While I continue futzing with Twine and getting my geolocation triggers to work properly, I’ve turned my focus more towards the actual content of my piece. Dr. Graham has emphasized that I need to know exactly what story I want to tell regarding the Carleton campus space, seeing as there are a ton of avenues that I could focus on. In order to get a more specific perspective, we organized a meeting with Dr. Joanna Dean, whose 2000-level history class inspired me to look into Ottawa’s environmental history for this project. We had an awesome round-table about where we could see things going, and bouncing ideas off each other. This ended up taking over a few whiteboards in Dr. Graham’s office, a few chicken scratch pages in my notebook before taking its current form as an ever-growing sticky note mind map on a wall.

I’ve held off on actually diving into research until I had a firm idea of what story I was looking to tell, mainly out of fear that I would become consumed by research and spend weeks taking notes on information that ultimately will not be useful to my project. (See: the twelve pages of notes I took when scouring multiple volumes of the *Documents on Canadian External Affairs. *) However, having mapped out my thoughts, I’ve now got a fairly clear idea of the general path I would like my application to take, so now it becomes time to make the Maps, Data and Government Information Centre (MADGIC) my new home base of operations.