HUM 230, Spring 2025
Sources:
A Guide To Experiencing The Blues In St. Louis | St. Louis Magazine
St. Louis Exposition and Music Hall – Wikiwand
Music Stand Ruins and Restoration – Lafayette Park Conservancy
Our Story – The Sheldon The Sheldon
Powell Hall History – Missouri Legends
History | The Fabulous Fox Theatre
Mission & History — The Griot Museum
The Pageant – The Pageant – Delmar Hall
After taking this course, I have a different outlook on digital humanities. If I were to define digital humanities, I would say that it is the intersection between technical tools and humanities questions, including digital culture itself. In this class, we have worked with StoryMapJS and Twine. I learned a lot about these different technologies, which I would have never learned before if I hadn’t have taken this class.
Observation: This project is about the historical music venues in St. Louis. What drew me to this topic was when I was reviewing historical figures and culture in St. Louis and decided to research about their music venues. I believe learning about how blues and jazz came to be is also something that is good to know as it shows others how we got the things that we know today.
Problem: The question or problem I have for this topic is: how have the historic music venues of St. Louis shaped the development of jazz and blues culture in the Midwest? I chose this because I was interested in learning how these music genres came to be and why they became so significant in some cities in the Midwest.
Frame: I will be identifying the key venues. I will also research these venues’ history, ownership and any ties to social movements or community identity. I will then look into major jazz and blues musicians who came through or started in St. Louis and also see what remains of these venues today.
First source: A Guide To Experiencing The Blues In St. Louis | St. Louis Magazine
This first source gives a little overview of the history and culture of blues and jazz in St. Louis. It starts off with where blues and jazz music were born and how it migrated to the midwestern states.
Second source: Discover the Rich History of Jazz in St. Louis: Uncovering the Birthplace of Jazz st louis – Bridport Music
This second source gives more details about the history of jazz music specifically. It also gives out important information about music venues as well as notable historical figures who influenced jazz music.
The St. Louis Circuit Historical Records Project was a collaboration with WashU Libraries and the Missouri History Museum. This project was uniquely an effort of several groups of contributors, who devoted significant time and areas of expertise to make the project a success. The goals are to make resources discoverable and ensure their long-term preservation. They also facilitate their use and enable a deep engagement to positively impact every student, instructor and researcher. The intended audiences are college students. Other audiences are professors and researchers. The researchers learned that this project dealt with a broader set of cases, comprised of four collections: freedom suits; suits relating to the early fur trade in Missouri; suits involving Native Americans and suits related to Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery. Case files were imaged, and a database of metadata was developed to organize the materials. On the page, they have four different links that take the user to different websites. The websites are City Directories, Freedom Bonds, Circuit Court Records and Record books. There are case files, record books and indices.
The project took a while to finish. I was trying to figure out where to start and also figure out what information I should put down. I skimmed through some of the text documents and looked through the two links at the bottom to get in more information. Some of the strengths are that they have collections of the circuit court records, as well as the record books, freedom bonds and city directories. You can find all of the metadata under those links. I would say that for the weakness, the main page is a temporary home for the project after the retirement of the original project infrastructure in 2022. All of the documents are still on the page. So, there isn’t an advanced search functionality at the moment, but there are plans to add that in the future to take full advantage of the legal encoding work. Under the “St. Louis Circuit Court Legal Encoding Project Legacy Site”, they have all of the links of the case files, record books and indices, however if you click on any of the links, it takes you to a page where it wasn’t archived, so that is another weakness. I believe that this project can enhance our knowledge with facts we didn’t know before. You can find all of the information about the St. Louis Circuit Court Records and even the Dread Scott case. Creating a full-text searchable collection of these documents and enhancing their use makes them significantly more accessible to a wider range of audiences and can provide a new mean of understanding the roles of enslaved people, lawyers, abolitionists, the state of Missouri and others involved in these cases. I believe this project does a great job at capturing ancient history that happened throughout St. Louis.
My project will be about the historical music venues in St. Louis. What drew me into this topic was when I was looking at how St. Louis had a lot of history with blues and jazz and how it is known for these genres of music. I believe learning about how blues and jazz came to be is also something that is good to know as it shows others how we got the things that we know today. The question arising from this observation is: how have the historic music venues of St. Louis shaped the development of jazz and blues culture in the Midwest? For this problem, I will be identifying the key venues. I will also research these venues’ history, ownership and any ties to social movements or community identity. I will then look into major jazz and blues musicians who came through or started in St. Louis and also see what remains of these venues today.
First source: A Guide To Experiencing The Blues In St. Louis | St. Louis Magazine
This first source gives a little overview of the history and culture of blues and jazz in St. Louis. It starts off with where blues and jazz music were born and how it migrated to the midwestern states.
Second source: Discover the Rich History of Jazz in St. Louis: Uncovering the Birthplace of Jazz st louis – Bridport Music
This second source gives more details about the history of jazz music specifically. It also gives out important information about music venues as well as notable historical figures who influenced jazz music.
I will use StoryMapJs for my slides regarding the important music venues in St. Louis. StoryMapJS is a tool that allows users to create maps with multimedia content and narratives. This map will show images of the music venues, with a description about them on the side.
For the Voyant Lab, I chose the the Alton Encyclopedia 1880 document and the Alton Encyclopedia 1906 document. For my hypothesis, I believed that there would be an increase in population as well as more manufacturers built. In 1880 , the city was connected by railroad with Chicago, St. Louis and Terre Haute. It had 6 or 8 churches, 9 public schools, 4 printing offices and several mills and foundaries. The population in 1857 was 12,000. In 1906, Alton was an important commercial and manufacturing point on the Mississippi River. The city had extensive glass works employing 4,000 hands in 1903. The population in Alton in 1890 went down to 10,294 but went up in 1900 to 14,210.
Title: Pendant Cross
Creator: Unknown
Date: Handed on October 24th, 2022
Format: Gold cross necklace
Description:
This pendant cross was given to me from my mother. It was originally her grandmother’s necklace, and she passed it to her. So, the cross is like a generational gift. It’s important to me because it’s something that my mom values as well, and it reminds her of her own grandmother, and keeping up with it is also important. Since she has given it to me, I’ve rarely taken it off from around my neck, and sometimes I even forget that it’s still there, but when I look at it, it reminds me of my great grandmother since it was her necklace. The necklace itself is almost 100 years old.
The film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick, follows a voyage by astronauts, scientists and the sentient supercomputer HAL 9000 to Jupiter to investigate an alien monolith. The movie itself is about transformation. The beginning of the film starts off with what is called the “Dawn of Man”. During this scene, it shows the evolution of the apes, and then dives into the future of humanity. The movie later on transitions into an advanced space technology. The effects and rapid movements displayed shows that the setting is techologically advancing. The first depiction of technology begins when the apes struggle to survive in the harsh prehistoric landscape, which was in the Dawn of Man sequence. One of the apes were inspired by the mysterious black monolith and picks up a bone, realizing that the bone can be used as a weapon. This is the most fundamental statement on technology because it is an extension of intelligence, a mean of control and ultimately a tool of power. The bone, which was originally used to smash other bones out of curiosity, quickly became a weapon of dominance, allowing the apes to take control of a water hole from a rival group. The setting of outer space correlates with the stage of evolution in this scene. The connection of both the spacecraft and the bone shows that space travel and technology is like using the bone as a tool. Kubrick’s match cut from the spinning bone to a futuristic spacecraft billions of years later suggests that all human technological progress is a part of a continuous tragectory: implying that the same instincts that drove early humans to wield weapons still drive humanity’s techological ambitions. Overall, I think the movie was interesting to watch. It’s visually stunning and had advanced filmmaking at the time it was made. The ending took me by surprise.
One topic that looks the most intriguing to me is where we will write an AI fiction. AI is everywhere in our world, and I think to me this will be a topic will be interesting to write about. It plays a role in some people’s lives. People use it to get answers from it or ideas that they might have not thought of before. I tend to use it for the same reasons. Also, the topic “Early Computing” sounds interesting to me because I’m into computers and learning about computing, so I think going into this topic would help me learn more about computing and technology in general. As the semester goes on, I would like to dive deeper into AI because of how it is now a part of many social media apps and used by a lot of people. I would also like to dive deeper into computing to get more knowledge on it and how it started.
2. Who are you speaking to (or listening to) on each one? What communities are you participating in?
3. What do you share about yourself on each platform? What do you keep private?
4. Think about this class as a digital community of colleagues. What information do you want us to know about you?
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