Week 6: A Review and Response

1.) 
The most challenging part of this course was the constant and necessary awareness of my impact upon the object, that my own understanding of them would provide that vision to those who would read my descriptions, subject terms, and who was decided upon as a source versus a contributor. With this awareness of my impact, I believe it made the job both easier and more difficult: the ease came from my assurance of being able to use the language of the objects themselves to describe them; the difficulty came with narrowing that language down to subject terms. And so in terms of my generating the metadata as quickly and succinctly as possible, here is my method: 

Week 5: Representation: Re-presenting a Lexicon?

After only a little bit of time with the metadata of the materials, but with more time actually handling the materials while in Critical Methodologies last year, I find that it has become easier to provide tags to pieces of the material due to their correlation. With more experience with the materials and more reading of the materials I know the story of Watts in order to better see the connections between the pieces which then build or tell a more coherent narrative of the events of and leading up to 1965. With this in mind I know that reading the Gerald Horne text, along with viewing things like the documentary of Watts helped in my being better able to approach the material confidently. Last year when creating the metadata for an object, it was daunting to attempt to claim a voice or a stance to speak from for the materials, the people who wrote them, or the people who participated in the events. But with a broader (not deeper) knowledge of the events I thought more as a historian being able to weave the pieces together to create a more cohesive narrative, one that even if I was not a part of, I knew well enough to show the highlights of details.