June 30th-July 3rd (Week 6)

Sunset on July 4th in Boston

Challenges:

• One of the challenges I had the most this week was my inability to focus. With the coming of the holiday weekend, I was going on a trip to Boston to visit my partner, and I was unable to stay set on the task at hand. This made me not very productive for the week in a time when I would have benefited from hunkering down and being productive.

• In addition, one of my challenges for the week was the session with the A. I chat bot on Tuesday. Although there were clear instructions printed out, I was still unable to complete the project without a lot of help from my seat partners, which was then a cause for distraction for them.

• Finally, my greatest challenge of the week, which is also an ongoing challenge, is that I am struggling to synthesize my information from my research into a way that is easily explainable. I have been spending a lot of time writing down my conclusions and discussion points, but I have largely been doing so in an informal sense, so looking forward, I will be working on formalizing those points.

Successes

• One of my major successes for this week was that I was finally able to add all my letters from Excel into GIS, which allowed me to begin the analysis phase of my research. The letters being visual on the map means that now I can look for the correlations in trends and examine if there is causation as well, which my research.

• This week also brought success in the form of reading more sources and beginning to write my literature review. Although this might seem late in the process, unfortunately, this is the way my brain works and thrives by working with the historiography portion of my paper alongside the analysis.

• Finally, my greatest success of the week is that I had a very successful interview with the Smithsonian Museum of American History for an internship for the fall. Although I do not yet know if I have gotten the job, either way, I am very happy with the way the conversation went and how I was allowed to show my skills that I have obtained through this research position.

Knowledge

• During our GIS session on Wednesday, we learned how to actually upload our maps from QGIS onto our website in order to best display our work. This remains an essential lesson for the nature of this project and how we want to be able to share our research with larger communities.

• Secondly, I felt the session with the graduate students was interesting and a little stress relieving. Often time when we discuss graduate school, it comes across as either hell on earth or an amazing experience. The conversation with the graduate students made it clearer that it is simple both things and that that is not a reason not to apply if that is our desire.

• Finally, this past week, we continued our learning about digital preservation and how there are a multitude of factors that must be considered when preserving and storing things. As we continue to work through these lectures, I am learning more and more about how vast the world of online archival keeping is. It is not simply scanning and saving a file, but countless decisions and factors go into the practice.

Next steps:

• My next big step is crafting my presentation to be best prepared for the practice presentation on Friday. It’s crazy to think about how soon this experience will be ending and how we need to complete our research quickly. That being said, I will be spending a lot of time in the library in the coming week and will come out with some beautiful research.