Last week, there was a little bit of a scramble. There was nothing up on the story map, the introduction and conclusion had hardly been written, and there were no sources. And the deadline was coming up very soon: we had less than a week to pull it all together and present a good project.
Luckily, this ended up being due to us not putting up the information, rather than a lack of information itself. We all had the content and the sources for the storymap, but it hadn’t made its way there yet. All we had to do that night was upload the sources, and write what we already knew into the introduction in conclusion. So what had been a nearly empty project on Thursday looked nearer to a finished product on Friday.  And over the weekend, everything has been improved even more.
I think the story map came together very well. Teiji and my topic overlap quite a bit: a lot of concepts I introduce she later expands on, so two perspectives are given on a similar event. While Nathan’s topic doesn’t fit as neatly, it definitely is still relevant, and that idea can be easily expressed through our introduction. All in all, the project I’ve been stressing over all semester is finally coming together in a cohesive way, with interesting and interlocking perspectives.
One struggle I faced while putting together my section of the story map was finding the location of one of the sources. It was cited as being taken in the city of Kyria, which I could not find when I typed the name into Google. We met with Eric later that day, and he hadn’t heard of the city either. However, when I asked if I should just put the location of the picture as a more general area, Eric encouraged me to keep searching for the true location. I’m grateful he gave me that advice. I finally found the real city. When I found the original source, it spelled the city as Keriya rather than Kyria. With the new spelling, I was able to put my source to a concrete location. It was incredibly rewarding to finally find this location. While the current ability to Google everything and find an answer right away is incredibly useful, there’s something exhilarating about solving a small mystery and having to dig a little deeper. Here is the picture taken in the city of Keriya:

The semester is beginning to wind down (how do we only have one month left?), the deadline for the website is approaching, and shockingly, I feel ready for it.
I have worried this whole semester over the amount of information I have, and whether my team is creating a cohesive project. But now, with our points decided upon and the beginnings of an introduction written, I feel a lot more confident.
The information I had didn’t feel like enough until I began to actually pin down physical sites and started to notice a pattern in what I was researching. Making concrete deadlines within the group for choosing sites and beginning to input information onto the storymap also really helped: before, it had been easy to sort of push work back and fall behind. Basically, moving from the research stage to the actual creation of the project led to a lot more confidence!
The conversation the Sky group had with Eric a few class periods ago also made things clearer. I had been worrying about cohesiveness as a whole, however, he suggested on “exploring phenomenons” instead. This put the project into a new perspective for me. Before, I thought that we would have to all be making the same point, just through the different lenses of beauty standards, queer identities, and fashion. But, now I realized that we could each explore slightly different ideas under the umbrella of “Body aesthetics within Uighur communities.”
My subsection of this topic is fashion, and I’m focusing on how fashion is used among Uighur women as a form of self-expression. One way of doing this is through the braiding of the hair I mentioned in my last blog post. But a more serious way this is being done is through silent protest against laws limiting outward expressions of Islam. There have been many bans against veils and other clothing items the Uighur wear to show their Muslim faith. Despite this, many Uighur women continue to wear these items not only to represent their religion, but to quietly rebel against these limitations. There have also been pressure from the government pushing for different ways to express faith without the use of veils.
It’s incredibly interesting to see the many ways fashion is being used. These strong strategies of self expression and protest provide a powerful contrast to the idea that fashion is a vapid and shallow interest.

 

My team met today for our weekly meeting, where we discuss where we are in our research. Today we focused on planning when to meet for the deadlines.
One of the main problems we seem to be facing as a group is still coherency of narrative and how the story map is going to be analyzed. The plan to confront these problems is to have all our information up on the google doc by next Tuesday, along with a paragraph describing the narrative we see within our own individual topics, and some ideas for the points we find important to put on the maps. Then, we will all meet in person the next day to discuss the narrative.
I have some hope that the narrative will come together organically and naturally. Our topics of beauty standards, gender expression, and fashion are all interlinked, so a similar narrative for all three may emerge. I know we are already noticing many continuities within our topics, and I think that these similarities can be shaped into a greater, overarching narrative. We also have to figure out how the geography intersects, and how to arrange the points on the map in a cohesive manner. Maybe similarities will arise once we see the research from everyone’s individual topic. Then comes the issue of in what order to arrange the points on the map. Maybe we’ll be lucky and a clear pattern will emerge!
I have been facing some small issues concerning my own individual project. I have yet to find any Uygher fashion designers, or find any evidence about whether traditional clothing is the norm for day to day life. The artifact I have included shows a wedding celebration, and I’m wondering if they normally wear clothes like the ones pictured outside of special occasions. Other pictures I have seen of Uyghers at market places or other everyday areas seem to show a similar style of clothing. I also have to find some more scholarly sources: most sources I have found just through Google searches, and are often just descriptions of the clothing normally worn, or focus more on the ways the current social situation affects attire.
Despite all of this, I have still learned a lot of interesting information! It’s very interesting to me the way fashion can be used to tell information about a person: for example, unmarried Uygher girls often wear their hair in many braids, while girls who are married only wear two braids.  Another interest I have is seeing how their fashion relates to their Muslim faith.
So, even though we have faced some issues with this project, and still have some problems to resolve, I am still confident we will be able to create an interesting and cohesive final project!

At last, it seems like our project is coming together. Our topics are solidifying: our main task now is to narrow down some locations and discuss how we will frame some potentially controversial topics. The language barrier is also a big issue: a lot of potentially useful sources are written in Chinese or other languages.
I’m looking forward to doing some research over fall break. During the semester, I’ve often been worn out by other classes and assignments and don’t feel like delving into Silk Road research, but I think the free time over break is a good research opportunity. My team has decided that we should have the majority of the research done by the end of fall break as well.
I have a few paths of research I’m contemplating. Most of the fashion I’ve found has represented a traditional form of dress, and I’m wondering what kinds of other clothing are worn by the Uygher women, and whether traditional clothing is only used for special occasions, or is the norm for some women. I’m also hoping to find some Uygher fashion designers. I’m interested to know whether these designers are normally men or women, and if they typically design more traditional or other types of clothing. I’m also looking into some research about how Uygher women’s Muslim beliefs play into how they dress.

In our tech lab yesterday, we finally covered the topic of the story map, which was the last general piece of information we are going to learn about. From now on, the tech labs will be focused on group work on the actual project, and the questions addressed will be more specific and geared towards particular worries, rather than on how to do general web stuff, like making a blog post or citing images.
In past blog posts, I have talked a lot about my worries about the story map, and I think this tech lab really helped with these fears. The maps were extremely easy to use, even for someone like me who is not the best at geography.  I also had a lot of fun making the map! I mapped out my birthplace, my current home, and some places I had visited this summer. I messed around with a lot of the features to produce a map that was funny to me, such as writing inane descriptions and using ridiculous lines for the “Explore” button. While I will definitely be more serious for the actual project, I still think this helped me because I played around with each of the features, so I will better know how to manipulate the Silk Road story map. Since much of the map was open to editing, we can personalize our story map beyond what I had imagined. Images were painless to add, and the map moved nicely and was greatly accessible to any viewer, whether they had any knowledge on the Silk Road or not.This is especially helpful for our topic, considering it focuses on an ethnic minority that many people may not know about.
Despite the many upsides, there are still some difficulties to deal with. When looking at the maps in our area of interest, we noticed a lot of the street names were in Chinese, which, unfortunately, none of us can read. Hopefully, either Zhihong or Google Translate will come to our rescue. Another problem isn’t a technical difficulty, but rather an issue with narrative. We still haven’t really been able to connect our research to an array of places. I’m hoping with more research we will find a good solution for how to arrange our map.
I’ve noticed that I mention a need for more research in almost every single blog post so far. I personally haven’t been able to do much: I never feel I have enough time for every thing, with other classes, college applications, and life outside of school. I don’t necessarily think this means too much work is being put on us in class: instead, I think I, personally, need to manage my time better. My group has agreed that a majority of our research should be done by fall break, so I really need to put aside the time then. Luckily for us, since our project is on the aesthetics of the Uygher people, a lot of our research will double as an artifact on the story map. For example, if I analyze a style of clothing, and where and why this clothing was worn, the picture I’m using to analyze all this could also be used as the artifact. I think the same would apply to the rest of my group. As we discover the areas where these styles and other types of artifacts are either present or where they originated, these would hopefully line up with points on a map!

On Wednesday, we had our first meeting with Eric and Zhihong, and luckily, it cleared things up a lot. Even though I ended up changing my topic, I’m happy with it and our project now seems a lot more coherent and connected. I was also reassured by the fact that we are able to focus our research on modern times, though we must still use research to contextualize.
 
My topic changed because, the more we talked, the more clear it became that it no longer fit. I think this is mainly due to one of our members dropping the class. When she was part of the project, my topic of healthcare meshed well with her topic of education. But after she left and our topic continued to evolve, my topic didn’t make sense with the other subtopics. So, due to our focus on aesthetics, using sources like pictures and music videos, to prove our point, I have shifted my focus to the fashion of Uyghur women. I’m really excited about this: I think it will be fun to look at trends and analyze what they represent.
So, the first meeting went well. My whole team agrees that we feel a lot more focused, and like our project has finally come together. Since all three of our topics are so related, I’m sure a narrative will emerge.

Today I used JSTOR to search for some articles about my topic, which is healthcare for Uyghur women. While the sources I was able to find are a good start, I’m still hoping for more information. I also used a regular google search for some less scholarly articles. One continuity I noticed was the tension and differences in lifestyle between the Han and the Uyghur community, and I wonder if this is a continuity for the rest of my group members’ topics.
JSTOR was overall easy to use and understand, but I kept running into the problem of my topics only corresponding to one of the keywords. It felt like there were a lot of articles about the Uyghur people and a lot of articles about women’s healthcare, but not as much overlap. More information may be found on another search engine, so I may try that to find more information. Another problem I faced was that many of the articles didn’t focus on healthcare for women; they instead covered general issues facing all genders. They were informative, but just felt like good entry-level articles about the topic: hopefully there will be more direct information about women’s health later on.
One other difficulty I had was finding historical information about women’s healthcare. I could find a lot of articles about issues from current years in the community, dealing with topics such as the discrimination the Uyghur people face due to their ethnicity, a lack of knowledge about illnesses like cervical cancer, and how Uyghur women were affected by China’s one-child policy. But I haven’t been able to find any information about women’s health in earlier times, which is a bit confusing to me. I would assume that health has always been an issue to be dealt with, and women have always needed unique care when it comes to issues such as childbirth. I’m hoping that not finding a lot of information about this topic is due more to not using the right keywords when searching or some other technical issue, rather than an actual lack of sources. However, if I am able to find out more about historical issues of women’s health, I think I could pull together an interesting narrative of historical versus current events, analyzing what has changed and what has stayed the same over the years. However, this narrative also depends on what my teammates find: if no one else is able to find a cohesive narrative between past and present, than I am open and flexible to different ways to develop my topic. Despite a lack of information about women’s health specifically, I was able to find a little bit of general information about the role and perception of women in the Uyghur culture, so I have shared these sources with my group members in the hopes that it may help them with their topics.
While I was a little disappointed with the information I have found so far, I’m hoping I will be able to find more sources by digging a little deeper. I probably have to stop relying on the Internet so much for information and check out some books from the library or something like that.

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.

One thing that definitely helped speed up the decision-making process were the interest sheets we filled out and the preliminary groups that Eric and Zhihong created. That way, since we all had similar interests, we could begin to narrow down a topic within those interests, rather than having to go through all the options the Silk Road can offer. All of us were interested in the rights of women and other marginalized people.We also had an interest in the effects of religion on women, along with the impact of women on spirituality, education, and health. We then tried to further narrow this topic down through discussion of specific areas or groups we were interested in, like nomads and pastoral societies or Afro-Eurasian sites. We also tried to find a certain time period, or ways of comparison, like historical versus contemporary, as points to use to focus our narrative. Eventually, we focused on a more recent period of time, the 18th and 20th centuries, in order to get the most information about the topics that we found most interesting. We also chose the Arabian Sea area, and chose to look at the effects Islam had on topics such as health, femininity, queer identities (if there are sources available), standards of beauty, and race. In order to get to a more narrow and specific topic, we used some of the strategies that had been discussed in class. In summary, to get to our topic we found common or related personal interests and then narrowed the topic to focus on those things.
My role in this group is as the facilitator as well as the harmonizer. I am comfortable not only with being a leader, but also with communicating with others, which will be necessary for setting up meeting times. I also think I am suited for being a harmonizer because I am often calm and nonbiased, and so I can help others through any problems.
The subtopic I will be focusing on for this project is health, which I am pretty excited about. I have almost never done a project on physical health (I am normally more focused on a mental health perspective), so I am looking forward to learning more about a topic I’ve barely even thought about before. It’s not one I would have necessarily chosen for myself, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more it seems to fit. I like learning about different ways of looking at and solving problems, and am also wondering what similarities I’ll find. Since it is a topic I know next to nothing about, I’m wondering if it will open up new areas of interests I had never thought about before. So even though it is not the topic I would have pictured myself doing, I am not disappointed.
I think my biggest anxieties are about the making of an online map and the amount of work ahead of us.I have very little experience with technology, so I am worried that the map will present many challenges and technical difficulties. I am also worried about the amount of information we are going to be collecting: since we are tackling a few different topics, it may be difficult to synthesize into a cohesive narrative. I do have hope that our topic will come together though: a lot of the subtopics can be related to each other. Teiji’s topic of race and beauty standards relates well to Nathan’s possible topic of femininity, since all those topics emphasize physical perspectives on women. My topic of health and Jamie’s topic of education also go well together, since the standard of education could be correlated with the quality of health care women receive. Perception of women can also play into all of our topics, since negative perceptions of women could lead to inferior education and less care when it comes to women’s health. But even though our subtopics have all of this similarities and connections, an overabundance or a lack of information would still disrupt cohesiveness. So, another thing I am slightly worried about is being able to find enough information about certain topics, such as queer identities.
So far, I feel our team dynamic has been incredibly positive, and we haven’t had to deal with any issues in that regard, at least from my perspective. We have been very respectful and supportive of each other’s ideas, as well as trying our best to find solutions and make revisions in order to better support our interest. One good example of this was Teiji doing her best to help Nathan get a chance to research his preferred topic, by asking a lot of questions about possible ways it could be done. The group has also been flexible, having the ability to support the plan even if their original ideas didn’t make it. I, for example, originally wanted to study nomadic cultures. But as the plan solidified, more team members wanted to study the more Arabic areas of the Silk Road. I went with it, and I am now very excited for and interested in our current place of research, even though it wasn’t what I originally wanted.
One thing I am interested in trying to find for research is sources from within the area itself. A lot of times, with these areas along the Silk Road, we see a European perspective rather than the viewpoint of the inhabitants. I hope that these sources are not scarce and that we get a chance to fully experience these perspectives.
I think that I have done a lot of good work in class when it comes to brainstorming and coming up with ideas, and helping to narrow the topic. I also have gotten a lot of information from the assigned readings in the class. One thing I do need to start doing, however, is some outside research on my own time. Now that we have our overarching area and our subtopics decided, I need to start getting some information about my individual topic. Also, as facilitator, I need to find a time for our group to meet and work.