Final Blog Post

        For my final blog post I would like to start off by saying how I came into this class not knowing much about it, after I had to drop a class early on in the semester. I read the description for this class, and although I am not a big fan when it comes to history itself, I thought it would be really interesting and a different experience as well considering it is digital history. I thought it was really interesting how we got to hear each other’s opinions and see what others came up with for some blog posts. It is really good to keep an open mind and I think this course did a good job allowing us to be open-minded. It was also very fascinating to historically learn more into depth, whereas in high school, in my opinion, historical information was not very taught well. 

        One blog post I wish I could have done better on was the most recent one from Week Ten. For my flourish visualization I looked at the population of slaves in the popular southern states of the United States, which consisted of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia. What I initially wanted to look at was the difference between the population of men slaves and female slaves in those states, but it was difficult to find accurate data as well as constructing that data on my visualization. Looking back at it now, I am sure I could have found more information on it if I researched a little bit more. I also had a bit of trouble pasting the data that was given to us in the link under the blog post description, so I entered in the data myself. It would’ve been cool to use other tools/graphs when making my visualization but I thought the column chart I used was most efficient for the topic I chose. 

        The blog post I most enjoyed was from Week Five, which was the podcast week. I really appreciated Mr. Fandino’s help during our class meetings and it was fascinating seeing how podcasts work. It was really fun playing around with Audacity and using the different tools to edit. I did not do too much editing for my final podcast since I wanted it to be more serious and formal, but when I was using it beforehand it was fun adding different audios and sounds to the original audio. I love listening to podcasts so I really enjoyed making my own and found it interesting to see what all the tools can do.

        All together, digital history was a very enjoyable class compared to my other classes. I learned a lot about slavery, that I did not know before, and I learned how to use the digital tools we used for our blog posts. Some of the tools we used were not my favorites but it was nice having a new experience as well as seeing the creative aspect of this course. I personally think this class helped me branch out to new resources that I believe will help me in the future. I also think this class was really helpful because I was able to look at/read what other students in the class had to say. Although I did not speak during class meetings that much, it was amazing how everybody in the class were able to share their own opinions. This will help me in the future because it allows me to be more open to other ideas, as well as be more creative. Lastly, I think the most helpful thing about this class was the professor. Compared to all my other professors, Prof. Andrella was really easy to reach out to, she gave helpful feedback, and she made the class more engaging. I would definitely recommend this course to anybody who enjoys learning about history, or anybody who is interested in learning different aspects of digital history.