Last night our group met, because we now meet every Monday night (this week at 7:00, every week in the future at 9:00). We discussed what we had each done up to this point, which, to be clear, has been minimal for all of us. Zach is stoked about Tandoor ovens and Youtube videos about making them as well as videos on street food and other meals in Kashgar. The rest of our research seems to be rather hard to progress with. Delaney and I were talking about how there seemed to be some stuff to read, but that nothing felt valuable or felt like progress. There are very few books about the history of Kashgar, let alone food or culinary practices in Kashgar; the research on Kashgar I have done in various databases is also fairly limited and feels like context rather than the content we hope to have in our project. I have had slightly better luck zooming out to Xinjiang and hoping to find specifics about Kashgar within. My next step is going to be expanding my search to google and not just databases. I am hoping to sift through websites and any other results that might pop up form google searches either today or tomorrow (9/21). Ideally I would like to be spending at least 30 minutes to an hour every day on research for the Tongue team and I am hoping to attempt to accomplish that minimum this week as a trial run and see how successful I am. As a reminder to myself and a statement that might help keep me accountable for fulfilling this: I need to create a more thorough and upgraded timeline for my group as “timekeeper”.
The largest part of our meeting centered on how we were going to make a narrative out of our separate parts of the whole Tongue Team project. This led us to the question of how we wanted our portion of the map to look like and how it will travel from point to point. I was envisioning a picture of our meal as our main point and then have the ability to click on each aspect of the table in order to bring you to the background of each component of the meal. I don’t know, technologically, if that is possible, so we also discussed how the traditions of the order of what got served or eaten first might help us with how the digital map travels from point to point. We discussed a lot of ways in which we could turn our project and all its facets into a map for the final project. It was really fun to think of that creative aspect of the project and to look ahead at what it might look like when it’s all said and done.