The Scout Report always turns up some interesting sites. This week’s collection includes Black Quotidian, “a digital project designed to highlight everyday moments and lives in African-American history.” I like the idea behind it:
While this allowed me to find and analyze over ten thousand newspaper articles on school desegregation, I missed the experience of working with microfilm reels and stumbling across interesting stories I had not been searching for. I appreciate that digitization makes it possible to search millions of articles with high levels of precision, but with Black Quotidian I hope to reintroduce the feelings of randomness and surprise that I associate with my first encounters with black newspapers.
although I wonder if that randomness really comes through in a curated collection. Still, it’s an awesome project. Friday’s entry showed several reactions to the moon landing in 1969. One part that caught my attention was this paragraph from the Los Angeles Sentinel:
because it addresses the same thing as the opening line of Gil Scott-Heron’s poem, Whitey on the Moon.
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With Whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And Whitey’s on the moon
The site is built on Scalar, one of the many web tools I need to look into and experiment with. Maybe someday I’ll find the time.
