Assignment #5 continued - my experience

Completing this assignment was not as difficult as I thought it would be, though it was not without its challenges. Even though I had never used it before last class, I went to google images to find all my pictures. This is an invaluable website for this type of assignment, and within mere seconds I had the bulk of pictures for my assignment. Writing the captions was also relatively easy since I have studied D-Day for a long time and know a lot about it. Also, most of the pictures came from websites that had information that accompanied the picture, making my job even easier. Putting the pictures on my blog was a little bit more problematic than I would have expected. Forgetting the advice from the class syllabus, I cleverly posted the pictures in the wrong order and had to delete my post and start over.

What I thought was most difficult was trying to tell the story through pictures only. When you are using words, you can say exactly what you want to say. When you are using pictures you find from the internet, you are trying to tell the story using other people’s pieces of a puzzle, which makes it a little trickier. For example, I was looking for a picture of a battlefield celebration after the Battle of Normandy was over, but could not find one. Had I been writing this with words, however, I simply could have described the celebration. This made the assignment a little awkward.

It is important to do this kind of assignment from time to time. It reminds historians that visuals are important, something many of them have forgotten. As the cliché goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and by using these pictures and visuals, historians have another great tool to recreate history for students, readers, and other interested historians.