Category Archives: Team Earth

All of the blog posts for the Team Earth research project.

Team Earth

Team Earth: Blasting off Again

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.

 

Team Earth

Rolling forward

October Fourth, 2016

I feel as if Earth Team has now got a much firmer grip on the project in the days following the meeting with Professors in which we decided to go a different direction, the direction of the famous travellers of the Silk Road. I am very happy to be studying Marco Polo and his life in the more honest realistic sense rather than on a television show or movie. The act of studying him is actually very involving and rewarding. Having been in attendance at betty place lab a few days ago, I saw Tierney show us all how to work with and utilize special tools of both storyline JS and timeline JS, which was really helpful as it gives me a sense of what the timeline (which earth group has decided on) looks and feels like, which always makes a project easier.


Fall Break is coming up and I am excited to return from it and begin to learn more about the Mongols, especially with my focus on Marco Polo, any information I can receive about his time with the Mongol Court, his relationship with Kublai Khan, or his activities for the Khan, I would be happy to hear it.

Team Earth

The Fellowship Gathers

This Wednesday, the fellowship of the earth met once again for an illustrious and exciting meeting of the minds. Our powerhouse of a team met for a team meeting to decide how we would move forward with our newly agreed upon topic idea. We decided to break up into three individual tasks that will eventually come together to form the greatest project of all time.  Each member of the project has decided upon a point that they are really excited about and are happy to be working on. Austin will be studying Marco Polo’s travels and taking a critical look at what it means for him to the be the most well known traveler. Sam will be taking a look at other travelers and how their stories relate or clash against the white European narrative of Marco Polo. I myself will be working on looking at the Mongols and the Mongol court and the history they left behind and their records of the places these travelers visited. Ideally when we bring all of our information together we will be able to paint a detailed and beautiful image made up of multiple narratives showing what these travels were really like.
I am really excited to get started on this project, while I am starting to worry there wont be varied  resources to help me on this journey I am incredibly interested in my topic. The mongols interest me greatly and I think that getting to study the history they created and wrote compared to the popular narrative is an opportunity I can’t wait to really get started on. Once again however I am feeling hesitant and a little anxious to the amount of resources I have. My first research steps are going to be in acquiring and looking through the book titled The Secret History of The Mongols. It has been recommended to me numerous times and sounds like the perfect first step for me embarking on this project. My next goal will be searching for research papers written on the secret history of the Mongols, in an attempt to find more sources and detailed analysis.
I must say I am much happier with this project then our original idea as I feel like we can really dig deep on this subject and pull out some new and creative ways of looking at the silk road. The topic is also just incredible to me and  I can’t wait to read over travelers descriptions of their amazing journeys.

Silkworms, Team Earth

On a thread

After filling out everything and completing the application (on my end) for the study abroad programs (both Silk road and Japan), I felt at ease. This thought was last week. Allowing me to take a breath and get on with my other work, such as working on these blogs and pre-flight quizzes. However, I missed one crucial part of it. There were more than just applications for the Guilford College. I was assigned to complete one for the ISA study abroad website.
My chill went inside out into a concentrated adrenaline rush, as the deadline was October one. Not to mention, they were all required to be mailed. If you read any further into this blog, it is mere fumes of myself and my problems that is in no way scapegoating.
So forth, on my list was this page and a half essay for my scholarship, and documents that need to be mailed to an office in Texas. My mind drifted away from anything considered class work and more into what will happen next year.
Still dealing with this problem, I sent 6 emails out to different departments in search for documents, and one came out to be a huge relief, which was the ISA study abroad office mentioning that they were going to extend the deadline to October 10. Such a time crunch, and this came to save my life. A relief that must go on this post as it was nearly the death of me, mentally speaking.  And so, I will be able to catch up on all these posts, hopefully do this pre-flight quiz with ease tonight, fingers crossed.
And also, talking about study abroad. During my scholarship essay, my mention of cultural and modern bridges that Japan is so uniquely molded into, Daniel Diaz told me to add the current event of Emperor Akihito’s abdication. Yes, he will be abdicating, but is trying to find a method in doing so, as he does not think his mentality will hold much longer (which means he’s at the age of retirement). More so, he made an appearance on national TV, one of the rarest things in history, mentioning his abdication. Check it out!

 

Team Earth

Thoughts

Howdy,

A few days ago, Friday morning to be exact, Jake, Brian and I all met with Zhihong and Eric to discuss the re-making of our project and the reassessment of our initial interests. This meeting led to the conclusions that instead of focusing on the agricultural and medicinal aspects of oases along the Silk Road, we should focus on the famous travellers that made their way across the Silk Road and use their journals, stories of them, and their writings throughout their lives to piece together not only a story map of the history of the travelers, but also a time map of overlapping and progressively more recent travellers across the Silk Road.

I think this take on a project focus is great and I can’t wait to start really digging into the meat of the project and discover things that the group and class will love to know.

Silkworms, Team Earth

New Research Topic

As of yesterday, Team Earth has decided to change the topic due to limited resources of the initial one. During our meeting with the professors, we’ve decided to focus on silk road travelers.
More specifically, we will be doing a cross reference comparison with eastern and western travelers. Perhaps Marco Polo comparing Rabban Bar Sauma & Markos. Using the story map as our medium, we will collect data on their travels through primary and secondary sources. And another thing to add on to this research, specifying it ever more, would be to concentrate on Mongol interaction. Because of Marco Polo’s work with Qubilai Khan, there’s bound to be other travelers who also either advised or experienced interactions with this leader or any other during the mongol rule. Also to note, this then dedicates our research during the 13-14th century, (Around 1206 to 1368 when the last emperor of the Yuan Dynasty passed away).
Thus being said, we’ve found a lot more sources to do the project, and the members have shown much interest with travelers and mongols.

Team Earth

Initial Post

Hello All,

This is my first post and I know it is late but I feel as if I have been so stressed and confused lately that I have been slow to start on the technicalities of this project. So far during this project my team, Earth, has been attempting to push past a lack of resources and aggravating dead ends as we attempt to further develop our topic and discover the facts we need to discuss and present on the research. I have fallen behind in my passion for the project as Team Earth is starting to be full of holes in our project proposal. It is due to this downtrodden feeling that I have not been doing my best work so far in this course, and I apologize for this.

We have been showed how to use our web page, our wordpress posting and ways in which to delve into our research and all of these methods and programs are user friendly and wonderful to utilize in this project, which will add substance and also professionalism to our work that may not have existed on such a broad scale in the work. Through these methods of research and idea development I have studies the available texts on the structure and design of irrigation and agriculture in oases of the Silk Road, a search that proved to bear little fruit in the end unfortunately, and I have also been trying to explore the texts pertaining to the effect the oases had on the rest of the Silk Road, whether it be through culture, religion, or farming practices. Upon discovering the sheer difficulties of finding any pertinent knowledge about this specific subject, I began to realize that there was a need for a change because the topic we had built our project around was failing to give us material that was both worth mentioning, and also trustworthy/detailed enough to give us a new area of our topic to speak more specifically about.

As far as the group goes, I love my group. Sam, Jake and Brian are all hard working and attentive which makes for a good set of teammates to complete this task with. I think something we need to accomplish more frequently as well as more systematically and easily is meeting up as a team and spending time together discussing the details, our ideas, as well as our own research topics within the project. These meetings will be a huge help to the whole group and I can tell already that the moment that we get everything figured out meeting wise, our group will be a super group due to our dedicated work and coordination.

Eric and Zhihong have been monumentally helpful in our quest to discover what we really wish to learn about and have provided Team Earth with idea as well as suggestions as to where to look for the information we need and also methods for actually showcasing our work as a group via the group website.   Their help has proven very influential and will continue to be one of our group’s greatest resources as both of these professors are treasure troves of knowledge, experience and advice. Since the topic we have chosen, seems to be working out very poorly, I think the group should have a meeting with the professors to suggest revisions and or major overhaul of our end goal of our work.

Tierney has also been amazing so far as she has set up the whole website and spent a large portion of her time preparing for us to come in this semester and immediately start working with the digital aspect of the course, which I am very thankful for. I am very much looking forward to working with the digital pieces of the course as well as being taught to do these things by Tierney.

I am the reporter for Team Earth and it is my responsibility to my group that I present our findings and report in throughout the semester with basic facts, updates and helpful pieces of information for the class. My reporter role is centered around the use of communication and the detailed understanding of the groups work on a whole, not just my own parts that I focused more heavily on. I will be working closely with Jake, Sam and Bryan throughout the process not only on the complete project (as is expected) but I will be working with them individually to get a sense of the ways in which they want me to present their information as well as anything they would like me to focus on explicitly, should they feel that would be beneficial. I think that I will work well as the reporter due to my ability to deliver when it comes to presentation, I enjoy this form of interaction with people as it allows me to illustrate and elaborate on facts and ideas my group is discovering, connecting, and help to entertain new thought processes among the entirety of the class, thereby keeping with the class goal of unification amongst the groups and not the isolationism that occurs in group projects sometimes.

I am excited about this course, I have been looking forward to this course and attached January Term for some time and I feel my excitement and desire to perform and absorb as well and as much as possible will help me along during my semester of work to be done. I believe that Earth Team will come to a better path in terms of the topic and we will succeed in setting down a path rich with resources and material. I believe all this will come down to is a meeting between the group members to decide upon our interests and passions lie and discover if they have the resources or specificity needed for a project of this scope.

There is only one last point I would like to make :

Earth Team is the bees knees

Peace out Blogosphere

Austin
Team Earth

Team Earth off to a Rocky Start

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.

Silkworms, Team Earth

Digital class

Currently in class, Tierney is giving us a broad range of tools to use for our digital project. One of which includes Metadata. Basically this is whatever defines a piece of information such as author’s name, copyrights, and other varieties of cites that provides useful data about that particular material. It was something that we see in our daily lives; only until today did I realize how to describe this common sight.
Further into this class, the teachers have introduced to us an account on Shared Shelf that enables a community media archive as another resource for our silk road. To clarify, students and professors alike have the ability to upload media relevant to the silk road class into the Shared Shelf account and, with proper citations, share it with the class. All media will have specific bibliographies to be certain of avoiding any copyright issues; as we’ve learned in class, (with both teacher and professor repetitively emphasizing on citing every uploaded image).
This is a great way for students as a whole to share the media that have been seen through their daily internet usages. With the whole classroom given this ability, the SharedShelf account will, without a doubt, be filled with very useful information relevant to our Silk Road project.
 

Team Earth

Resource Draught

One thing I have learned so far in working on this project, is that a lack of resources is a sure fire way to loose hope and motivation. My groups initial project idea which we were all very excited about had very few resources on the topics we were researching and so after running into the roadblock of no information over and over again wore us out and made me personally have less motivation in working on the project. I’m writing about this issue despite the fact that we have a new direction in our work full of resources that i’m excited about, mostly because it’s a good reminder to myself.
I think that I need to be aware that despite the fact that I have a lot of resources in front of me now, somewhere down the line I may run dry and this issue could start again. I need to remember to not give up hope and simply stop working on my project and to actually dig deeper and really try to work with both the physical resources I have in terms of text as well as the people in my life who are here to help guide me on this project. Both professors have been a huge help for me so far even early in the projects beginning and so I need to remember that they’re here for me if I need them later on as well.  I think I also just need to remember that running out of resources on a certain topic isn’t the end of the world and I can’t simply give up when I have a group relying on my input and participation as well as the fact that the final work we produce is graded.
That being said however, I have very few worries about running into a lack of resources in the future, and although it is definitely a possibility and something I am feeling a little bit anxious about, I need to remember that it is an obstacle I can overcome. This all being said I am really excited about the new direction this project is taking and one of the best things I have learned from this experience of shifting focus is that a shift in a new direction when confronted with an obstacle can sometimes lead to something more exciting. The projects direction now has me even more engaged and happy then before and It wouldn’t have been possible without a shift in focus. I can’t wait to get started on the new research!