The Project:
A variety of tools were used in the making of this project including:
Timeglider: This tool was used in the creation of the time-line with the history of the 1960s and 1970s. It is simple to use and can help historians and other scholars visualize their subjects both spatially and chronologically.
Voyant Tools: This tool allowed me to delve into the text of The Only Alternative in order to analyze more deeply the trends and word uses. Voyant created the word-clouds, keywords-in-context, and word trend graphs used in this project and allowed me to compare examine how the The Only Alternative compares with other underground newspapers and what the historical scholarship has argued.
Google Maps Engine Lite: This tool was used to map the events advertised in The Only Alternative as well as key places in the newspaper's history.
Create-A-Graph: The National Center for Education Statistics Create-A-Graph tool allows users to create graphs without using a table. This allowed me to input data more easily to ensure that the graph was displaying the data correctly.
Free CSS: This site provided the free CSS template which was modified to create this site. As I have limited experience in website design, this template was helpful in allowing me to spend more time on research and analysis and less time designing the site.
Adobe Creative Suite: Several adobe programs were used in the creation of this site, including Dreamweaver, Acrobat, and Photoshop.
Visual LiteBox: This tool was used to create the various image galleries which were used in the project.
Google N-Gram Viewer: This tool searches for words in the Google Books corpus. It allows the user to track uses of certain words and examine any trends that may appear.
This project was completed as part of a creative project for the M.A. in History at Ball State University. It began as a project for Dr. Doug Seefeldt’s Intro to Digital History in the spring of 2013. This project builds on the digital archive which was created for that class and hosted on the Ball State Digital Media Repository here “We Have an Opinion.”
In addition to this website, the entire run of The Only Alternative was digitized in order to facilitate this project. The scans were run through Optical Character Recognition software in order to make them text readable. After digitizing the issues, I created a metadata spreadsheet with article level data in order to build a digital collection which will be available in the Archive at Ball State University where the collection is currently housed.
The goal of this project is to add to the historiography of the Underground Press and to bring The Only Alternative to a larger audience decades after it was printed. This project also adds to the scholarship on Muncie and Ball State University during the 1960s and 1970s. While much of the writing about the University at that time suggests that the community was apathetic towards the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement, the existence of The Only Alternative and its broad reach across much of the eastern portion of Indiana suggests that there was a Countercultural Community. While they may have been a minority, as a true counterculture is, these students and faculty involved in the newspaper joined a larger trend across the nation. Thousands of youths worked to publish their ideas on important events as they developed. The fact that Muncie area students published one of these papers and were able to keep it going for three years shows that there was both an audience and a will to work hard on this paper.
If any of the contributors to The Only Alternative find this page, please contact me. I would love to hear from you. Thank you for creating such an important piece of history and leaving behind an excellent source for generations of students to come. I am thankful to be able to help preserve your work and hope that this project brings your words and spirit of challenging the status quo to those who read.
Thank you,
Ryan Frick