Reflecting on Week Three of Mapping Freedom

My third week of the Mapping Freedom REU was probably my busiest yet, and with all the work we completed, there were also many new areas for thought, success, and reflection. On Monday and Wednesday, we met with Dr. La Beaud to discuss different aspects of the Digital Humanities discipline and the sustainability of metadata, DH projects, file naming conventions, and an assortment of information. I enjoyed learning how to properly organize and preserve my digital files with different tools and methods provided by Dr. La Beaud and organizations like the Digital Preservation Coalition. I will now remember that I should always format my date with "four-digit year-two digit month-two digit date" and never use spaces or extra periods as this may cause the files to experience "bit-rot" as computer software and file recognition systems change. On Tuesday, we met with Dr. Aleise McGowan, a professor of computer science here at the University of Southern Mississippi, to discuss how websites are secured and the ten most common risks to someone's data, as stated on the OWASP website. Computer science has never really been my area of expertise, so it was good to take the information and break it down so that I could grasp a small concept. On Thursday, we had our first GIS lecture with Dr. Kayla Stan, a geography professor who also teaches here at USM. We flew through an introduction to GIS and jumped into how to add files, join data from CWRGM, and visualize where particular letters are coming from by creating layers from selections, etc. Thankfully, I have moderate experience with GIS already, so I was happy to understand at least the refresher course that was being presented. For this experience, we are using QGIS, an open-source GIS software that works on both Mac and Windows. I was thrilled to see the similarities between QGIS and ArcMap, the program I used previously that preferred Windows computers, and how similar the key commands, user interface, and basic creation features were. In general, it was nice to do GIS on my Apple laptop instead of using a desktop. Lastly, on Friday, we all met with staff and faculty to confirm our research topics and review any questions before moving forward. During this time, I met with Dr. Ural and Dr. Stan to discuss my ideas and possible concerns.

We had a lot of independent work time this week, and during that time, I continued to research and refine my topic, as well as create Excel spreadsheets about the authors of my CWRGM letters and the historic newspapers I saved from newspapers.com. This was a bit of a tricky process, but after all, was said and done, I have an in-progress, very rough draft of what I want my letters to look like when they are mapped out (see picture above^). I have all of the letters that I plan to use mapped out based on their latitude and longitude (which means a few overlap), with the author, date of the letter, author's age, profession, and other biographical information. I am proud of my accomplishments this week and cannot wait to see how far I can go as the weeks continue.

I will also reflect a bit on what prevented me from doing my best work this week:

• I think I am a bit confused about how our CS lectures will connect directly to the deliverable of this project. I understand entirely learning about CS and website security. I wonder where that will connect to our GIS and research article.

• I feel like I might be getting too far ahead of myself with my work since much of our parameters are open-ended regarding where we can look for sources and what style of map we can use. I think that I need to slow down a bit and assess before I jump in too far. I have found more work for myself, which has been a different experience, but I guess that is part of being a historian.

• The food from The Fresh continues to be meh.