Well, the project is finished.  It feels really amazing to have built a webpage this semester.
This class was a bit difficult for me, not because of the quantity of work but because of the format.  I work well under pressure and with clear deadlines, so with only a final class deadline I found it difficult to sit down and chip away at my research.  I ended up doing most of the work in the last week.  In the end, I’m the only one that can enforce deadlines for myself, so it was a good learning experience.
I really didn’t keep up with the blog posts.  I think it would have been easy to write a couple hundred words once in a while but that gradual commentary on my own work doesn’t mesh well with my scattered brain.  Again, that’s something to work on in the future.
Travelers on the silk road.  I learned a lot through my research.  I was studying John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck.  My real plan was to look more into the perspectives and biases of these travelers.  I wanted to compare their views to each other and to the Mongols and analyze them.  I didn’t leave myself enough time to do that.
So I just compiled available information about travelers and tried my best to present it all with more concision and eloquence than the sources I got it from.
I’m content with our story map overall.  Everyone knows about Marco Polo and the Mongols but a lot of people don’t know the many interactions the West and the East had, or how close Europe was to being destroyed.  Hopefully our page will be a useful source for our fellow academics.

Alright, Team Earth has a new direction.  We are now researching European explorers, their accounts of significant sites on the silk roads, and their interactions with the Mongol Empire.  In a recent group meeting we discussed our research roles.  Jake’s focus will be on the Mongol Empire side of things, Austin is covering Marco Polo’s journey, possibly with more emphasis on the Western perspective.  I have everything in between.  Basically, I want to study the lesser known explorers such as Giovanni of Pian de Carpini, William of Rubruck, Friar Odoric, and Rabbi Benjamin.  My initial goal is to narrow down the similarities in their journeys.  For example, find a city that they all went to and compare their analyses of the culture.
I found a fantastic book called Contemporaries of Marco Polo.  It was published in 1928, and it was last checked out from the Guilford College Library in 1981. The book contains primary accounts of the four explorers I mentioned above, edited by Manuel Komroff, who also provides an informative introduction.
I also found a book called the Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation.  It is about Carpini’s accounts but also a map of the first depiction of the Americas, not sure yet how they’re related but hopefully I’ll learn about Carpini a bit.

Our initial research plan didn’t pan out, so we had to keep panning for research topic gold.  There just wasn’t enough information on agriculture and plants in oasis cities.  We’ve spent the last week discussing ideas and scratching our heads a bit, anxious to begin researching.
This morning I wasn’t able to attend my group’s meeting with Zhihong and Eric because I was at the protests in Charlotte until late last night.  We had all been leaning towards this idea, but Jake and Austin finalized the topic of travelers- particularly their interactions with the Mongols- at the meeting.  I’m quite interested in nomadic culture and also the remarkable exploration of brave travelers along the Silk Road, what their observations and interpretations looked like, etc.  I’ve been told that we have some awesome primary sources to look into, and some of the readings for class so far have been very helpful.  I’m excited to get started with this research.

I was initially placed in the Heart group, which was a sound placement considering that my main passion is music and art in general.  I would have enjoyed studying musical instruments on the silk roads, but decided otherwise.  The study of plants and their relationships with human society (mainly agriculture and religion) fascinates me deeply.  I think that plants are beautiful and incredibly complex.  Plants are, on the surface, quite alien to us, yet they’ve become chemically intertwined with human physiology.  In order to pursue this interest in an academic setting for the first time, I switched to Team Earth.  We initially brainstormed ideas of agriculture, irrigation, oasis cities, and the cultural significance of different herbs and crops.  After some deliberation, we focused in on the Taklamakan Desert.  Oasis cities were a key aspect of the trade routes that ran along the northern and southern borders of the desert; they allowed merchants to only traverse the desert in the small increments between towns.  Those cities had to develop technology to control their environment in order to grow food and maintain the agrarian lifestyle.  Of course, only certain crops were able to grow in the harsh environment that accompanies even the fringes of a desert.  We plan on researching the diffusion of technological innovations such as irrigation systems and growing methods, the specific crops that were used, and perhaps the spread of different seeds or plants along the silk roads.
Our group has not yet decided on a specific place or time yet.  We have the region and subject down, but there are so many options within each.  Eric mentioned Samarkand, and Kashgar is a possibility as well.  I suppose the time period will be limited by the amount of information we can find.  Ideally, we would research different developments over a longer time period, but it may be too difficult.  I think that narrowing our focus will be really hard, and will require a good deal of broad, preliminary research.
My individual focus will be on the specific plants used by humans in oasis cities.  Whether a plant’s native, where it came from, its nutritional components, it’s prevalence in agriculture, etc.  Beyond that, we don’t quite have assigned technical roles, it’s difficult to decide that this early in the project.  I like to write, I like to research when I enjoy the subject.  I’m pretty good with technology.
That ties into my main anxiety in this project, which really just boils down to time passing us by.  It’s easy for me to say now that we can start narrowing things down once we really start researching, but weeks can fly by so easily.  The only answer to that fear is to be proactive.  I’m working on it.  Within discerning our subject of research, my fear is a lack of information about agriculture and of historical documentation in this region.  Solving my first problem will solve this one, because once I dive into the sources I found I will know where the information is.  I have high expectations for this compilation of knowledge that we are about to create, I’m excited to see where it takes us.  It is also exciting that on the trip to China we will travel along the Taklamakan desert and I will finally see what was once only a distant reality during months of research.  The sheer amount of information that I will have to dig through this semester overwhelms me, and currently I’m not sure where to start, but I can’t wait to learn it all.
I’d say my work to date is mediocre.  I’ve done enough to get by so far, but I haven’t yet thrown myself into the work.  I hope that I can deeply dedicate myself to this project whilst battling through my other classes.  I found a lot of sources for our project proposal, but I haven’t had time to delve into them yet.  I think our group will work well together, we all seem to be on the same page and we have all contributed what we’ve needed to.