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 !