- Project Name
- The Representation of Anthracite Coal Miners: An Artistic Movement
- Project Summary
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- “Through analyzing different forms of artistic mediums, I will identify the ways in which coal miners have been represented and the impact of their lives on the anthracite region.”
- Areas: Northumberland, Luzerne, Schuylkill, Lackawanna, Columbia, and Carbon
- In 8 weeks, I want to create a multimedia platform that includes artwork, poems/brief stories, songs, monuments, photography, and possibly film representing coal miners. I would also like to get audio clips from citizens from each area in the coal region.
- I want to use my ideas of social memory and spatial memory while outlining the importance of where the monuments are situated.
- I think Scalar would be the best platform to display all of my media. I would include forms of text analysis on the poems, brief stories, and songs. I would also like to do some sentiment visualizations with the songs. I want to create some data visualizations as well.
- My audience will be the people of the anthracite region. I want to show a collection of the representation of coal miners to the people who chose to remember the coal miners, or those who maybe did not choose to remember (Shamokin).
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- Environmental Scan
- My project mapping monuments, “Shamokin and Coal Township: An Interactive Map” is the only useful website I could find.
- There are really no other similar projects, except some authors discuss the representation or do a “study” of the “Appalachian” region.
- This project will focus on anthracite coal miners, and include an abundance of different artistic representations.
- Requirements for Development
- Copyright Concerns: song lyrics, poems/stories, photography
- I can go to the different historical societies of each region and online databases to find some of the materials.
- I will need resources on the ideas of social memory. I would also like some books on art aesthetic theory.
- The coal miners union
- PA state records: WPA
- Bulleted List of Deliverables
- Find at least three examples of each artistic element: artwork, monuments, photography, poems/stories, and songs for each of the six counties
- Gather audio clips from at least two people from each of the six counties
- Analyze the representations, using Marx, social memory, spatial memory theories
- Create a scalar website
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- Include the media components
- Use text analysis tools on the songs and poems/stories
- Use sentiment analysis tools on the song lyrics
- Use theories to discuss artwork, monuments, and photography
- Critique bad or feteshized representations of coal miners
- Include a brief history of anthracite coal miners
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- End of Life/Future Plans
- This project could easily be added upon. One could continue finding different artistic representations in the anthracite region, or begin researching other coal regions of PA or other states. Then, it could be connected with different coal regions from around the world.
- Also, the monuments could be mapped, like my first research project, and one could research each town individually.
As I begin looking over my bulleted list of deliverables and thinking about how I could refine my project, I believe my scope will instead be my media. I will use only three different mediums – written & visual art and newspapers. My area will be the anthracite region broadly conceived and I think I will use the timelines of 1900-1930 and 1970 to present to look at how miners were represented during the height of the coal mining industry and after the fall of the industry. I believe this will not limit my research and not overwhelm me either, since I will be finding information through newspapers and artifacts that interest me in terms of written and visual art.