So the semester has come to an end, this time next week I will be the proud owner of a Bachelors degree in Anthropology. Yay me! Two months from now, I will probably be downing every morsel of bbq and biscuits and gravy before I begin the next chapter of my life by moving to South Korea to chase a boy band… ahem I mean teach English.

But before that, I wanted to this blog post as a bit of a reflection on this project and talk about my last little edits to it before I take the plunge and turn it in, thus freeing me to do my other projects (you know, the ones that I don’t have to do well on to graduate college).

So, if you can’t tell from my previous posts, I was not entirely keen on this project. I find the Civil War to be painfully boring (really American history in general) and I am not particularly adept with technology (though once I do finally get it, I usually do pretty well with it, it just takes a while). On top of that, this was hands down the MOST frustrating project I have ever had to do, mostly because I have never encountered the unique issue of “I can’t find hardly any information, and yet I can’t change the topic either”. So that was fun, though in hindsight, it’s probably something that I should experience in the rather closed environment of school before I go out into the real world.

Now that I am pretty much done, I am oddly satisfied with it. It’s not as nice as that one lady’s in class, the one who has a picture of her soldier, but I actually rather wish it was. I’m jealous that her soldier left behind a nice trail for her to follow, where mine didn’t leave behind hardly anything. But, still yet, I’m pleased with how it turned out. There are still some weird little things on the site that I couldn’t figure out (like how to rotate the signature pictures) but it still looks kind of nice. I especially like the Battle of Chancellorsville page, It almost looks professional.

All in all, while I am extremely glad that this is finished, I am still rather grateful for the few lessons I learned while doing this project. I am also happy that, even if he was a pretty boring guy, I was able to help tell Adam Meyer’s story, one that might have been completely forgotten otherwise.

Well, we are finally to the exhibit building part, time to see just how sparse information on Adam really is. This is something I already know, but no one else does.

It’s really freaking sparse. Just so you know. He didn’t do much of anything. So while I am going to do my best with this cause I REALLY want to graduate in 2 weeks, it ain’t gonna be much. Sigh.

So as for the actual exhibit building, it is pretty straightforward. I am still working on uploading some pictures (it’s tedious so I have taken a really long time to do it cause typing up the metadata makes my eyes want to bleed) so that has caused a kink or two here and there. Also I didn’t realize that I needed to upload each picture separately (I’ve been uploading things that are front and back of the same document to the same item file) so I have ran into issue with that, so I will need to fix that up this weekend. I suppose that I just need to sit down and do all this, which I am going to do tomorrow. Me and 2-3 5 hour energies are going to become best buddies and get this done so I can get feedback on it next Wednesday.

I have pretty much set up one entire section, which is his pre-war life. I’ve done this because I have pretty much no information on this, so it was pretty quick. I’ll probably go about setting up the exhibit to match the chronology of his life, this is because the most information I have is actually about how his wife lived out the rest of her life after he died. Mathilda was a bit more interesting than Adam to be perfectly honest. She moved to Delaware for some unknown reason (I tried to see if she had relatives there but no luck in finding anything, perhaps she just liked the climate better; I can guarantee you Delaware is far nicer than Indiana in the summers).

So the past few days, I’ve been fiddling with the Google Ngram thing. I’ve looked up tons of different things (mostly related to fantasy books, if I’m being perfectly honest) and even a few searches related to my soldier.

Now, as with everything to do with Mr. Adam Meyer, I don’t have much to work with. He seems to have been a pretty low key sort of guy and didn’t do much at all after the war. So unfortunately, I am left with some pretty generic key words to search for him. I narrowed the search dates down to 1800-1894 (the year Adam Meyer died) and looked up Civil War, (which obviously came up a lot near the early 1860’s), veterans (which was popular in the later 1860’s), and rheumatism (which hit it’s stride in the 1880s, about the time that Adam started experiencing it himself).

Unfortunately nothing much would come up for coach maker (Adam’s post-war profession) which was one of the only real identifying factors about his life. So all in all, text mining was not terribly useful for my guy, though I can see how it would be for other people with soldiers who led more interesting lives.

My main search

So I know this is really really late, I’m sorry. However, I am doing it before next class so that’s something right? Right?

Either way, this week I did some mapping of Adam Meyer’s life. It took me a while to figure out cause, as usual, my computer is super freaking slow and I’m never quite there with what is happening in class because my computer is like 3 steps behind (its usually crying “Chrome is not responding” and blurring out my tab bar because it has less RAM than my Windows 98 Compac Presario whatever thing) but I digress.

So mapping. Once I got it all working it went pretty fast, I really have only one thing left to plot, which is where Adam and Mathilda got married. Other than that I have the entire thing plotted, I plan to put dates he was in those places in the little info boxes, especially for the places he went during the war, as some of those places he was only at for a few days at a time. Over all this was pretty simple and straightforward once I figured it out, and it will add a really interesting aspect to my omeka page as it shows Adam’s movements from birth to death (and if I can figure out how to change the line appearance, I will add in his wife’s movement after his death).

With this I am inching closer to being done with this project, and this makes me very very happy. I plan on getting my picture from Blenheim house in two days so there is that, and then I hope to be able to fully complete steps 1-4 on the “You should have this done by now page” I have most of it started but not terribly much finished, so I want to get that out of the way so that I can focus on the last little bit and my other final project (which is a wee tad more interesting to me)

So over the past couple of days, using this Daytum program has only reaffirmed my suspicions that I spend A LOT  of time doing SHINee related things. Though I did most definitely do other things (like homework, job hunting, and playing Rune Factory 4) the grand majority of my time is spent doing things that are SHINee (or at least kpop) related. I spent an absurd amount of time on tumblr and livejournal and an even more absurd amount of time on YouTube (which in my defense, I am watching SHINee videos for homework now too, as I am analyzing them for examples of feminized masculinity for my final anthropology paper before I graduate) watching music videos, interviews, and their shows. Then that is COMPLETELY overlooking the fact that about 1/3rd of the music on my iPhone is SHINee (and over half of my music on it is in Korean) so most of the time I’m listening to music I am listening to SHINee.

Here, join me… Listen to SHINee too.

The other thing I do a lot is drink coffee and water, almost evenly actually which I wouldn’t have guessed. Though really, I drink my coffee black so its really just over-glorified water.

More than anything, I found this Daytum thing to be really quite confusing, I only have two things to talk about because for the life of me I could not figure out how to add new displays and have them show up new things without overwriting the older displays. It just wasn’t happening, I just couldn’t seem to figure out how to do it, though I tried all weekend. I even kept up with my horrible diet to input should I figure it out (though if you’re curious, ramen with hoisin and sriracha is a large portion of my diet, ESPECIALLY when I’m watching k-dramas or reading online stories, and I also eat a really stupid amount of turkey bacon).

So apparently I missed a post, and since I am not entirely sure on what, but I only had 7 when I needed 8 so I am going to see if this will count as a make-up post.

Yesterday I decided to sit down and do a lot of things, namely the ancestry.com thing. While It was actually fairly interesting (especially when I got distracted and searched for my own relatives) it was one gigantic dead end. I feel bad, I really do. My guy’s page is going to be so barren, but there just isn’t much out there. I can’t find anything on his, or his wifes parents, they had no children. All of the people that signed his affidavits and other documents are dead ends too (or at least, I had so little information on them that I couldn’t single out one William Shepherd from Indiana from the other hundred William Shepherds). The men who signed with their initials were essentially unsearchable, because it wouldn’t really take the initials, and their last names were far too broad to be useful.

On the bright side though, I did actually get two pretty useful things out of it that I had no previously known. For one, Adam Meyer’s wife, Mathilda, moved to Delaware after he passed and lived there until she died about 22 years after he had died. Second, I found out just what Adam Meyer had done as  a job after the war, which was a coach maker. Now, I’m not 100% sure what that is yet (though I am assuming that it someone who makes carriages) but it is an excellent lead that I can use to flesh out his web page a bit more.

I am actually somewhat sad that he is such a home-body. I think I could have had a bit more fun with this if he had been a bit more interesting, like even some kids to research would have been fun. Alas.

So as usual I am a bit behind in getting this up, but in my defense, I work and have class pretty much all of Thursday and Friday so it is usually damn near impossible for me to get this in by Friday night, so Saturday is going to have to suffice unless I get my schedule changed for work.

Now onto the point.

So today I have been uploading some of the pictures to my Omeka site. The first one I did in class was Adam Meyer’s medical examination sheet and I had a pretty difficult time with that, mostly because the class  moves faster than my computer. But I got it, and later when I was able to really look at the website I figured it out most of the parts I was unsure about before. Today I uploaded two more pages, one being Meyer’s initial declaration for invalid pension and the other the four images that make up his muster rolls.

The first one was the Declaration of Invalid Pension and It took me a few minutes to figure out what I needed to do again after a few days but it didn’t take long. Typing in all the metadata is tedious but not difficult in the least.

The second was the Muster roll images, where I decided to put multiple images on the one page (not sure if I was supposed to do that or not, but it made the most sense given that they’re the same things) but it took ever so sightly longer to do just because I needed to add a date range and a variety of image names in the identifier section in the metadata.

Overall it was pretty simple and I plan to try and upload all of the images today so that is less that I have to work on later.

So you may wonder why the title of this post is “Irony”, well let me explain. So I have already expressed my general distaste for this project (mostly because I find pretty much anything Civil War related to be mind-numbingly dull, even if you try to stick zombies in it, I will probably be pretty bored) but in addition to that and my dislike of looking at old documents, I just learned that my soldier died in the town of Marion, Indiana. The small town I grew up in (in Southwest Virginia, mind you) was named Marion and the place where my mothers family is from is a small city in Indiana not far from where my soldier died. I hate both of these places with a fiery passion, so I just found it amusing that I have to lurk in the records of a place that I rather loathe. Joy.

Moving on.

So just to add insult to injury, there is pretty much just a four year window after the muster rolls end and his death date (1890-1894). So there is not much to work with, everything is going to be what is happening in that small span, in this small town, which as of the moment I am not finding much on. I am continuing to look obviously, but

Aha! As I type this I actually found something, its not much (it’s a wikipedia article) but it gives me an idea of what to look for in other places. So that’s nice.

Another problem I’m running into, while I have found a site (in.gov) that has all these lovely newspapers and birth/marriage/death certificates, not a one of them has been digitized. Which is utterly useless to me, as I can’t just lope out to Indiana and hang out in their microfilm room to look up the information.

Hopefully I will have more luck soon.

What do you have?

CDs?

• I do. I collect Kpop albums as they are really really nice. Other than that though, not really, I don’t store pictures on them or anything like that.

DVDs?

• I have a ton of DVD’s. Between my mother and I there are hundreds at the house.

Flash Drives?

• I use flash drives quite often. I tend to download things on my mac and transfer them to my other compute with a flash drive. I also use them a lot for school.

LPs?

• I honestly have no clue what this is.

Personal Archiving

What do you do with your photos?

• I keep some on my mac, some on my phone, and some on my new computer. Also some in dropbox though frankly that was an accident.

What do you do with your email?

• I keep my inbox pretty clean. I have folders for specific things if I want to find them again easily.

What do you do with your social media?

• I let it sit there and be social

What do you back up on to?

• I don’t really. I recognize this will bite me in the ass one day. The only things I back up is my collection of SHINee videos and pictures onto a special hard drive cause I have no life like that.

Your Passwords

Do you reuse?

• Yes, pretty consistently.

Are your passwords guessable?

• It is a strange password to guess. Mixing languages is weird, but I don’t think it would take a program too long to figure it out though.

Real details?

• Not really. I mean, if you know things I like it wouldn’t be too difficult I suppose, but it is still pretty weird.

Capitals at front?

• Yes.

Numbers/punctuation at end?

• Yes.

First name and date?

• No.

Mangling with numbers and letters (such as S and $)

• No.

Security

Is all your software updated?

• Not at the moment.

Do you use anti-virus software?

• I should….

Do you open suspicious email-phishing?

• No.

Do you use secure connections- SSL/ https?

• For some things, but definitely not for everything.

Do you manage cookies on your browser?

• I honestly have no clue what this means… again.

So this week in class we talked about Zotero, which I was actually pretty familiar with due to having taken a variety of anthropology classes the past five years which all really wanted us to make use of it. Though I don’t actually often use it, I will admit that it is a pretty fancy program and probably more useful than I give it credit for. I suppose I’m a masochist for the pain of searching for that article you read a week and a half ago on Jstor. I can Zotero being particularly helpful with this assignment though, because all of the sources will be pretty similarly titled, which will make searching for them again a very large pain. As for source types, as useful and interesting as primary sources can be, I personally prefer secondary sources. I feel as though this is mostly because the way that historical secondary sources are written is far closer to the way anthropological ethnographies (which are somewhere in between a primary and a secondary source) are written. Also because I loathe trying to decipher old handwriting. It is a migraine waiting to happen. Also secondary sources tend to cite multiple primary sources in the reference section, so when I do require primary sources I am able to refer back there and know exactly where to look for the most useful sources.