Over this week, we’ve had a lot of changes and compromises with our topic. But now I think we have narrowed it down to a particular city: Urumqi, which is in the Xinjiang area. Since this city has a mixture of the Uyghur people and the Han, it seems to serve as a meeting place for different cultures and ideas and provide a lot of information about the effects of that. Both Nathan and Tiejii seem to have found information about their subtopics from within these regions, and I’ve found a little information as well. However, since my topic of healthcare is more universal, I don’t think I will have too much difficulty with finding good sources. One thing we still need to do is find a time period or figure out what type of narrative we want to pursue, such as a comparison between historical and contemporary ideas. I think as more research is done a decision about this can be reached. I also hope that the meeting with Eric and Zhihong next week will help to clarify things. Like others have been saying, I think one of the reasons it has been so difficult to find a topic and stick to it is due to the broadness and possibility of the Silk Road. Hopefully, we will be able to find lots of information about the topic we are currently exploring, and also have some fun with researching and learning new information!
 
All of the digital meetings have been incredibly helpful and have made me feel a lot less anxious about the project. I have never used search engines like JSTOR before to find academic papers, so it was nice learning how to use that and other databases, in order to find journals that may not show up with just a google search. Also, learning about metadata and the site to use made me feel a lot more confident about sourcing images. I have always been kind of paranoid about plagiarism and accidentally not sourcing something correctly, but after seeing how easy to use this site is I’m not as worried.
 
The digital aspect I’m most worried about is the story map. I’m looking forward to receiving instruction on how to make the map, because I feel it may relieve some of my fears over the technicalities. But on the narrative side of things, my group is still struggling a little on how to arrange the map. Hopefully as we do more research and narrow down a time period, a cohesive narrative will begin to emerge.