It’s hard to believe we’re all at the end of the course so soon.  Our blog  is nearly done, our last few interviews are rolling in and being uploaded, and I still feel like there is so much to do.  I’m honestly not too sure after this is all said and done if I’ll be able to get out of the mindset of looking for stories to tell every time I hear something about our campus mentioned in the classroom or community, but perhaps that is a good thing.  This has been a phenomenal experience, one which I can wholeheartedly say has helped me as a student in more ways than I would have initially thought.  WordPress, Timeline JS, and Blue Jeans are all technologies I feel comfortable with now, not even mentioning the enjoyment and learning that these interviews have brought.  I’m very happy with the strides Julia and I have made in these last few weeks.  I felt we may have been floundering initially, but I believe we now have a site that I can show my peers with pride.  I’m excited yet a bit nervous for the looming presentation day, but I’m still taking things one step at a time.

Now that everyone is finishing up their project sites, I’m starting to get nervous. Am I doing a good enough job? Does my project site look okay?

Not only am I the youngest in the course, I am also the only team of one. I’m trying to remind myself of both, especially the latter, as I draw my project to a close. However, I still feel inferior and anxious about being satisfactory in the eyes of those who will see my project. I’m a perfectionist, and it’s hard for me to ever feel like I succeeded at something. I actually started crying in the research technician’s office this morning when she told me that my site looked great.

I want this project to be the best it can possibly be. These stories are so vital to me and this school has an immense handprint on my heart. I have to find a balance between pushing myself to succeed and overexerting myself to the point of exhaustion.

Time for class to start. I’ll continue this later.

In Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon wrote a 12-page sentence.  When asked about the sentence, Chabon responded that he wanted to give the readers a tracking shot so readers understood what was going on.  For my readers who want to know where I am, here’s my tracking shot:  

Trump was elected president (I stayed up till the bitter end); Emily and I conducted two interviews and got about an hour’s worth of usable conversation; my cat killed a snake, brought it in the house, and hid it under my housemate’s bed for safekeeping;  Emily and I made some major changes to the blog that should be functional and aesthetic improvements; most of these changes–especially changing our theme–made obsolete all of the work I did last week; I’m annoyed that a lot of my work seems to be for naught, but excited every time I learn a new way of making something accessible, every time I learn a new technology of visual rhetoric; we had really great conversations about the uniqueness and importance of liberal arts, as well as the future of higher education; it turns out my housemate is terrified of snakes, and the snake wasn’t completely dead; incredible dialogues began on campus regarding the importance of liberal arts institutions as enclaves of resistance and protection; I found some great sources that will contribute to our project; Emily’s timeline blew my mind; I didn’t have time to start either of the essays I have due tomorrow (Monday the 14th) until 1Pm today (Sunday the 13th); I’m excited that I get to blog for this course and have the opportunity to take risks like this post; starting at 4Pm on Friday, 50 of my teammates and I drove six hours to New Jersey, slept at the house of the TCNJ tracksters (who we had never met before), woke up and drove to Rowan college to support our top-7 men and women competing at the Atlantic Region cross country championship, painted our bodies and sprinted back and forth through a broccoli field to catch the runners as many times as possible (both teams won handily and qualified for the NCAA championship), we drove six hours home and returned at 4Pm on Saturday; I had serious writer’s block on my senior thesis; I was forced to re-evaluate my plan for the next several years in anticipation of cuts to higher-education spending; while writing a paper about Autism, I was fascinated by the ways other cultures approach the disorder; I continued to transcribe interviews and research SUNY general education requirements; I mapped the route to drive to Louisville, Kentucky to support my teammates at the NCAA championship this Friday–the men are ranked 2nd in the country and the women are ranked 3rd; a swastika with the word “trump” above it was found graffiti’d in a dorm on Geneseo’s campus.

I’m having trouble distinguishing between the difficulties of this project and the rhetoric surrounding the treatment of humans in this country:  most of a person’s labor is hidden from sight, and hidden labor is so often considered a lack of labor.  Which isn’t to say I think the difficulties of this project are equivalent to the plight of so many people in this country, but that this election has consumed all of my thoughts and emotional resources (and I recognize my incredibly privileged status).  So in the spirit of uncovering hidden labor, I’m going to use pictures (and a few words) to illustrate the potentially trivial changes I made to our project website in pursuit of some thing called excellence.  (I can only imagine what Derrida–in all his confounded genius that borders on idiocy–would have to say about this “thing”).  Hopefully, allowing these pictures to “speak” will achieve some symbolic act of removing my voice so that another “voice” can gain access to the conversation.

–this was the guiding website.

 –here’s where we started.

–after testing some themes, this is what I got.  I think the picture of Geneseo works extraordinarily with this theme, but we’ll have to do some editing with the font, colors, and menu.

–here’s a template of how I thought the theme would work.

–that didn’t happen.  When you add pictures to the home page, the site works differently.  Obvious issues.

–the hover aspect is nice.  But this theme does it automatically–whereas I spent hours working with plugins to get this affect on the other theme.

   –and when you click on the site, it takes you to this page (which will later be filled with information).  I had to do some editing to get here, and didn’t take all the picture to prove it.

–this small change from the original hover effect is the change I’m most impressed with.  I had to do some SERIOUS coding:

–changing font size and color.  Putting in a line break so there’s a primary title (the quote) and a secondary title (the question).

–and I seriously appreciate the people who paved the way before me.

More interviews this week.  And I’m hoping to dump a ton of information on the blog.  Ideally, in a coherent manner.

I, as I can imagine many of you are, am dismayed at the results of the election. For the last few days, I’ve been struggling to find reasons to keep trying to work on my schoolwork. Is it worth it? Am I doing any good? It’s hard to feel this way, and I hate falling behind like this.

Mark sent me a supportive email on Thursday, and I appreciated our course discussion the same day. As much as I want to reject this project and hide from the world, these narratives don’t give me that option. I have an interview on Tuesday with a woman who lived in the barracks built by the college to house World War II veterans while they (and the occasional wife) studied at Keene Teacher’s College. That’s the type of story I want and need to tell at this point. I rely on these stories to keep chipping away at my project despite depression.

Donald Trump is going to be President, and I’m scared. I don’t know what will happen to our country. I do know that this is the time for me to be telling stories about tough women and their access to education…now more than ever.

So, if you are reading this months or years from now, know that we are hurting this week. I’m hurting, but I’m not giving up.

This week I’ve mostly been trying to make something coherent out of my research from the past several weeks. On the site, this is most visible in the timeline, which I’m continuing to revise to provide sufficient context for the rest of the content.

Deciding what to include in the timeline has not been an easy process, as there are countless events that be helpful and provide further insight to Geneseo as an institution. I’ve been trying to select events that are interesting and varied but still create a framework for our more detailed discussion of curriculum. Another difficult aspect of creating the timeline is the sources I’ve been relying most heavily on: Mahood’s  SUNY Geneseo: From Normal School to Public Ivy, 1871-2007 and Fisher’s …the stone strength of the past… Both of these histories of the school are incredibly informative and factual, but they are also written by long-time professors at Geneseo with inescapable biases in favor of the institution. While working on the timeline, I’ve had to continually remind myself that the events highlighted in the histories are likely those that were the best for the school. Of course, there are worse problems to be had, and I’m very grateful for Fisher and Mahood’s work. I’ve also added some explanation and analysis to the “General Education and Humanities” page to accompany the booklet containing the developments in general education. I’m planning to pay special attention to the revision of the Common Core in the late ’70s that included the addition of the Humanities sequence, and I haven’t decided if that discussion will be on the same page or treated separately.

As for the site itself, John and I have spent a lot of time this week working on the general organization of content and finding the best theme. The organization will likely stand as it is on the landing page of the site currently, with more content–images that reveal quotes from our interviews that lead to related pages. I think we’ve narrowed it down to two themes, both of which are very customizable and generally clean and minimalist.

During this past week, we had two really insightful and informative interviews with Humanities professors. Our interviews this week will come from different perspectives. We have two definite interviews set, and are attempting to schedule a time with an administrator. One of the interviews is with a student, and I’m expecting that we can use many of the same questions we asked the professors we’ve interviewed with some reframing. The other interview we have this week with Professor Brooke McCorkle of the Music Department is of particular interest to me. Geneseo has not been particularly to kind to the fine arts in recent years (as can likely be said at most public schools), and the most recent blow came just this weekend when President Denise Battles announced (through email) that the college will no longer be funding Finger Lakes Opera (FLO). FLO is a relatively new organization that has provided the college and the surrounding community with access to an art form that is often inaccessible and  considered elitist. To me, this type of access and exposure to the arts is one of the most important aspects of a liberal arts education. This latest cut is particularly discouraging considering the election, the results of which do not bode well for education as whole, and when education suffers, the fine arts usually suffer first. If these are the decisions being made before the effects of a Trump presidency are felt, I greatly fear for the fine arts at Geneseo in the next few years. I am very interested in hearing Professor McCorkle’s thoughts on these events and the state of the fine arts at Geneseo, in addition to our regular questions about general education.

The word of the week in the fast-paced world of digital humanities: progress.  We’ve been trimming audio and scheduling new interviews.  Julia seems to have a better handle on things than me, as she has both of her interviews pretty much in stone, whereas I am still being snubbed by candidates.  However, I’m very optimistic I’ll be able to get one for this week with a long-standing administrator on campus, who should be able to fill me in on a lot of campus history.  We’re also working on getting our site in a more presentable order, with more for a viewer to see, even in these building stages.  I really want to dive into TimeLine JS this week, but am a little wary that we don’t have enough new material for it yet that hasn’t already been covered in the original timeline we made for the class.  My goal is to have the site in good order by Tuesday, so we can get some feedback and continue to work towards improving it.