Journey to the East – Progress Report (Week 9)

By Lila, Jeanny, and Nina

In narrowing down the scope of our project, we decided to focus on important events and visits within Sichuan Province that the Carleton-in-China representatives participated in. We were able to obtain the metadata and private letters pertaining to Sichuan after discussing our project with Hsianghui Liu-Spencer, someone working specifically with the archival materials from these travels. So far, we have matched specific photographs with context provided in Domke’s letters. We have also tried to match events with dates and locations. We recently worked on creating the ArcGIS map with icons to represent the different locations. We also discovered a potential object for scanning and incorporating into our narrative.

Since the previous blog post, we have needed to narrow our scope in order to have a manageable project with a timeline and strong narrative. We have not had to change the tools (ArcGIS and StoryMaps) that we are going to use. Our plan is to map the locations of the events represented in the photographs and then use the StroyMaps tool to add the narrative elements from the letters and other resources. We may encounter issues in the near future about how we are going to construct the narratives with photos and videos.

Another problem that we encountered is that we did not initially consider what 3D object model to create for our project when we planned out the timeline. Most of the objects stored in the archive for this project are paper copies, which are hard to turn into 3D models. We then talked to the director of this archive project and she found some possible objects that are possible to digitize. From the collections, we found a book that might have been used by students to sing in music classes. We hope to turn this music book into a digital object and convert some of the pages into audio.

Timeline (On Track)

Week 7: Completed!

Week 8: Completed!

Week 9:

• Customize the map that we want to present
• Turn the 2D information into 3D maps in StoryMaps
• Continue to construct the map
• Scan our 3D object
• Start structuring the presentation slides

Week 10:

• Finish up any loose ends and implement feedback
• Finish the presentation slides and practice presenting

Here (https://contentdm.carleton.edu/digital/collection/Carl_In_China) is a link to the collection of photographs taken on the representative’s travels.

Thank you for your interest in our project!