Eweaver’s UMW Blog

So it came to my attention today that we had a discrepancy between the markers in the book and the markers on the site. My worst fears have come true. Here’s the situation:

Markers in Marker Book [not on site]

Fredericksburg

“Fall Hill” E-49-b

Spotsylvania County

Penny’s Tavern Site E-129

Heth’s Salient Battle Site E-127

Third Spotsylvania County Courthouse Site E-128

Washinton-Rochambeau Route — Marker not erected.

Stafford County

Kidnapping of Pocahontas E-48

Fredericksburg Campaign N-4

Markers on Website [not in book]

Fredericksburg

Amoroleck Encounters John Smith N-38

Spotsylvania County

Spotsylvania County Z-149/ Caroline County Z-149

Spotsylvania County Z-156/ Caroline County Z-156

Stafford County
Creek Delegation in Fredericksburg J-102

So to sum this all up - We do not have 62 Markers anymore - we have 6 Official Markers more and I think we should still research the one that is not erected yet which would put our grand total at 69 Markers. Stay tuned for our solution to this travesty. Have a good Spring Break everyone.

I am thinking an annotated bibliography would be beneficial for our purposes. Especially for works consulted so that people know what they are looking up…. thoughts?

Hey guys don’t freak out because I did enough for all of us just a few moments ago. So while I was researching tonight I came across a helpful website:

 http://www.hmdb.org/results.asp?Town=Fre…

According to this there are 96 Historical markers in the three counties we are in charge of. I know - WAIT NO - THATS NOT OK - CRAP WE ARE SCREWED is running through your head.

I looked deeper into this madness in panic and realized that there are a lot of placards that aren’t our kind included in this. We are just doing the black and white ones correct? Also, having seen this site we might want to link to it and definitely outdo it in further research and bibliography. I am sort of disappointed that this project has somewhat already been done. BUT this scare has made me really rethink using just the website given in the syllabus to clarify that we only have a certain number of markers in the area. Whoever has the book —- BRING IT TOMORROW! I am going to go through and count all the markers. Let’s just hope that the website was right in the first place because I went back and checked again - they only have 62 total.  Sleep well, see you in the morning.

Best, Elle

1. How extensive do we want our bio of the group? IE do we want individual bios and if so we should each do one for ourselves.

2. I like what McClurken said about initialing our work - how does everyone else feel about that?

3. I want to also clarify that the initial blog posts that we are doing are considered ROUGH drafts. Hopefully I am correct let me know if I am not.

Thanks! GO TEAM!

I am thinking that early frustration about this process is much better than late in the game [and i hope i am right]. So we have been ambitious — we said that already. We all are having different problems in the form of research and time in our lives etc. I have completed rough drafts of 2 markers and I have a really rough sketch and a lot of scrawled notes and post its on 3 others that can be put together in another substantial sitting. I am feeling confident about how to go about researching and somewhat of what we might be looking for to put on the site now. I still have some reservations about a few things we have not clarified as of now, but I feel confident that we will work together to have a great product in the end.

Just a few things for my group to ponder [and others if they have ideas]—

- how uniform do we want all of our research to be? would it be possible to sign our work and take complete responsibility for the pages we create. we are going to have different writing styles… how much individuality are we going to promote and allow in our project? I for one hope to keep some personal tone and word choice etc. in my own markers. I find history to be more or less interesting based on how it is compiled [i dont think i am alone here]. I feel that so long as our divisions, links and integral parts of each page/marker is there — we have done our job. I like the idea of not having all my work completely reworked — maybe because I am a bit of a control freak and like to have a hand in the final say of things that have my name on them.

- How flexible are we going to be with our deadlines? I am a strong supporter in the “no excuses just get it done on time end of story” policy. We all have already broken our first [and second] deadline. We needed to do so for sanity sake for all of us and we came to this consensus that we underestimated the intensity of the work we wanted to do. However, now that we do have a grasp we need to get crackin’. Thoughts? Should there be consequences for not getting things done etc.?

This is why group work is hard because you have no idea what other people are thinking sometimes. I do feel better after our meeting tonight, and I appreciate everyone taking the time to come and discuss our presentation. My goal for this project is to take more of a following role [not usually my style] and be a work horse type group member that is reliable. This is a real challenge for me because I have never had a group project of this scale before - usually I can get away with doing most of it myself and micromanaging. Obviously for this project that is just not possible.

Well well well - to me this is the same old story… Wikipedia is good but at the same time its bad.

After looking at the discussion and history tabs I am a little overwhelmed. The discussion of these articles could be endless and the minor discrepancies that people come up with are just ridiculous. I read a comment on the error of saying football or soccer as a keyword link in an article. Why not have both so that Americans can figure it out since we seem to be the only ones who like to confuse things by calling it soccer and a sport that we play with OUR HANDS — Football. Back to my point — these things could be endless and there is no way to not have any guy off the street rant about proper wording or whatever he wants no matter if it actually matters or not. That is a lot of freedom. I do like the history tab but I think it could be organized in a less busy way — I couldn’t understand what I was looking at until I looked around for a bit, there has to be a better way of showing that information.

Well that’s my rant - but at least I didn’t do it on wikipedia.

So I am blogging — as we have been prompted to do. I haven’t looked at all the wikipedia stuff yet, I just watched the longer- than-i-thought-it-would-be debate video. I feel like the female history professor was on the right track… but I really felt like she did both the pros and cons… debates don’t usually go like that. She also was repetitive… but maybe that’s because I already felt like I knew all those things about wikipedia from my class with McClurken last semester… etc.

Aside from that — I have so much reading to do its not even funny. I am determined to get these 7 markers done but I think we were ambitious with our first deadline. Mine WILL BE DONE…. but I hadn’t realized how much went into these until I sat down to do my research. I am really excited because I know that we all are going to do great research and we will have one fabulous addition to the historical markers online representations.  I can’t wait til its all done. The end…. now i am going to go read about the battle of chancellorsville [aka my thrilling adventure for 10:30 on a friday night]. YES!

So not much to report after this week - I did hit up the library and check out a pretty impressive amount of books, I feel like I am back in 299 but with a much more researchable topic. You know you are a history major/library loser when…. you know the girl at the library check out by name and not because she had a class with you. You also know that you are a history major/library loser if you have to ask for a bag - yes one of those heavy duty red plastic bags they give the kids that already have too many books in their backpack to fit the 10 more they have just checked out. Thank you. thank you very much.

So we had our first outside of class group meeting tonight and get a lot of things nailed down. First we discussed and came up with what I think to be a great group contract. I myself am feeling a lot more comfortable now that I know what is my responsibility and how we plan to get this all done. Along with that we divided up all the markers for further research and made deadlines for ourselves to get them done. We also figured out particular jobs that each of us prefer which worked out better than I could have imagined. WHO would have thought that we would have 5 people with different skill sets and ideas of fun history work…. I am thrilled. Shannon and Jennifer are heading off this digital thing, Shannon is also doing our group blurb while Jennifer is our picture collector extraordinaire. Whitney is our editor commander, Amy is our scribe and biographical information checker as well as field work expert #1, and I am a timeline and task master and field work expert #2. VERY EXCITING STUFF. I am really ready to get started and I am pumped to see the final product - which will be done before we know it. Thats all for now… more later.

 Emily Chang’s eHub was pretty cool - it had a huge list of stuff — if I were more interested in digital/internet things in everyday life I would investigate further for pleasure… Unfortunately, I felt like a lot of these tools weren’t very helpful for our purposes. They are all focused around mobilization etc. I don’t know that we need or even care about being able to access our sites from mobile devices. I also felt that it was hard to tell exactly what all these programs could do with such a short description… but Jagango might help us —

Description - Create a mobile website or portal in five minutes or less. Jagango is a template-based website creation tool that guides you through creating a mobile website that you can share with others via SMS. Also features a community where you can view and search other user-created mobile sites.

Jaganga seems user friendly. We will be able to see what other people have made out of it and work from that in the community it has created. Basically I like the idea of giving us steps to follow and creating a website. We should look into this because we have been uncertain about Omeka and maybe this will either be way better [for us] or make us see how great omeka actually is… who knows.