This week we officially began our websites through omeka.net and began uploading images, with all their accompanying metadata. The metadata thing takes some getting used to. It is pretty tedious. Though it became progressively less so, as many of the fields (Source, Publisher, Rights etc) are the same from one item to the next. And the fields which are different do force me to analyze the documents more closely, which is always a good thing. This week I uploaded a few images regarding Marvin’s marriage and farm. I wish I had more time available this weekend to dive into it a little more (my personal/family life has been a little chaotic this week but I hope to devote more time to this project next week.) I am looking forward to taking some time to sort through all of my info and decide which specific documents are most interesting/important in the story I am hoping to tell. I also need to dig into the secondary sources I’ve collected on Zotero and decide which are most relevant/interesting to include.
I appreciated Dr. Robertson’s outline of the final project which he emailed out this week. I need to finish mapping Marvin’s unit’s movements during the war. I think I have a pretty good picture of Marvin’s life before and after the war and obviously Gettysburg was an important part of his story, but all the other movements of the unit, I’m still working on. It is a little amusing, while filling in the movements, to notice that all the places they traveled and fought were, well, right here. I’m sure that seems obvious and is probably old news to most of the class who grew up here, but having grown up in the American West, I’m still oddly excited to be in the actual places where history happened. I mean, obviously history happened where I grew up too, but even by American standards, Utah History is pretty sparse.
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