Maitland A&H Project Blog Entry 4 - Organizing

My partner Joseph has been working on a heatmap of payphones within the United States today, using Tableu, an open-source platform, to try and create this heatmap that we will incorporate into our interactive timeline on the social implications of the evolution of cellular technology. He also has plans to try and make lesson plans, if time permits, that teachers could use along with the timeline to discuss the evolution of this technology and the social changes it has brought about. 

My main focus the past week has been organizing my wealth of information on the evolution of cellular technology. I have established my periodization, which will go from 1876 to 2010. The earlier dates will be briefer in technological information, as the Maitland A&H Telephone Museum has much more information on this earlier technology than it does on the social implications of this early technology and on the information of later 20th and 21st-century technology. Starting in 1960, the timeline will contain much more descriptive information on the actual technology itself, as well as the social changes that more accessible telephone usage brought about. This theme will extend well into the 2010s and will be the highlight of the overall social implications that new cellular technology created in the United States.

I decided to use Sutori to create my timeline, as it is extremely user friendly, allows for seamless incorporation of different forms of media which, if Joe is able to make lesson plans, would allow the timeline to house different videos, images, links, and source materials that could be useful for students and teachers alike. The more I have researched about cellular tech and AT&T's "propaganda machine" (a term used for the company's pushing of young female telephone operators as lauded professionals) the more I desire to be able to inform about the little details of these social implications that may have to be scrapped for my focus on the larger themes. However, Sutori makes it quite easy to include images, pdfs, and other hyperlink options to allow for these little details to be incorporated in case there are those who want to read more. 

More importantly, the Sutori timeline is easily editable and navigable, meaning that if I wanted to, I could allow anyone to edit it and interpret the available sources themselves - and I think that would be a great way to allow for this project to be very public history-oriented. 

While working on the timeline, heatmap, and possible lesson plans as the deliverables for our project, I have also been using this time to plan out my basic report. It will be a simple information-driven essay with an emphasis on the social implications of cellular technology. It will likely follow the timeline's periodization, explain the important tech of the era, why this tech caused social change, and what social changes these were. I think this will be a good way to deliver the information to my scholarly peers and audience, while also providing the Maitland A&H Museum with something tangible to go off of for their own museum timeline. 

Overall, Joseph and I have been working hard to tie together the projects and make a great, interactive tool for the public to learn more about the rather pervasive effects of technology! I am quite excited to see how our final project pans out - it has been really fun to learn about the social implications of a technology that has certainly affected my life since I was born. Seeing how it affected people, even in its infancy, and how it has changed the world has been extremely eye-opening.