This blog was created to host my assignments and final project for ENG470: Tech and Texts Capstone. This course centers around the Morant Bay Rebellion, which occurred in Jamaica in 1865. We’ve used the Morant Bay Rebellion as a lens to analyze qualitative datasets, practice tedious transcription and data organization skills, and create visual/audio representations of the Rebellion that are accessible and educational to the general public.
Prior to taking this course, I really didn’t know anything about the history of Jamaica, and certainly not the Morant Bay Rebellion. My history classes only mentioned Jamaica when speaking about the triangular slave trade, but I was never introduced to the island’s culture and history. Now, I feel much more familiar with Victorian Jamaica’s contributions to global trade and the adverse effects colonialism had on the island, but I would like to do further research about post-Victorian Jamaica to learn how it has grown to function independently of the British monarchy. By creating timelines, blog posts, and data visualizations about the Morant Bay Rebellion in this course, I’ve learned how impactful creative representations can be when educating others about a topic. With historical events, it’s easy to ignore the humanity of the people involved when just reading about it. By creating representations that appeal to a viewer’s interests and encourage them to engage with the data, it turns the people involved into fleshed-out humans that viewers can relate to and empathize with.
It’s important to note that the information presented in this blog isn’t perfect. This is the first time I’ve worked with datasets like this, so I’m still learning how to speak about and interpret data. This blog demonstrates the new skills I’ve learned in this course and the growth in my thinking and analysis skills that have come with that. My final project serves as a representation of all of the skills I’ve learned in this course. By crafting an audio-visual project, I have been able to see first-hand how transforming datasets into different mediums allows for different aspects of the data can be brought to life. For example, my project is centering around Paul Bogle, who is just one actor in a larger historical event. By choosing to create my project based on his story, though, I’m able to shed light on an aspect of the Rebellion that otherwise could go underrepresented. Taking the time to analyze the data as a whole and pick out a specific aspect that stood out to me to research further and turn into a visualization was by far the most educational part of this experience for me, and knowing that I have the power to draw attention to voices that have gone previously unheard or names that have been forgotten has been extremely empowering, and has ultimately given me so much appreciation for the digital humanities field.