This week appeared to be a bit slower for some reason. I think my main accomplishment was finding the latitude and longitude for all my letters. From that I was able to plot all my letters and see any geographic trends.
An additional accomplishment was reading the three secondary source books that Dr. Ural suggested and gaining a broader understanding of women during the civil war.
That works in conjunction with my third accomplishment, which is that I have a better idea of an argument or two I can make in my paper/presentation. I think I can make an argument about how the Ladies Military Aid Societies in Mississippi were primarily comprised of wealthy white women as a way to maintain their societal status during a war that disrupt their entire society.
For much of the week I was unsure of what else I could do with my geographic data. I could not see how to apply the things Dr. Stan was showing us to my specific topic. However, after talking to her on Friday, I have a few ideas of some additional analysis I could do should we be able to find the right data.
Another thing that is preventing me from doing my best work is that I am so far unable to find any secondary sources about the Ladies Military Aid Societies specifically. There's a lot about Southern women's experiences during the war generally, but not much about the Aid Societies in particular. In addition to that, the letters we have are all written to the governor and do little to express the motivations and experiences of women in these societies. This is making it difficult to find direct evidence for the arguments I want to try to make.
Finally, the heat this week and knowing we had a four day break made it very difficult to motivate myself to work this week. When other people were talking about going home for the long weekend, I finally started to miss being home and doing all my usual summer activities with my family. But as my mother keeps reminding me, I said, "I can do anything for eight weeks."
This week was very GIS and web app security focused. I learned a lot from Dr. Stan's lectures about story telling.
I learned about how to think about your audience, and that a good strategy is to imagine them in your mind. Thinking about their age, prior knowledge, occupation, etc. is a good way to build your audience's story so you can better understand which designs would appeal to them.
We also learned about the different kinds of ways maps/sites that can be used. There are analysis-based maps that focus on data and statistics, as well as narrative based maps that are used in telling a story. Most of us will probably end up creating narrative maps/sites as that is what we are more familiar with as historians.
A third thing I learned this week is that many Southern women of all classes were displaced from their homes as fighting neared them during the Civil War. For some reason, this surprised me, probably because I'm used to learning about the home front efforts during the World Wars, where most of the battles did not happen in the continental United States.