Project Update

At this point, we are a little over the halfway point for our summer. My project work so far has been similar to the work I did last summer; I’ve identified five more events to add to my timeline, charted the story of each event using stories in The Gettysburgian, and added the summaries to my scalar site. My hope for this summer is that, because I’ve completed most of the work I’ve done last summer, I will be able to explore more ways to use scalar to my advantage, especially through the annotation tool, and can provide more context for each of my events.

When I returned to my research at the beginning of the summer, I felt very frustrated by both my research itself and its presentation. Last summer, I did not know what my research would entail. Consequently, I was energized whenever I found something relevant to my project. However, as I’ve continued, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the lack of information surrounding each event, especially because I want my website to interest users enough for them to become involved in activism themselves. As I discovered last summer, most instances of student-led social justice movements were led by small groups of people and were only briefly sustained. As such, people did not devote a lot of energy to documentation. Particularly frustrating is the lack of media available for each event. As much as I try to provide a comprehensive history of the social movement in question, many events on my website feel incomplete.

However, I think that hope is far from lost. What We Did Here, Musselman Library’s digital collection for activism on campus, has been receiving submissions since the fall. Seeing as it is more effective than my own attempt at crowd-sourcing, I hope to incorporate it into my website.  I also used a slightly different research method this summer than I did last year. Rather than starting with college histories and issues of The Gettysburgian, I started in special collections and framed my events around materials we have in vertical files. This way, I was guaranteed that there would be supplemental media my users could interact with. On the whole, I’m hoping that the five new events I add to my timeline will be more interactive and comprehensive, and that they will help to emphasize the importance of campus activism and the need for other students to become involved.