On Monday, we finished the bulk of our storymap. There were a few small editing things that were taken care of Tuesday morning (or at least I think that’s what happened – I somehow missed the memo that we were all going to meet), but  Monday was when everything truly came together. Once we got past putting everything in the map and ordering the points, I was no longer stressed and everything felt like it would be fine.
Working on the project has definitely been an interesting experience, especially considering that I’m not a fan of group work. I was a bit apprehensive at the start of the semester because I didn’t know how well our group would work together, but that turned out to be a non-issue. We all got along really well and ended up having a lot of fun, and aside from some brief tensions stemming from the differences in how each person worked, everything went smoothly.
I think a big part of why this project was ultimately more fun than I initially expected is that it’s entirely digital. Projects with physical counterparts are always high-stress because everyone has to be present and working on things simultaneously, but doing everything digitally allows everyone some breathing room and the ability to work at their own pace. From a more personal perspective, I enjoyed it simply because I enjoy working with digital platforms – there’s so much you can do with multimedia and format, and it’s so much easier than working with physical materials because you have the freedom to play around and experiment with what you’re doing without any worry of screwing up to a degree that would require starting over.
In terms of stress and managing work, I don’t think this project has been anything out of the ordinary. For me, the biggest struggle were the blog posts; I realized when I started writing this entry that I had forgotten to post my earlier entries on the website and had them stored away in my computer, so I had to go and put those up before I could forget again. Aside from me being forgetful, it was also kind of hard for me to find things to write about. It felt really redundant trying to write about a lot of the things that came up with our project because I would spend time talking about them to teammates, and I ended up writing less than I should have because of this.
I’m excited to see the project go up now that it’s done. I’ve had a really great time researching the gay community within Uyghur society; it was fun to try and do research on something that had little information available, since I felt like I was actually contributing to academia. All in all, I think this was an incredibly worthwhile project, and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves moving forward.
via GIPHY
–Nathan, 11/16