As this was a bit of a shorter week, I am a little unsure of what to include as my accomplishments. I think first and foremost is finding secondary sources for my paper. Before this week, I had a few promising leads, but many of them did not contain the information I expected. However, after searching through various databases for hours, I finally managed to find 5 good sources for information on Southern women during the Civil War, and hopefully another is on its way through ILL.
Secondly, I believe I have finally narrowed down an argument for my paper. It's not totally set in stone, but I believe I will be able to focus on the "why" behind the Ladies Military Aid Societies. The few sources I've been able to find on them focus on their patriotic ideals, but I hope to go beyond that in my paper.
Finally, after talking with Dr. Stan, I have a few ideas of additional analyses I can do from a GIS-standpoint. By plotting the locations of the letters against where major Mississippi battles took place and against income data, I can more easily tell if the letters are coming from the kinds of women I expect are writing them. Or, it may reveal some interesting points that I can further investigate.
Early on in the week, I would say the thing that prevented my best work was not knowing where to get started on creating my final deliverables. However, our discussions with Maeve and Dr. La Beaud helped to clarify what exactly is expected of our work and provided me with a place to start, namely the paper.
Another major thing this week that slowed me down was the lack of secondary source information on the Ladies Military Aid Societies specifically and even about Southern women more broadly. I could find a decent amount of information on Southern women during the Civil War, but got stuck when I looked for anything about the Aid Societies in particular. Additionally, much of what I could find on Southern women was about poor white women or enslaved black women, which were not my target for this project. I would also find information about how the Civil War influenced the women's rights movement, again interesting, but not useful to my project.
I suppose another issue I had this week was confusion about where the 2D and 3D animation fits into our final projects. While really neat to play with, it does not seem as applicable to our project as the GIS/map animation lessons were.
Another note, those perhaps not a hinder for me personally, was other people's frustration with the project. I personally felt like this week was "the beginning of the end" and I'm finally understanding the outcomes and excited to begin my final deliverables. However, when talking to some of the others, there seems to be a lot of stress and frustration that I don't understand, and then feel like I'm missing something because I am not as stressed or frustrated. More of a personally insecurity than anything, I think.
This week, though short, was full of interesting new things. The primary new thing I learned was about 2D animation. We gained exposure both to created our own original animations and animating maps to emphasis specific trends/places. We also learned some 3D modeling (see below).
Another thing I learned this week is that many of the Ladies Military Aid Societies were indeed formed for the purpose of sewing clothing for the soldiers, out of patriotic obligation. This was revealed by looking at Mississippi newspapers from the early years of the war.
Finally, we were introduced to more of StoryMaps, specifically the pre-made apps that you can plug your own data into. This is an easy way to show off particular aspects of your maps/data without needing to create an entire narrative in a story map. In essence this apps can act as component parts of a project that is perhaps not based in StoryMaps.