Tangible progress on my research project came to a bit of a halt over reading week. The project itself hangs in stasis; still waiting on me to scan many of the plates from the atlas I mentioned last post. I’ve continued to trawl for information, but have found that I seem to be running into the issue of not finding as much material on what one would truly consider the environmental history of the campus space as I had hoped. Instead, I seem to be finding snippets of environmental history between a plethora of history on the development and construction of campus. It has me torn, as I had originally thought that taking that route would be dull, however the construction of Carleton University as it is today has been a rather complex process. It has left me in a position of thinking that maybe I will find a way to incorporate this information in some way in my final project. On the topic of my final project, it now has a fairly firm deadline of November 18th, as Dr. Graham and I are set to talk about it at Carleton’s GIS Day event!
As for the more prominent reason why my project has been stalled, that would be because I ended up using my reading week to work on coursework, particularly a digital project for my Introduction to Digital Humanities course. For this project, we were given a few guideline projects that we could do, or given the option to create our own digital piece with the professor’s approval. I decided to take the ‘free project’ option, and basically presented it to the instructor as a mishmash of several different projects I have worked on in the past few years, but particularly focussed on creating what will be the yet another form of my “Explore Ottawa” project. Why is this relevant to the work that I’m doing here, you may ask? Because I am utilizing the technology and premise that I’m using for my fellowship project: hacking Twine to use geo-location. So while I’ve been less focussed on my exact project, I’ve been fiddling around with the technical aspects of it for the last little while, which has been fun as well as educational!
