Blog Post #2 - 06/06/25

What did I accomplish?

The most important accomplishment this week for me was finally being able to come up with my primary research question for my project. I've landed on my question being : "In what ways did enslaved people resist their conditions through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and how were these acts of rebellion perceived by Confederate authorities?". I might touch up on the actual question or add some additional questions or sub-questions as the project goes on.

My next accomplishment was managing to find a handful of letters that strongly contributed to my research question allowing me to finally get started on my work. I also got started putting together my intro since it's expected to be completed next week.

I also managed to put a bit more time on my website. It still isn't quite finished, and it's missing a fair amount of text, but I managed to add a bit more flair and touch up some aspects of it I wasn't completely happy with. I plan to have it fully completed other than the Project page by next week.

What were my roadblocks?

My biggest roadblock came in the form of landing on a topic. It took me a while to finally find a topic I was both interested in researching and had enough material available to write about. There was a lot of topics I was passionate about but ultimately had to scrap (despite the hours put into them) in favor of something that could have been discussed more by the Governors of Mississippi and those who sent them letters.

My next roadblock came in the form of losing the letters I had read. There were a number of letters I had read and found fitting for my research, however despite logging them on a notepad, I must have handled it incorrectly as none of the codes I had written lead me to the correct letters. Luckily I've been able to find most of the letters I had read, but it is an annoying process and has made me learn to be more careful in the future.

Finally, my last roadblock is more of a personal issue, and that's my sleep schedule. Ever since starting this internship my sleep has been kind of all over the place, but now it doesn't matter what time I end up going to sleep, I always just feel exhausted in the morning. It hasn't inhibited my ability to perform in the lectures or on my work, but for the last few days I've been extremely sluggish and have to put extra effort into staying awake and attentive.

What I learned?

I learned about how to write a proper research question for this project. It has been a while since I wrote a real research paper, so it was helpful to learn about several qualities that make up a research question, as well as learn about different mistakes in writing a question that lead it to being a weak question.

We spent a lot of time highlighting the importance of file naming conventions this week. I must confess as a CS major I think file naming kind of comes second nature to me, and is something I do on the daily without even really realizing I'm it for the purposes of organizing my work and projects. That being said however, I learned about a lot of different qualities of file names and how I could both improve my own for personal reasons and for this internship. I also learned about how institutions like libraries use file naming conventions and how that can be helpful in my research.

I also learned about using GIS (specifically QGIS) for the mapping section of the project. We luckily had a very informative lecture and I even made sure to practice what we had learned during independent worktime, but I also found and read some online tutorials to help give me a better grasp on the many tools and functions of the software.

What is my next action/step/thing you need to do for my research?

My next step is going to be to continue to comb through letters and documents on the CWRGM database in order to find more letters than pertain to my topic. As well, I plan on putting more effort towards my paper and to finish up my intro early into next week.

What else have I been up to?

I've been spending lots of time with my peers in the REU cohort. We've been going to all kinds of neat things in Hattiesburg, and I managed to convince a few of them to come to a local show with me which I think we all had a good time.

The Nintendo Switch 2 released this week and I got to attend my first ever midnight release. I hope the system doesn't distract me too much from my work but it is hard not to be excited.

I had discussed it with cohort but I think as I was going through letters I may have discovered a violin playing serial killer in Mississippi, as there are two letters describing a similar looking person (with a differing name) that had murdered two different people and escaped. Needless to say but everyone found that pretty interesting, and part of me wonders if I should try to do my research on serial killers instead, oh well.