In searching through the Interactive Timeline, I was unable to come up with any connections to the materials that I brought in for today’s class. While there are a few items tagged for “Imperialism,” they focus primarily on discussing the topic in a strictly European focus, whereas I am more interested in the discourse of American imperialism and World War I, particularly in regards to Native Americans.
The only items available on the Interactive Timeline for the authors that I brought into class were the items that I entered. Rather than speaking to the output of these authors leading up to and during World War I, these results speak to a lack of coverage of their works and Poetry on the Timeline, as a cursory search on the MJP exemplifies that all three authors published in Poetry in the years leading up to and through World War I.
Using the Topic filter, I was able to come across “The Indian” from Owl (May 1919) and “Give Him Room” from Poetry (May 1915). Joseph Crawhall’s painting speaks to the depictions of Native Americans which speak to depictions of Native Americans around World War I as well as the broader theme of nativism in modernist aesthetics. By espousing an allowance for experimentation, Harriet Monroe’s piece serves as an inherent justification for her later discussion of the aesthetics of Native American oral poetry. In spite of the difficulties identifying meaningful relations to other pieces, using the topic filter seems to be the most productive means to seek out connections, especially if the topic is under represented on the Interactive Timeline.
In filtering to all content from Poetry on the Interactive Timeline, the contents of Poetry seem to be solely focused on World War I throughout the war years, not only in the poetry but also the content of the advertisements.
Because of the specificity of the discourse that I was interested in researching today, the Interactive Timeline did not seem to be particularly useful. The primary drawback seems to be that there needs to have been pre-existing interest in the discourse in order for it to be a tool beneficial to an individual’s research agenda. Without any work done by others, the timeline becomes cumbersome in having to troll through all possible avenues rather than being a means to efficiently whittle down results.