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!