Blog Post #3 - 6/14/25

What did I accomplish?

My first and biggest accomplishment this week is the completion of my intro for the research paper. It took quite a bit longer than I had initially hoped mainly due to my own bad work ethic, but I was able to get it completed and I'm satisfied with the finished result, but I'll still be updating it over time.

I updated my questions to better reflect my research. After going through the letters I had realized that the exact topic I wanted to work on wasn't possible going off of the letters, so I slightly modified my questions to better reflect the evidence. I might update them more in the future, but I think I had sufficient sources to not need to going forward.

I read through and compiled all of the letters concerning insurrections. Luckily there was already a tab on the CWRGM database, and Kayla was able to make me a spreadsheet from the tagged letters as well which helped out with keeping things organized.

What were my roadblocks?

My biggest roadblock this week was motivation to read. After going through half the letters it was really starting to drain my enthusiasm for the project, and I stopped working on it entirely for about a day after that.

Another roadblock concerned Audrey, another member of the cohort. We hadn't realized it but our topics ended up becoming fairly similar. We can't figure out who came up with what first, but ultimately after we both did research our topics became too similar, so we had a talk about it and decided to try our best to stay in separate lanes. I don't think it really matters if our topic is the same and I think we're different enough so it shouldn't matter, but it was a bump in the road that had to be addressed.

My new reoccurring roadblock is the commute to the library every morning. I started feeling sick from my allergies and the 15 minute commute in the boiling heat on top of that started to become too much for me. So I've been driving to the library and parking nearby to save both time and energy. I'm really not sure if I can park where I'm parking but that's the point I'm at right now.

What I learned?

My favorite thing I learned was about how to digitize materials for archival purposes. It was not only fairly fun setting up the scans and writing the metadata, but was also just fascinated by the process as a whole. I also learned about how the process for all the transcribed letters I've been reading actually operates and even (slightly) contributed to one of the letters.

On the topic of metadata, I learned lots about that this week. How to write it as well as different rules and practices for good metadata writing techniques. Learning about metadata as well I think is good knowledge to have, as knowing how archivists treat metadata could help me in my own research when it comes to tracking down material based off its metadata. I learned a lot more about GIS, and specifically learned about how I would be taking datasets from the spreadsheets concerning the letters, and turning those datasets in to tangible map data through the use of points and heatmaps.

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

The next step is going to be to work on the literary review. Truth be told I'm not completely certain how it needs to be made and what needs to be on it, but we have gone over Literary Reviews in previous weeks so I understand the overall idea.

Since I don't think the literary review will consume too much of my time, I'm going to spend some of next week finalizing all the details on my website, so all I'll have to do hopefully is update my "Final Project" page as progress comes along.

What else have I been up to?

Spent a lot of time running around with the REU cohort this week, as usual. Watched a few movies and spent a lot of time studying together. I've also been playing a lot on my new Switch 2, the new Mario Kart is super fun and I've brought it by the dorm media room for all of us to play a couple times. Started playing soccer a little bit with Jay and Jason which is a good change of pace despite the heat. And I'm now on the 5th season of the Sopranos.