Project Charter

Project Title: Where do we fit in? Gettysburg College in the modern and postmodern.

 

Project Owner: Augusta Pendergast

 

Project Summary

This project is about looking at Gettysburg College student publications over the last century and attempting to understand how these works fit into the larger context of the modern and postmodern eras. It includes historical analysis as well as literary analysis while all the while coming from a philosophical perspective. It will also attempt to answer the question of where we stand now, whether we are still situated in the postmodern period or whether we have moved on to something new by looking at contemporary student works.

 

Research Questions:

• How do Gettysburg College students fit into the larger periods of cultural history known as the modern and postmodern periods?
• What trends are there in current student work and how do these relate to the postmodern period?

 

Scope: It will be an interactive website with explanations of terms as well as contextualizing those terms in the broader American history by using a timeline. It will have also analysis and annotations of student works from publications like the Mercury and the Gettysburgian as well as shorter run, student created platforms. Lastly, it will have a list of the philosophers that are significant to the modern and postmodern periods and their main ideas that relate to this topic.

 

Deliverables

• Books about the postmodern period that also discuss the modern period
• Book with philosophers and their specific ideas
• Books about the history of the college to situate some of the student works
• Student writings from the Mercury and Gettysburgian
• Student publications not necessarily created by the college itself
• Student made pamphlets
• WordPress website builder to create the cite
• Timeline JS to make the timeline of all the philosophers, student publications, and the significant historical events related to the periods.
• Storymaps JS to annotate images and potential student texts
• Soundcite to add audio

 

 

Timeline

Week 2: Project charter due Friday morning

• First Draft of Philosopher Bios – beginning of week
• First Draft of term definitions – middle of week
• Look at Gettysburg history – end of week
• Spend time in Special Collections figuring out student works – end of week

 

Week 3: wireframe due on Friday

• Read student works and analyze – all week
• Create timeline on paper of the events, student works, and philosophers
  • If you have time begin to make it on Timeline JS

 

Week 4:

• Wrap up research
• Make sure everything is organized well in order to put it online
• Begin playing with website seriously to understand how everything works easier to make week 5 easier.

 

Week 5: Visualization Due Friday

• Begin to take written notes and content and put it in online format – all week
• Write an about the project page – end of week

 

Week 6: Project Draft due Friday

• Continue to create website. Focus on visuals and embedding all the proper elements
• Finish writing any pages such as the where are we now page if that’s not done
• Get all bibliographical information in order

 

Week 7: Final Project due Friday

• Work throughout the week to fix anything that needs fixing
• Finalize everything, make sure everything works well
• Test the website out on multiple users

 

Week 8: Presentation week!

• Practice the presentation
• Write out notes of what you will say
• Practice in front of people and get them to ask tough questions
• Make sure everything is lovely

 

End of Life/Future Plans

I would like this project to be largely complete by the end of eight weeks but I would like to be able to have the option to go in and keep adding if that’s something that I feel it needs. Because there are so many student works, it would be easy to just keep going and going and analyzing each one. If possible, it would be interesting to find a way for other students to add to this cite if they are interested themselves in reading and analyzing the student works because I known I won’t be able to do it all on my own. It can live on the Gettysburg website and I will send the link out to professors and teachers who I know