Blog post 8

 This week, our team made a lot of progress on creating an expansive timeline of events at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). My individual contributions were based on researching and processing events such as former president, Barack Obama's visit to campus, the history of our wildcat mascot, the influenza epidemic, and the impact of September 11, 2001, on the university community. We planned to evenly divide the workload and collaborate and communicate to make sure our findings and our presentation was consistent and not all over the place. This plan ended up working out as we communicated and went through the university's library archives, however our timeline is not a complete history of the school, we focused on specific events and deep-dived our assigned events.

One unexpected change was the amount of archival material available for some events compared to others. For example, the amount of information on 9/11's effect allowed for a better account of the event, while data on the Obama's visit to campus required more effort to find relevent information. The project, so far, is going better than I had anticipated. My group's combined effort has resulted in a (unfinished) great timeline of UNH's history that has both well-known events and lesser-known ones, like the student boycott and the alleged "alien abduction" incidents researched by my other group members.

In terms of Digital Humanities (DH) concepts, we applied metadata and digital archiving to organize our research effectively. We are also working on pasting it into a timeline template platform which are data visualization tools to map out the timeline, making sure that the presentation is not only informative but also aesthetically pleasing to look at. This makes sure that the presentation will look clean and professional.

Looking ahead to the final presentation, we are making an interactive digital timeline on knightlabs that could be that will feature events and research from our school's library archives. Our work will hopefully provide a constructive timeline that will highlight both known and unknown events and provide a better view of the school's past. When we continue to our group presentation, we will explain what DH concepts we used like user experience design and interactive media to make the timeline's processing easier to understand. On top of that, we will also paste photos, videos, and audio clips to make our presentation more entertaining.

Overall, the project so far has been moving a lot smoother than I expected. When my group first started I was absolutely lost and had no idea what I was doing. Our team’s collaboration, along with the digital tools we've used, will hopefully help us create a project that really brings UNH's history to life and preserves it in a meaningful way.