Maitland A&H Project Blog Entry 5 - Final Touches, Final Thoughts

The past few weeks have been spent organizing the timeline, creating the timeline, and working on our presentation for the class. Joe has been tirelessly focused on making the heatmap of payphones and where they are located in Florida, sifting through tons of data to create a really awesome interactive tool to study payphones and where they are most abundant or least abundant. 

In making the timeline, I have been really focused on making it as public history as possible - meaning, I want to include a lot of links to other readings, oral histories, videos, and more so that people looking at this timeline can essentially learn as much as they want. At face value, they will know that the evolution of telephone and cellphone technology affected jobs, societal gender roles, and how we interact with other humans on a global scale. However, with the connected readings, forum questions, and ability to read, watch, or listen, users can learn more, in the way they would want to learn more. 

I also wanted to tie it to the Maitland A&H Telephone Museum as much as possible, so I have been including pictures from the museum of devices I discuss in the timeline. My outlook is that this timeline and heatmap combination could be used for educational purposes, either in just a link on their website, or something schools could look over before a potential field trip to learn more about the historical themes behind some of the telephone technology Maitland A&H exhibits. 

This project has been challenging. There is so much information on the social implications of this technology that it was really difficult to hone in on one, or a few, different groups and narratives affected by this changing industry. I think that would be my main reflection, and my main idea as to where this project could go: a more specific research area, maybe the social implications of cellular technology on women, in rural areas, or even in Central Florida. I feel that if it had been more specific, the research could have been more illuminating. That being said, I hope that with the attached readings, videos, and other source materials, people could learn more about these specific groups, and that future researchers could even edit the timeline themselves.

To wrap up some final thoughts: I enjoyed learning about this technology, the social implications of it, and how much cell phones have shaped my generation. More than anything, I enjoyed practicing digital history through the creation of the timeline. It allowed me to be creative and move beyond the structure of an essay or basic report, and it allowed me to include tidbits of information that would be lost in a simple monographic study. I could foresee working on this timeline even after this class ends, continuing to edit and perfect it, and maybe even using these digital history tools to house future historic projects. This is my first semester, so it is my first time thinking as a public historian - and this project, our deliverables, and the practicing of digital history tools have really invigorated in me the desire to practice these skills even more.