PhilaPlace is a historical website created by the Historical Society of Philadelphia. Using a Google Map interface, visitors can explore an interactive map of Philadelphia through photos, sounds, and text. Clicking on one location brings a pop up with an option to listen to the people that make up the city.

Much like any city, Philadelphia has a wealth of history. PhilaPlace is both engaging and informative, allowing for people of and outside of the city to explore its richness. The site not only allows one to see historical places, but also allows for a historical map to be placed underneath the current map of the city.

In our previous in-class discussions of what individuals are gaining or loosing with the internet, individuals aren’t loosing anything from sites like PhilaPlace. Instead, they are gaining new knowledge. Making these stories of individuals at historical places available, makes individuals want to go see them. This only enhances the city, not hurt it. In a similar case, has Foodnetwork’s shows about local eats hurt those places? No. It’s enhanced them.

In fact, I would argue that many cities should take advantage of the tools that are available to them. Fairfax County, where George Mason University is located, should have something similar to PhilaPlace. What PhilaPlace offers is a way for individuals to connect to the maps and the history around them. So often when individuals look at maps they don’t know how to understand them or know where they fit in. PhilaPlace allows for individuals to be connected to the history of the maps that they are viewing.

I want to be a reporter for National Public Radio. Therefore, the sounds of the city and individuals’ stories are what I find compelling. Using both visual and auditory senses to put people into certain places are what I find most appealing about this project. The project also doesn’t just allow for outsiders to view a city, but for individuals of a city to see their own city in a different light. They are also able to share their own stories about their city, allowing for a collaborative process to occur that is only made available because of the internet.

I am interested if other cities have thought of undertaking such an expansive project.

This week our class went exploring. Our first task was to create a chart.
Below is the chart that I created:

I got the statistics from Gallup Poll on President Obama’s approval among voters. While originally I thought this would be easy, however it was not. I’ve done charts in the past for classes, however this was using Microsoft Excel instead of Google Chart maker. I thought the whole process confusing and not user friendly. I entered the correct information, but the chart wasn’t aligning with what I put in. I am hoping that Google fixes these kinks because I think the average user would find this very confusing.

The next step was to create a basic map.
This was also very complicated. I had a difficult time using the tools as well as drawing the straight line. However, I was able to make a map from Manassas to President’s Park, an often confusing location for many visitors of the campus to get to.

View How to get to President’s Park in a larger map

Overall, I found all of these exercises very confusing to follow through on. There didn’t seem to be a very simple way to teach someone to use these tools adequately.

The Internet Archives, recently launched their newest section on recorded television broadcasts from news organizations such as NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC, including Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Report.”

The Internet Archives Organization is a  “501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.”

As part of a class exercise, I went onto evaluate the ethics of TV news section where they have over 356, 000 videos to view.  On the surface, this is most likely violating copyright law. However, the purposes of the TV archives reaches far beyond any means of reproducing a product.

What the TV archives aims to do is make audiences critical about the television they are watching. Instead of hearing about how FOX Cable News Network has decided to make every program about the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth in the United States, viewers can actually view it for themselves.

New York University Professor and Journalist, Farai Chideya sees the project as something to be applauded,

At some level the Television Archives will really will allow people to not only rely on gatekeepers, people like me who are trained journalists, but to also be gatekeepers and to free themselves in terms of information.

What I searched for was Invisible Children. Back in March of this year, this film “Kony 2012” sky rocketed into internet fame for a small thirty minute video discussing the horrors occurring in Central Africa under the Lord’s Resistance Army. I had previously know about the conflict and had been working with Invisible Children for more than a year when the film was discussed on every television screen.

Now, I can look back and see what people were discussing. For someone how is doing a documentary, these video clips are valuable to knowing what was actually being reported on at the time of the videos release.

Despite the  legality question of this content, I strongly support the project. Like C-SPAN, the viewer is able to judge for themselves what they see in comparison with all other sources. Otherwise, researching on one topic would take forever. This a very effective and useful tool in learning about the way media operates in the U.S. and finding trends for evaluating months, and even years after an original event has occurred.

What is best known as the Amen Break, was originally played by the Winsten’s from their album, “Amen Brother,” is almost irreplaceable. I did not know what I was expecting, but as soon as I saw the 20 minute movie  about the drum roll (see below), it was easily recognizable.

What is called a sampler, the amen drum roll was one of the first segments of music to be repeatedly used in other genres of music. National Public Radio defines sampling as, “re purposing a snippet of another artist’s music.” Sampling is a part of our pop culture. In the case of Imogen Heap’s popular song “Hide and Seek,” which was used for Jason Derulo’s “Whatcha Say.”

However, Imogen Heap’s original song was used a sampler for Derulo’s song:

National Public Radio’s Science Friday, delved into this concept. What sampling involves is taking something and make the sound your own. However, if you are not careful sampling can get you into some legal trouble. Artists whose work is sampled aren’t often compensated, even if it is for just a six second clip.

Professor McLeod of Iowa State University, whose a professor of Communications noted on NPR that sampling  is, ”

basically the central part of popular culture if you think about social networking and the way that people interact with each other across great distances. And they get to collaborate with each other, you think about open-source software, the way that people collaboratively create stuff, they’re essentially taking samples of computer code and remixing them.

And the same is true with music. I mean, I know a 12-year-old who make mash-up videos on YouTube and upload them. It’s just – it’s almost part of the DNA of – not just youth culture but just popular culture more generally.

What he says is true. We are so confused by our everyday culture that we are constantly surrounded by un-authenticity. It brings about, as discussed in last week’s blog post and this week’s lecture, of what is truly authentic. Is it OK for people to place other items into their work, whether it be music or digitized photography? What are loosing and gaining from a world of sampled music? We are now skeptical of everything. We are even skeptical of humans, as in the case with lip singing. We always wonder if an artist is actually producing the sound that they are making. Sampling is just part of that.

In viewing the video History of the Internet I began to think about how much our world has changed since the age of typewriters to laptops that are smaller than typewriters of the past; and can do more.

The image above, with the caption, is from the first episode of the hit television show Mad Men. Head secretary Joanne shows Peggy the ropes of working at a Madison Avenue ad agency, where in the 1960’s a simple typewriter was considered an advance in technology.

In the past you needed these three items to do a separate task. To call someone, you needed a rotary phone, to tell someone that there was someone to see them you had to use an intercom, and to type out information to distribute you had to use a typewriter. Needless to say, things have sure changed.

Now computers, and even cellphones, can do all of these tasks in the palm of your hand. When the computer was invented, it didn’t change the future right away. Computers according to the History of the Internet, could only do one function at a time. Plus, they were huge. Pictures below is a scientist from the RAND corporation next to one of the first computers ever built:

It’s pretty easy to see why the computer, when it was first built, didn’t get a lot of traction. It was not economically possible for an average home to hold. In order to have a computer, one had to have a separate cooling room for it. All of these components pictures above, and we haven’t even discussed the internet. Simply being able to access one site that does multiple things, is impressive enough particularly when one considers how large our former computers were.

Now, I can sit comfortably on my bed with a computer that only takes up a small fraction of what used to be a computer. Not only can I use a word processes, but I’m able to type these words and access a blog. What I continue to learn through this class from my own thoughts, is how remarkable the mere access to the internet actually is, and even the technology of a laptop has changed so much over the past. This, despite a computer and internet access being a constant presence in my life while I grew up.