Our group had a meeting at the Hub this evening, and it was very productive. The members of Team Earth were on track, creating a new deadline for all of our projects before the actual one. In the meeting we jotted down new ideas such as what to add into the earth group page. One of which included music from the silk road such as Mongolian Throat Music, playing automatically as the reader is scrolling through our page. This was very stressful and actually getting the codes to work for the automatic audio loop took around 30+ minutes. However, once executed properly, it was beautiful. We planned on creating a file that was invisible, hidden within the code, and would play as soon as the reader clicked on the earth page, playing, for example, Mongolian throat music and going on an audio loop (which you are listening to right now, and if you aren’t, turn that volume up!). Hopefully the reader does not become annoyed, but we doubt they would be on the page for numerous hours as well as not have a volume control button on their laptop/computer. However, there will be talks concerning how we will dead with audio playback, seeing if it really is necessary to prevent readers from turning it off on the youtube clip/soundcloud clip itself.

Further into the meeting one of the members, Austin, is bringing in a book concerning the travels of marco polo, called “marco polo: from venice to xanadu”. The great part about this novel is that it also includes a sort of commentary from a well-known author, Laurence Belgreen, whom in which will be explaining the travels more thoroughly. This would very much help Austin in his part on Marco Polo’s travels.
Also, Sam added valuable input such as a possible voice-over of the readings that would be on the earth page. And pertaining to what I mentioned earlier, concerning the automatic audio-loop, an automatic play of Sam’s voice narrating the story is also highly possible. On another note, his work is in track and has started to create a story map that will be based on his email so that they can contribute their works in that single file, due to sharing not being possible for story map.
Lastly, but important as well, Jake. He too is on track with the project. With his side project concerning the secret history of Mongolians, Jake has contributed a lot of great thoughts into the hub meeting and were all excited to see what the page will turn out to be in the end of our custom deadline (which is around november 9th).