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!