John Cassara's Blog

Many Eyes Visualization November 17, 2009

Although it seems that the majority of the class has gone Wordle crazy this week, I actually decided to spend my time playing around at the other website that Dr. Cohen introduced us to last week, Many Eyes. I thought it was really cool that users could upload any data set from Excel and Many Eyes would allow them to create a number of unique visualizations from that data. After messing around with the site for awhile, I have to say that it is not exactly what I hoped it would be. I tried plugging in a lot of different data related to my project (I had a few Excel sheets on players/major events in the integration of college football), and I could not really get Many Eyes to do what I wanted it to. For instance, I wanted to use their map visualization to geographically display where the first black college football players played (i.e. 5 played for colleges in Massachusetts from 1889-1900, versus 2 in Nebraska, etc). Unfortunately, I could not make that happen (though I still hope to figure it out….I’m pretty sure I’ll keep fiddling with Many Eyes in the coming weeks).

Therefore, I decided to take a pretty small data set and create a treemap. The data set I chose was a list of “controversies” surrounding the presence of African American players in Bowl Games located in Southern cities from 1940-1962. My data included the year, bowl name, name of the black player(s) involved, the team the black player(s) played for, the opposing team, the bowl location, and a brief description of what happened (i.e. the black player was or was not allowed to play in the bowl game). Once I uploaded the data (which only included 10 games), I created the treemap by using the bowl name as the major category. The results appear below. All in all, I think it is a pretty cool little chart. The user can immediately see the name of black player(s) involved, as well as get a sense of the chronology by looking at the color of the particular box (the darker the box, the later the event occurred…see the key at the bottom right of the screen). Moreover, if you click on any of the boxes, you can get all the information in the data set. However, for some reason, all the years are displayed with a comma (so 1946 becomes 1,946). I couldn’t figure out how to change that. Nevertheless, this little chart shows the potential that Many Eyes has for my project, because I think that images and charts could be a big part of my prospective site.

Copyright Concerns October 25, 2009

We had a number of readings this week on copyright, including the Owning the Past? chapter in Digital History. I definitely found the readings helpful, but at the same time, they raised more questions than they actually answered. For instance, in my project on the integration of college football, I imagine that I will use newspaper articles on game stories, game cancellations, etc. I am still a bit unclear on what I am “allowed” to do with these articles.

For instance, see my earlier post on the “Ruth Knocked Out” picture. In that post, I present a two paragraph block-quote from a July 6, 1924 New York Times article. Is that “fair use” of the source? What if, instead of transcribing the article, I had scanned a printed out version of the article (accessed via Proquest) and uploaded the image to the blog? Would that violate copyright for the New York Times, or Proquest’s terms of use? Do the answers to all these questions change if we are talking about an article published in 1922 instead of 1924? Hopefully, I’ll discover the answers to some of these questions in class on Tuesday, though I would obviously welcome any thoughts in the comments.

In addition to newspaper articles, I also forsee some copyright concerns regarding pictures of college players that I would want to put on my prospective site. However, I imagine that I would mostly get these pictures from university archivists. Therefore, as long as I ask (and am granted) permission, I would think that I am free to put images on my site.

Final Project Outline October 18, 2009

Warning! Long post! Skim at your leisure.

1. Abstract: To create a website about the integration of college football. The website will develop a bibliographic index of scholarly material related to the integration of college football as well as a database of notable black players at nearly every school in the country.

2. Need: People in this country are amazingly passionate about college football, yet they know very little about its history. They know even less about the fascinating and important history of the integration of the sport. The public ignorance of the integration of college football is largely due to the fact that there was no “Jackie Robinson” figure in the sport. Indeed, the story of Jackie Robinson breaking Major League Baseball’s long-standing color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 is one of the most celebrated and oft-told in sports history. It is a heroic story of how one man had to overcome racism from fans, opposing players, and teammates to break the walls of segregation that had existed in baseball for over fifty years.

The story of the integration of college football is quite different. No universal color line was ever established in college football; therefore the integration of the sport cannot be defined by a single moment or athlete. Instead, it was an eighty year process that involved countless, mostly forgotten, players. As far back as 1889, black players played on predominantly white university football teams in the Northeast and Midwest. Although they represented a small minority of the nationwide pool of players for many years, the presence of black football players on predominantly white college football teams was constant from the 19th century to the 1970s, when the last schools of the Southeastern Conference finally integrated.

Yet the presence of black players in a still overwhelmingly white sport was far from universally accepted; in fact, hostility toward black participation in college football was prevalent throughout much of the country for many years. This was most apparent in games between integrated and segregated schools. In such encounters, the racial concerns of the segregated schools ruled the day. It became customary for black players to be forced to sit out home games on the bench, and be barred from accompanying their teammates on road trips to segregated institutions. This practice of benching and exclusion would become known as the “gentleman’s agreement.” The “gentleman’s agreement” was very much a part of the sport until the 1950s.

The slow and steady process of the integration of college football is precisely what makes the integration of college football such a captivating subject. Historian Lane Demas has provocatively argued that the integration of college football was a process that “exemplifies the true struggle behind the story of African-American civil rights in the twentieth century.” In Demas’ view, the history of college football’s slow process of integration represents a welcome departure from the popular narrative employed by sports historians on the subject of athletic integration; namely, biographical pieces on professional “race heroes” like Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis. These stories, while undeniably important, cultivate an account of integration that is too simplistic—one person breaking down long-standing color barriers. In truth, integration in athletics, much like the integration of society at large, is much more complex. Both are processes involving countless, mostly anonymous people, and many ups and downs. (1)

There is no current website (at least not one that I can find) that examines the integration of college football. There is a clear need for a website that addresses this topic, and one that will hopefully bring greater public awareness about the integration of the sport.

3. Functionality: There will be two central features to the website. One, it will have a searchable bibliographic index of scholarly material related to the integration of college football. Two, it will have a searchable database of notable black players at nearly every school in the country. Notable black players include the first black players at a particular school, College Football Hall of Famers (that played pre-1960), as well as black players that were involved in “incidents.” “Incidents”’ range from racially motivated injuries that the black players suffered on the field, to instances where black players were withheld from a game because of the “gentleman’s agreement,” to instances where the “gentleman’s agreement” was waived, and black players were allowed to play against segregated schools. Ideally, the website would develop into a comprehensive resource on significant black players at nearly every school in the country. Because the database would be searchable, a user could go to a website and find all the notable black football players at a particular school. Moreover, I would want to group schools by their current conference affiliations, so that users could, for instance, look at black players from Southeastern Conference (SEC) schools. The website would also feature a few short essays about the history of the integration of the sport, to help give the user a “big picture” sense of what happened.

4. Audience: The site has the potential to attract a wide variety of people, from general college football fans and university alumni, to sports historians and historians of American higher education. Yet if the site is truly going to succeed, a key component of the audience would have be university archivists. The site would need to attract university archivists and encourage them to help participate in building a database of the notable black players at their schools. More on this in section 6.

5. Technologies: The goal of the site’s design is to be fairly straightforward and user-friendly, so it will probably utilize a simple HTML design (definitely no Flash). As mentioned, the website will also feature two searchable databases. One that can search bibliographic sources, and one that can search players by name, date, school, or conference. The site could also utilize Flickr for any photos of players I get permission to use.

6. User-contributed content: Because the goals of the site are rather ambitious, collaboration with university archivists will be absolutely essential. I would need to encourage archivists to help build the database of players. Initially, I imagine the best way to get this accomplished is through e-mail: directly asking them for assistance. In past projects I have done on the integration of college football, I have e-mailed university archivists with questions, and have generally found them friendly and willing to help. Here is an email that I sent to the archivist at Wichita State University about a player I was interested in:

Hello-

My name is John Cassara and I am a graduate student in the MA History program at George Mason University. One of the topics I am really interested in is the integration of college football.

In doing research on that topic, I came across a 1947 newspaper article that described how the University of Tulsa would not allow Wichita University (as it was called in those days) to use its black football player in an upcoming game between the schools scheduled to be played on November 1, 1947, in Tulsa. I discovered that Wichita’s black football player was Linwood Sexton, who actually played on the team from 1945 to 1947. I have found some basic information on him from doing Google searches, but nothing substantive.

Therefore, I was wondering if you might be able to provide me with some information on Linwood Sexton, especially on his football career at Wichita U. I am most interested in any information pertaining to situations like the Tulsa-Wichita game described above, where his appearance on the football team caused controversy, and he was forced to sit out of the game because of the exclusionary racial policy of another school. Also, I have assumed that Sexton was the only African American player on Wichita’s roster during his career (1945-1947), but do you know of any other black football players at Wichita during that time? Was Sexton Wichita’s first black football player?

Thank you for taking the time to read this and know that any response you give will be much appreciated.

Sincerely,

John Cassara

The emails that I will send out to university archivists will essentially be the same, though I will obviously say something about the fact that I am building a website. As the site progresses, I could envision building the player pages as wikis, and inviting university archivists to help edit/add to the information that I have. Obviously, that would also allow other users (other sports historians, passionate amateurs) to help build the site.

Note:
(1) Lane Demas, “Beyond Jackie Robinson: Racial Integration in American College Football and New Directions in Sport History,” History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007): 675-690.

Final Project Audience October 5, 2009

When thinking about my final project idea of a website devoted to the integration of college football, it seems like the potential audience for such a site would be made up of a wide variety of people. Because of the narrowness of the topic, it would obviously attract specialists in the field (sports historians, historians of American higher education), but it also has the potential to attract general college football fans and university alumni.

Clearly though, the key audience members of my potential website would be university archivists. Indeed, I need to both attract university archivists to my website and figure out a way to encourage them to collaborate with me. That is because the two primary goals of my prospective website are to determine who the first black football player(s) was at a particular school, and to share information and stories about the men that played a pivotal role in the integration of the sport. To accomplish either of these goals, archivist collaboration would be absolutely essential, especially for smaller schools.

Reading Chapter 5 of Digital History definitely gave me a lot to think about in terms of building an audience, but I haven’t really pinpointed a way in which I could ensure university archivists would come to my site. The only real idea that I have had so far is to send out e-mails to the university archivists of the hundreds of schools that I am looking at. Doing so would obviously take a lot of time, even if I simply sent out the same generic message in each e-mail, because it would require looking up each individual e-mail address. Can anyone think of a more efficient way to reach my intended audience?

Final Project? September 17, 2009

Very much like Hal, I really don’t have a clear idea of what I want to do for a final project. I feel like I lack both the technical skill and the conceptual vision to come up with a new web tool or software. Therefore, like others, I have been thinking about creating a website based on my personal research interest. I mentioned on the first day of class that I’m interested in sports history, but it is really more specific than that: I’m interested in the integration of college football. It’s a topic that I’ve been researching since I was a undergraduate at Virginia Tech (how narcissistic is it to link to an article about yourself?…probably as narcissistic as the concept of Twitter ).

Anyway, two things really amaze me about the integration of college football. One, how little there is out there on the subject. Two, how literally every college and university in America that has a football program has played a role in the process. Therefore, the story of the first African American football player at almost every college in this country is both fascinating and of historical importance. Thus, I envision my website serving two primary functions. One, to serve as a bibliographic resource for all the material I have found related to the integration of college football. Two, as a place where school archivists can share the story of the integration of their university football team. In that way, the website would develop into a comprehensive resource on the first black players at nearly every school in the country. Therefore, you could go to the website and immediately determine who the first black football players were at every current SEC school. You could then click on their name and read a short essay about them. Putting together a website like this would obviously be very ambitious. From my own research, I already have lists of notable black “firsts” at many universities, but certainly, I would require collaboration with university archivists and fellow sports historians to put together a comprehensive and useful website. How would I reach out to them en masse? What impetus would they have to collaborate with an amateur historian? Would the website have to be supported by the National Football Foundation to succeed?

People in this country are so amazingly passionate about college football, yet I feel like they know very little about the history of the sport. They know even less about the fascinating and important history of the integration of the sport. I feel like a website on the topic would be of interest not only to sports historians, but to university alumni and college football fans. What do you guys think?