Month: April 2017

This past week was Spring Break for us Montevallans (Montevallites?), so there is not much to report from Mary Haynes and me. Although, apparently I need to make more use of my calendar alerts because the break mind-set had me 15 minutes late to class this past Tuesday; I was so scrambled that I had to log in on my phone and participate in class while mooching off a Starbucks’ wifi. Let’s just say I do not think I will make the same mistake again.

That being said, it was not entirely unproductive because we did get our IRB Report submitted. The IRB was not extensive, but it was annoyingly detailed. Of course I understand why it must be that way for high-risk projects, but for simple interviews a lot of it seemed redundant. Because of my Communication Studies major I was bound to run into the IRB reports eventually, so I am glad I got to get familiar with them now. We are still waiting to hear back about it, so updates to come on that.

Now that we are back on campus, it’s time to hit the ground running with this project–and school in general. I feel like I need to make a very intense to-do list for this next month, but I’d be afraid as to what it would look like. As far as this class specifically, it seems like a lot still has to happen but I think most of it is just getting it down on the website. Interviews aside, we have almost all of the information we need for the project, it’s just a matter of writing it out. Mary Haynes and I planning on meeting after class tomorrow to discuss a divvying up of the work, so hopefully that will help–to use a season-appropriate saying–get all of our eggs in the basket.

This portrait of Pickles sums up my current feelings. However, since I’m not a little, adorable pug, I must continue to get work done. Fortunately for Bailey and I, nothing was scheduled to be due this past weekend. This had afforded Bailey and I time to both work on our senior seminars. She gives her presentation this Wednesday, and mine is the following Wednesday. My topic of choice this semester is on the development of a potential vaccine to aid in battling cocaine addiction. While my subject is interesting, writing my paper and preparing my presentation has been physically painful.

Soon work will resume on our COPLAC project, I promise.

Last week was a short week for me.

I only had Monday and Tuesday to fit in work for not only my on-campus classes and internship, but also to get something done for the project site, as I was out of state for a academic convention from Wednesday to Saturday. However, I’d like to think that I got a fair amount accomplished in those two short days, having been extra motivated by the time crunch; I mean, I am a college student, after all. In two days, I achieved two distinct goals that, while not present on my project site, are very important to lay my foundation going forward with the rest of the project: I (finally) touched base with the Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Participants (IRB) at my college, and I obtained pictures of the three books that I’ll be working with.

While I have yet to make contact with this woman, it’s my hope to get a brief and casual interview with Dr. Poste’s surviving daughter, and ask her to tell me a bit about her father. I’d like to take an audio recording of this interview and post it to the website to add to its interactivity dynamic. Fortunately, my college’s IRB responded to my inquiry about what I need to do to be approved for this potential interview, and gave me the best news I could get from them: I don’t need their approval at all. The scope of my project, according to the IRB, poses the least amount of risk to the participant, and so all I need would be for her to fill out a permission form releasing me the right to post the interview. I’m really relieved about this, considering I’m not sure she will even agree to speak with me at this point, and won’t have to jump through unnecessary hoops if she does.

As for the pictures I was able to take of the three Poste donations, all I have to say is that I’m ecstatic about them! All three books photographed really well, and I got about 80+ pictures total that I would love to utilize on my site. When taking them, I was very excited about the possibility of some Renaissance scholar stumbling across my project site one day and finding them beautiful and useful.

At this point, the biggest concern that I have is how I am going to apply the required two tools that we learned in class to the project site. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to use Timeline JS, but now I’m worried that I won’t have enough information about my books, or even Poste, to develop a worthwhile presentation. Aside from that, I really wanted to use Google Maps or Fusion Tables to highlight things like where the books were published, or where Poste was stationed in Europe during his time as a Monuments Man. I’d love to somehow find out which libraries he had a considerable hand in restoring and display those with a map, but don’t quite know how to begin searching for that. Perhaps there are even other class tools that I could use instead of these ones, but I can’t think of which ones. Not having a partner makes these things a little bit more difficult to sort out!

After creating a rough schedule to keep the project on track, Savannah and I have been working with the different digital tools we want to use on the project site. She’s been working with Juxtapose JS, and I’ve been tackling Timeline JS. Over the past week, I’ve been attempting to figure exactly what information I want to put in the timeline. I also spent more time than I thought I would getting images from the yearbooks to use both on the project site and in the timeline, although that could just be because I kept getting distracted by the content of the books and forgetting that I was on a mission. Basically, the timeline will place The Cohongoroota in a larger historical context, but this is also where we’ll explain the gaps in publication and set the stage to look at the yearbooks in more detail.

I also spent some time messing around with our project site in what was probably a futile attempt to avoid problems later on, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t spending all of my time looking at the information we have and forgetting about the project site.

Both Savannah and I graduate this semester, so life is a little stressful at the moment, but we’re moving forward and I’m looking forward to when we can share the more visually interesting parts of our project. We have a plan. We can do this.

This past week Meaghan and I have been doing separate aspects of the project. After adding our own “About the Author” information to our site, we have done more work with the individual programs. I have been working on the Juxtapose JS by KnightLab software. So far it has been a little tricky getting everything to line up. My plan is to compare the previous photos of our campus buildings to the current buildings. So far I am still searching for viable social interaction clubs or organization photos to utilize as well. This is a challenge however because a lot of the organizations have changed over the years and some are nonexistent today.  I have however, imbedded a Juxtapose of McMurran Hall to portray the changes over the years.

In the first week Meaghan and I have managed to nail down the specifics that we want to learn from our project. First, we want to know more about previous student experiences at Shepherd University. We will learn this through reading the yearbook collection housed in our library. Second, we will use the yearbooks to make comparisons about the past in relation to current student life. We have also begun to organize our site pages. We intend to use Juxtapose JS by KnightLab as well as Timeline JS by KnightLab as well. Using the two we will learn more about changes over time. We will also make comparisons using Juxtapose. Finally, we have established a schedule of events that we will follow to stay on track. I am excited to see what results we find. Stay tuned for more updates and sneak peeks.