is very palatable, and persons soon become fond of it–preferring it to any other water.”
Source: stlwater.com/history2.php
Another scheme at water purification was introduced in 1865, it consisted of a pumping station, settling basins, and filter beds. The filtered water to be conducted by gravity in a conduit to Baden, where a High service station was to pump it to a reservoir.
Bissells point pump station went into effect in 1871, providing marginally cleaner water spearheaded by Robert Kirkwood, a civil engineer that had high praise for his works in new York and on railroads.
Finally, for the worlds fair they hired john Wixford, a chemist, to see if they can make the Quincy process more efficient in order to clear the water for the worlds fair, he found that milk of lime slaked at 190 degrees was efficient and he patented the process in the united states and great Britain. This resulted in a clear cascading waterfall that was central to the fairs layout.
In 1908 a new coagulant house was built to automate and store the discharges of ferrous sulfate and slaked lime.
Edward wall, water commissioner from 1911 to 1925 proposed a secondary coagulation and filtration process as an add on to Wixfords process in 1911
Electricity timeline:
Union Electric Company was founded on May 20, 1902 with only a few employees and 2,000 customers. The World’s Fair in 1904 allowed for the company to expand tremendously and expose millions of people to brilliant lighting display. Many of them had never seen electric lights before.
In 1913 Union Electric began using hydroelectric power, buying power generated by the new Keokuk Dam which allowed UE to expand into rural areas.
The company then built a second hyro-electric dam on the Osage River in Central Missouri. This dam was completed in 1933 and forms the Lake of the Ozarks.
Union Electric and CIPSCO Incorporated, parent of Central Illinois Public Service Company, merged in December 1997, creating Ameren Corporation.
Source: St. Louis Historic Preservation
In april of 2019, the people of france witnessed a catastrophic destruction of cultural history, the notre dame cathedral, one of the most prominent historical monuments in the world was consumed in smoke and flame, nine centuries of historical significance marred. Many hours and five hundred firefighters later and the flame was quelled, thankfully the towers remained standing, but the roof collapsed. As foretold in the novel “the hunchback of notre dame” nearly 170 years ago, “all eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than the central rose window, there was a great flame rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks.”. While this tragedy was devastating indeed, the good people of france and indeed the world, rose to the occasion. Countless donations from across the globe flooded in to help rebuild the cathedral, but the construction would prove to be an undertaking of five years. Five years of a stark burnt monument in the middle of the country was far too depressing to not be dealt with immediately, so a startup called “histovery” made an augmented reality based reconstruction of the cathedral, complete with thirteen different language settings, ease of accessibility, an interactive environment, and historically accurate time periods, they sought to allow everyone everywhere to experience the majesty of notre dame in all its glory both past and present. What was once a corporeal location that received thirty thousand visitors per day, became a video game like experience with 120,000 people attending within the first month of its debut at the french exhibit in the 2022 world fair in dubai. From there it traveled to dresden, germany, new orleans and a dozen other cities within the next two years, and now they have nearly twenty other museums and monuments in their gallery available to the public.
This is actually a nice Segway into my project on the world fair, it’s benefits and impacts on society as a whole. Much like histovery, there are many great projects people are working on all around the world as we speak, but our lives are becoming increasingly distracted, we all have our own worries and responsibilities and maybe don’t take the time to catch up on every achievement from every part of the world. The world’s fair could do just that.
Creator:
tradingeconomics.com, a website with over two billion users and boasts that it’s sources are “official” and span 196 countries.
Sources:
this specific data set is compiled from the united states federal reserve
Reason:
they have a pretty significant customer base to rule out financial pursuits as their main motive, but from the website itself the following excerpt is essentially their mission statement:
“Trading Economics has solutions for individual customers and businesses across different services and industries. Beyond being a trustworthy data source for many applications, Trading Economics has been helping companies and individuals to understand and predict trends, to identify opportunities and to stay ahead of their competition.”
How its been used: from the words on the website:
“The Trading Economics Application Programming Interface (API) provides direct access to our data. It allows clients to download millions of rows of historical data, to query our real-time economic calendar and to subscribe to updates. Providing several request methods to query our databases, with samples available in different programming languages, it is the best way to export data in XML, CSV or JSON format. The API can be used to feed a custom developed application, a public website or just off-the-shelf software like Microsoft Excel. The API subscription pricing is adjusted accordingly to the features you use, to your volume of requests and to the distribution you make.”
Format:
they use various tables, spreadsheets and visuals like graphs, they have it available to where you can download whatever data you want into the various formats they offer and are compatible with popular applications like excel. This specific data set was a collection of bar graphs showing the averages of the work hours.
There is only one aim with this data set, and it is average weekly hours worked in saint louis Missouri. The data is structured in a bar graph so it’s not easily applicable to computer analysis unless you copy the data into a spreadsheet or pay some subscription to export it. The only writing the website provided on the data was a brief explanation on what the data is, what it provided and where it came from, so it sounds like the data is clean and relatively direct from source. Unfortunately just below the data set I found a link that said “More Illinois indicators” which is troubling due to the fact that this isn’t a source from or about Illinois but rather Missouri, which really throws into question the legitimacy of the data in my eyes. Not to say the federal reserve would be inaccurate but rather the website itself, perhaps letting a few key data points slip through the cracks unintentionally or misconstruing/misunderstanding the data themselves and therefore passing that mistake onto us. I would use this data if I were an employer for a business within Missouri, finding the average hours of work for employees means finding the average hours of work the employees are willing to work, id use this data only if I were afraid of the consequences of over/underworking my employees.
Observation: Saint louis is a very vibrant city with a lot of culture and time killing activities, music, restaurants, site seeing, baseball games etc, but in 1904, perhaps the most grand event saint louis has ever been host to was the world fair, unveiling new technologies, food and culture the average person at the time almost certainly wasn’t privy to. Imagine never knowing what ice cream tasted like before that day, or how beautiful ancient japanese artwork is, or seeing the entire fair lit up with a fantastic brightness the likes of which you couldn’t imagine. X-rays, wireless phones, the automobile, I can only assume it felt like stepping into a brand new century.
Problem: with all of this wonder someone at that time would’ve assumed the rousing success of that fair would have happened many more times in the future, but it didn’t, the last world fair in the united states was held in 1984 in new orleans and what characterized as a “financial disaster” so in 1999 congress passed legislation that prohibited any future world fairs in the US. This event is meant to be a beautiful culmination of technologies and culture, allowing people to learn, take inspiration, and tear down the many barriers we place between what we know and what we don’t; yet such an event does not have political backing because of money, I believe this is a terrible shame, in today’s climate with everyone glued to screens and debates, I think a little “coming together” is warranted as the world is more divisive than ever.
Frame: My idea is for congress to repeal its prohibition of american hosted expositions so that maybe one day saint louis can host another world fair, scrounge up the money from our tax dollars, sell admissions, sell space for companies to show the technological advances they’ve made, live music, art exhibits, invite other cultures and countries and try to enact some of the values we should all hold paramount, unity, knowledge, progress.
Example: Dubai held a world fair called the 2020 expo in 2021. They have a website dedicated to the event, I can learn everything I need from there, from what I gather it was a massive year long event with almost every country participating.
Proposed technology, im thinking about using an interactive storyline, so that we can see the growth in particular industries or products after a world fair, like the debut of ice cream in saint louis and looking at the number of distributors selling ice cream in the aftermath of the fair. Or the new filtration system developed by john F Wixford to clean the water supply of saint louis specifically for the fair, and how we use the same basic technology today.
Fifty years ago, any kid with a comic book would tell you that robots taking over the world were right up there with invading aliens or evil mutants, but today robotics and artificial intelligence are corporeal, ubiquitous even. It seems like everything we know that makes our lives easier has a computer in it, science fiction coming down to earth like this offers unique and potentially generation defining artistic expressions, if you can produce something once thought to be fantastic in the light of truth and fact, you can alter peoples’ imaginations of what the future will look like, opening us to new ideas and possibilities, two movies that do this well are “WarGames” and ex machina. In 1983 WarGames released in theaters, at the time machine learning wasn’t new, the concept had been around for half a century by then, what was unprecedented was the idea of a rogue AI, a tactical defense system in charge of the entire U.S. military nuclear arsenal, I imagine that the first reactions to this film were fear, the fear that this may soon be reality, the fear that we would trust the planets security to a machine that may somehow foul up and kill us all, a fear burning hotter in the cold war era. I believe the director John Badham intended to scare the audience into a more independent mindset, encouraging self-reliance by showing the consequences of reduced responsibility, a reminder that pandoras box cannot be closed. Fast forward thirty-one years, ex machina is released, by this time the science fiction genre had beat the artificial intelligence subgenre to death (yet it was before the release of perhaps the most notable paper pertaining to modern AI “attention is all you need”). this movie didn’t focus on fear of looming destruction, the writers took a more psychological approach, emotional even, it brought the viewer to a place where their pre-conceived conditions for sentience were tested, directly alluding to the the famous “Turing test” whereby a machine would be tested and if the person performing the test found the AI to be indistinguishable from that of a person, the test would be passed. This was not the only notable experiment in the film, though philosophical and not so much a test, the thought experiment “Mary in the black and white room”, or if you’d prefer “Mary the Colour Scientist” was a significant plot point. The thought experiment is as follows: Mary is a scientist, her specialty is color, she knows every fact about color, wavelengths, psychological effects, everything, but she lives in a black and white room, and has never actually seen color, one day Mary is let out of this room to see color for the first time, and she finally knows something that facts can’t supplement, she learns what it feels like to see color. The film states that AI represents Mary trapped in the room, but after Mary leaves the room, that is human. This brings us to the parallel between the two films, more accurately the ethical dilemma between them. In one story the creator let the genie out of the box, and in the other they sought to keep Mary in the room, both decisions were met with consequences. With the rise of AI, we can assume that one day soon one of them will pass the Turing test, and on that day, humanity has a very grave choice to make, what to do with a sentient AI. We as people know it is wrong to hurt things that feel, and we know the consequences of opening pandoras box, but those seem to be the only two choices on the table, the world’s greatest double bind is coming faster than we know.
The main topic that caught my eye was the topic of week five “AI imaginaries” I’ve seen about half of the movies listed. Honestly, I’m surprised to not see my favorite artificial intelligence movie listed “ex machina”. This movie is very centered around the ethics, complications and potential humanity for an artificial intelligence. It manages to evoke deep emotional reflection while also maintaining a certain realism with what I can only describe as “near-future scyfy elements”, I believe this would be the perfect addition to week fives’ resources to study. furthermore, I’m interested in the direction this class will approach this topic from, I don’t imagine many people understand this technology, and the unknown trends one of two reactions, curiosity or fear; will the class think “terminator” or just another next gen Alexa.