I have to start by saying that I have no coherent response to these situations we read about. This week I heard about the fourth grade teacher who had a “slave auction” in her classroom where white kids “bought” and “sold” the black ones. Mmmmm, really? Now, if I was going to “teach a lesson” about discrimination I might set up an “imaginary” reenactment, but say, based on the color of your eyes, or perhaps the color of your mother’s hair–things that are not rational, that might affect the child regardless of their helplessness to change it, and the fiction that these things represent. But that’s just me. These situations where you have such charged emotional responses get to be a lot for a girl like me to handle.
So, speaking of ethics.
For the last few days we have been dealing with the use of images in our project. Namely, what is the legal status, and who do we contact if we must? What about images that are in books? Most of them luckily, are located at the local archives (some of them are not free unfortunately), but what about the other images? We’re working all of these issues out at the moment, but we’re finding that it does take a little effort.
Also, I posted the Reinventing Boise Atlas last week. It is the project for MAHR student Johnny Hester. His work is really helpful for our project, he has published a number of maps that illustrate geographical and infrastructural change in Boise at the turn of the twentieth century, but for me, there is a question of how much can or should be used? For this project I was wondering, should I just use some of his images, and cite Mr. Hester, or would it be better to incorporate a link to his digital history into our project? I have never met him, but I will have to contact him to ask his opinion on the matter. I’m also going to see if he has any tips for us on our search.