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.