Introduction

Welcome to smalltownhistory.blogspot.com!

Webb, Naomi. "Bikes." c.1950. Belott, TX. [Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International]

My name is Victoria Watts and I am studying to be an English teacher at Texas A&M University-Commerce. I enrolled in English 333 Advanced Writing: Non-fiction for the spring semester of 2014. When I began this course I expected to be writing a lot of papers, so it was a surprise to discover that this class would be focusing more on digital storytelling. 

Digital storytelling is a vague term which essentially means that the class found pictures from the university library's digital archives and used them to tell a story about some aspect of Northeast Texas. 

Throughout the course the class created two major projects: DMP1 and DMP2. This stands for Digital Media Project. For the first project each student created a photo essay. We decided what our topic was, and everything was fair game as long as it focused on some aspect of East Texas. I created a photo essay about the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) and featured images from the Historical ET Collection. For the DMP2 I focused on what life must have been like for the families who stayed at home while the men were drafted into World War II. I used the images from the photo essay in combination with two oral histories from the Digital collections and some personal family photos. 

If you want to read more about my creative process see the page labelled "Overview."

For the DMP2 the class focused a lot on the fair use laws for our projects. Fair use allows a mashup or remix to be shared on YouTube or another site only if the way it is used is for educational purposes and/or the creation gives credit to the original creator. There are a few other specifications which can be found on this site: http://us.creativecommons.org/