History, a Reflection of the Historian Who Writes it.

I have heard it said that all historians do research that reflects their personal or familiar past. I would not want to over generalize about all, since I only know a few historians. But my project this semester definitely reflects my feelings (frustrations) with having been a TA this past year.

I have spent a vast amount of time telling my students to follow Rampolla, and demonstrating the differences between the style for a footnote and bibliography. I have corrected their formating meticulously on all there small assignments, in the hope that they would do it correctly for the large assignments –but this was to no avail.

When I read through their book reports and final essays I got Sparknotes referenced, I had only one page in a book sourced for the whole essay, I got work cited lists instead of bibliographies, and a whole bunch of other mistakes.

So after each assignment I would stand up in front of my tutorial and show where and how you footnote. I would ask them if they understood, and they would all shake their heads in agreement. STILL THERE WAS LITTLE IMPROVEMENT!

Though this picture book is designed for a younger audience, it’s really for all those TAs out there, smacking their head in frustration in their first year students' inability to follow a format. Sure, I know it can be hard if you are using a source that is unusual. But they all used internet or monographs, not some random artefact.

As the semester is almost over, I have a pending dread of marking their final exams.

Here is a link that will take you to the picture book I made. If this becomes supper popular on the web, I have a whole bunch of other villains for Ninja Historian to fight. He can become the Dora the Explorer of the history world.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2TH6TCNbUaidnpOYU9RNnF3b3M/edit

Making it into Book Form:

My picture book is supposed to be a fun (and interactive way if used on an I-pad) of informing people about the need to footnote.

I really enjoyed using the pen tablet, it was supper fun! The most frustrating thing for me was the constant changing of document format, and fitting everything into the same size picture. The reason I found the need to change the format annoying was because the final image had to be a pdf. And since I always make typos it was very time consuming to go back once I thought I was done and reformat an image back to Photoshop, then add a new layer, then rewrite, then condense it back into one layer, then save as pdf, then recreate the large pdf again. And of course, once I think I am done again, I catch another error and have to do the process over again. Thus I think pdfs need to be editable, WORK ON THAT COMPUTER PEOPLE!

The process I took to make all the images and words the same size, so it looks like an open picture book:

1. Make a new document in Photoshop that is 8 × 11 inches.
2. Open a completed picture and flatten the layers, then change name of file.
3. Copy image, and paste onto new document. When I pasted the image it was like 200 times too large since I drew the pictures on a large document since it was easier to do with the pen tablet.
4. Then go to edit , then transform, then scale. Next click on the chain.
5. Next you begin to shrink the size of the image. You can’t just go straight to the roughly 20% size that fits half the page because the image disappears. You have to shrink about 20% at a time so that you can drag the image back into the center of the screen, so you can always find it.
6. Once the image is about half the page you move it to one side of the page.
7. Next you add a layer and click on the text icon.
8. Then you make a text box, and type in the words.
9. Then you flatten the layers, and save the image with a new name.
10. Once all your images are done you go into acrobat pro and create a multi-page file.

Picture and words now one image.