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.
Category Archives: Team Earth
All of the blog posts for the Team Earth research project.
Ashes to ashes, worms to silk
This has been an exceptionally rough day for working on the research project. Study abroad meetings are draining my energy and I had to devote way to much time today to finishing up my Chinese visa. Additionally on top of that stress it’s been really difficult to make sure I’m still able to do the preflights and readings while putting as much time as I can into this research project. It’s been nice to know I’m not alone and I have heard that a lot of other students have been struggling to accomplish preflight assignments so close to the final due date.
However despite the difficulties of planning for China and maintaining class work while still putting in time on this difficult project, things are going well. Team Earth is scheduled for yet another meeting tonight, and ideally tonight is the night we finish everything. Shortly I will begin typing up the introduction to our team page using the notes we came up with in our next meeting. Our groups Story Map is nearly complete and only the addition of Sam’s slides and some light editing are needed in order to go live with the map. After the meeting the page will be ready for it’s due date on the 15th and the team is really excited about that.
If everything goes well tonight and everyone brings with them their completed assignments then this night should mean a lot of stress off of our shoulders. I think that the introduction page and the story map will be complete at the least which will be very exciting. I am also hoping to get another member of the team to create something for our additional information page. I’m excited to get to utilize the anchor links that Tierney has taught us but I think we need more information their. While the additional information page is not necessary to the class I think it would be a nice addition to our page that adds some depth.
Hopefully tonight at the meeting everyone will be prepared and calm enough that the idea of pitching additional information will not sound completely ludicrous. While we’ve talked about the additional information page before something tells me that peoples minds may be different after working on the project for so long. This all being said I’m feeling very exhausted and worn out from both this project and especially the meetings and tasks I had to do today for the Jan term. Here is a photo I am hoping to use for the additional information page:
Darwins Instruments
With the direction of the professors, team earth has set some deadlines that are firm. this will help us to make sure and finish all the work we can earlier than the class due date. We will meet these deadlines and we won’t be very stressed because throughout the semester we have discovered as a team that each individual member is able to perform under pressure well. I think that having these deadlines is a huge motivation factor and I have gotten even deeper in the work since we set them.
This video is a musical performance by the Silk road Ensemble, which is a group created and led by the legendary Yo-Yo Ma and it is the incorporation of many varied types of similar and vastly different instruments that were developed along the Silk Road throughout history. The Silk Road was a superhighway for the evolution of instruments such as the lute. The class was treated to a visit by a friend of Eric’s who is a professor at UNCG who studies instruments throughout time, with a focus on Myanmar. This man showed us a trail of changes to similar lutes that gave each one a personal and locally cherished sound, ingraining itself in many cultures.
The Beginning of the End
Coming back from fall break and getting into a steady rhythm of work and communication between Team Earth members was excellent. We picked up where we had left off and began to dig deeper into specific areas of our respective topics after having a few talks with Eric in class about which direction to take. This half of the semester is more stressful, but it is more rewarding as we begin to see our intentions and work become represented physically by our webpages and blog posts. I heard there is an oven being built by another group…that’s awesome!
My artifact here is an 18th century representation of what Marco Polo may have looked like when dressed in traditional Tartar garb whilst he was traveling the empire as an emissary. Very bright colors punctuate the landscape of his chest as the baggy clothing settles on his tall frame. This may not be how he dressed all the time as it it seems ornamental and fine, as if to be used for special occasions.
Experimental Room Recap
Today in class we were able to set a date of completion for our final project. This will be taking place on Thursday at around 9pm in the Hub. I am truly excited to be seeing our Team Earth page on that day. Of course, it will not be perfect, hence the earlier date than the actual deadline, but that’s what our group meeting will be considering. Numerous tweaks will be required such as the implementation of our story map and other coding to make the page be more visually appealing.
As a silkworm, I will be focusing on aiding the team in the visual aspects of page. Learning how to add things such as “jump links” that would take the reader to different sections of the page if they so wish to. Also, adding in autoplay codes that will play a specific youtube or soundcloud (for example) link when the reader goes into the page. So forth, these will be the things that I would wish to contribute in and hopefully be able to support the members of Team Earth.
Nearing the End
As we near the end of this assignment I am becoming increasingly nervous which is proving to both be a good and a bad thing. On the plus side my nervous feelings surrounding the project are pushing me to put more and more work into my research and writing. On the downside however this class has began consuming a lot of my work and attention span. I now have all the research I think I will need for the final project, and all of my ideas have been typed up and I hope are ready to go onto the final website. I’m a little hesitant because despite being ready, our group hasn’t yet revealed our completed final work to one another yet.
We had an amazing meeting this Wednesday and I’m feeling really excited about the things we have planned for our website. Our members all seem to have great work done and I know they both excelled in research after getting to see some of their amazing resources during our meeting. We also had a great meeting with Tierney that proved to be really helpful in terms of our website planning. We got to draw out how we wanted our webpage to look, as well as learned some awesome web developing skill I hope to be able to put in action during our web implementation phase.
Our group has set deadlines for a lot of final pieces so I think that it all should fall into place well in these next few days. The main portion I am feeling a little nervous about now is all of our ideas coming together on the story map. Our meeting was really helpful in getting me to rewrite some of the ideas I had jotted down as well as helping to re-shift my focus to help support the team. I had a great conversation with Sam that really helped me change up two of my story map points in order to help the flow and work better with the work he’s producing.
I am really excited now to see the final project, My only hesitation is that without a concrete deadline from the class before the last due date I’m worried about everyone on the team being ready at the same time. However, despite all of these worries I have a feeling it will all work out.
Here is an awesome artifact I found, I was worried about not getting an image of the letter from Guyuk to Pope Innocent but found this Creative Commons image of the Persian Letter! What is awesome about this is it’s the letter that John Di plano Carpini brought back with him to deliver.
Traveling across the books of the silk road
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).
The Silken Android
In the past two days the Earth Group has had two incredibly successful meetings and I can’t wait to keep moving forward with the projects. Not only have the projects been big in terms of the kind of information that different members were able to share about their projects but also because of the ideas we came up with together. Our first team meeting we had two big planning breakthroughs that I think will be really exciting for our final project. One of them was more logistical and involved us sketching out some ideas for what we wanted our story map to look like and how our pieces would all look together as one. After working on that for a while we had a very successful conversation with Tierney about different resources we could work with which has really taken us down an exciting path.
One facet of our webpage which I’m excited for is that as a group we discussed doing something similar to additional information pages. The idea behind them was that we have a lot of incredibly important and useful information that doesn’t quite fit into our story map but that we know people would want to learn more about. The idea we’ve been tossing around about that issue now is to implement a sort of side bar or tabs in order to organize these ideas. While that idea is really exciting and I hope it works out we had an even more exciting breakthrough in our team meeting tonight.
We got music to play on our page
It may not sound exciting, but Brian through a painstaking process of forum post reading and youtube watching was able to embed music into our blog page that begins playing as soon as the page is opened. Likening himself to a hacker or an android he managed to save the day. So far we can only use youtube videos but the fact that our page has a unique and awesome element to it already really has me excited for our final outcome. On a more logistical note we had a great meeting in terms of planning and I think that the ideas we came up with are going to really help us. Not only did we plan concrete meeting times for the rest of the assignment but we also put in place some really helpful deadlines and drafts to help encourage us all and keep us focused throughout the next few weeks of working on the project.
Additionally I’ve been getting better at finding images that may be useful to me like this one of Kublai Khan.
Khan you believe how little time is left until this project is due
The readings for the past few classes have been incredibly useful in my research. It’s been really refreshing and rewarding to have so much material all of a sudden to work with and I’m very excited. One of the biggest challenges I’m facing right now is with The Secret History of the Mongols. I’m incredibly grateful that I was able to find the full text online but skimming through it to find valuable information is proving to be difficult. While the amount of useful primary source information is overwhelming in The Secret History of the Mongols I am having trouble choosing what information is most useful for our story map.
Right now my goal is to find as much information as I can on the time period in which Marco Polo was visiting the mongol court from within The Secret History of the Mongols. In order to make sure our story map is the best it can be I will need to meet with both members of my group as soon as possible so that I can insure the information I am gathering is useful and will improve our story map instead of just being repeated information.
Another Idea I’ve been toying with recently is of adding a fun side bar of information on our page giving some general background on the practices of the Mongols. While I think that our map will do a great job of providing a lot of information, I think it would also be good to provide the readers of the site with some more background info. I was thinking about doing a small paragraph section on the importance of the horse to the Mongol people. I think giving people an option to delve deeper into the culture of the Mongol people and learn about why they were such an effective military would be really useful. I’ve typed up a few drafts of what the paragraph would look like and have gathered what I believe will be all the sources I need for it. I also found a portrait of Genghis Khan that I think will make a good title addition above the paragraph to draw people in.
I’m excited to pitch this idea to my team and seeing if maybe they too would be interested in making an additional info paragraph to help add some density to our page in the end so the readers have lots of options. I’m feeling really good now that I have so many sources to look through and am getting really excited about being able to learn so much. I can’t wait to start the next set of readings as I think they will prove to be very useful as well! So far things are going great !
A mini meeting and a world of hope
Today Sam and I met for what would soon be the most crucial meeting I have had this year. All of my stress instantly melted away as my beloved teammate told me that he had found some amazing sources that would blow my mind. And he was right. While I am very happy about the direction our project was going in I had only come up with one solid lead when it came to research. That all changed today however when my teammate revealed to me that he had just found the holy grail of resources.
Sam found a wonderful book that as an alternative to Marco Polo presents the stories of four travelers from around the world who wrote about their experiences traveling the silk road and interacting with the mongol court. Not only is this resource good for our project as a whole but it also makes me feel a lot more supported because It contains some very good mongol resources. I am really excited to get to go through this book with Sam and I think it could become one of our most useful resources in our project.
As far as research goes, truthfully it is moving very slowly. Being weighed down with classes I haven’t had a lot of time after completing my other homework to do intense research and so I have not delved nearly as deep as I wanted to at this point in planning. However despite this setback I have a plan and a lot of faith in myself that I will be able to accomplish it. I’m planning this fall break to do some catch up internet research and find some books that I will be able to check out when I get back on campus at the Hege Library.
Ideally I will also be able to lay out an outline for the portion of the project that I will be contributing the most too. I am really excited to see what our project will be like when it all comes together. While I think our team has a lot of research skills I believe that our best work will come when making the actual webpage. I think our group has a lot of creative thinkers who in our meetings have already had a lot of great conversations about our end goal. Because of the success of meetings like this I have been feeling really good recently about the direction that Team Earth is headed in.