Month: September 2017

Hey everyone!

This week went way better for us both. On Tuesday we got the opportunity to spend a few hours in the Virginiana Room and really spend time looking over all the articles and make photocopies of them to bring with us just in case. Through this process, we were able to solidify what pages we were going to have in the layout of our website. We found a lot of articles detailing lunch sit-ins that occurred in protest to the community’s inaction to desegregate the local schools. We also found a lot of articles about Stafford’s experience with reaching integration specifically so we decided to have a whole page dedicated to that county in particular since most of the other schools didn’t have as much sources about the conflict in their counties. Finally, we found a lot of articles that covers the students’ first-hand recollection of the events surrounding desegregation and how integration opened doors for them. While we were there, we also met a representative from the Central Rapphannock Heritage Center who was able to get us started at looking what they’ll have to offer us materials-wise when we visit there next week. She gave us some personal contacts that we can talk to about our subject when we go. She also helped us find the picture of the first African American student to enter Stafford Elementary school and we were able to request and be granted permission for us to use it on our website! Now we feel much more prepared and ready to gather more sources from the heritage center when we visit this upcoming week. Right now we are working on our contract and factoring in the feedback from the previous assignments to make sure we present a solid and well thought out contract that covers all we need to cover in regards to discussing our research and website.

I know it been a while since I posted last but during that time I spent looking into the school newspaper and planning out our research plan. Erin was able to look more in depth into the Archives and public library and found some pretty awesome stuff that we will be viewing together today. Below is our research plan that I believe is realistic enough for us to accomplish. The only obstacle that we have to accomplish is the IRB process in which we are working on to complete ASAP.

Research Timeline
MileStone One: October 12
Milestone Goals: By October 12th the newspaper and online article collection should be complete. This includes, Keene Equinox articles digitized, Keene Sentinel articles, Youtube news clips, News articles from various perspectives and any town hall transcripts. Also photographs of downtown Keene should be taken
(Newspaper archive collecting should be done first because it will be more time consuming)
September 25- Mason library archives. Digitize Equinox articles from 1991 to present

September 25/26- Keene Public Library. Sentinel articles

Find a transcript of town hall meetings

Citi IRB training should be done by the weekend of October 8th

Finish Entire IRB Process by Oct. 8th

Milestone 2: October 26
Milestone Goals: By October 26th the interviews should be completed and uploaded to the website
Interviewing students will be the easy part because we are going to interview people we know
Interviewing community members might be harder because it will involve more scheduling and taking the time to find people who will want to be interviewed.

The interview workload will be split in half. Tyler will interview around 3 students/faculty and Erin will interview 3 students/faculty. Any community member interviews can be done together

Interviews will be asked to share their experiences of either how they remembered Pumpkin Fest in the past, the riot incident, or how they’ve seen resolution come out of the conflict

One or two staff members will be asked to discuss their opinion on the subject and give their point of view
Michael Antonucci will be interviewed on his opinion on how the media reaction to the riot is reflective of the double standards

Milestone 3: November 9
Milestone Goal: tentatively by this date we will have gathered all of our information and begin to upload our findings to our wordpress site.
The structure of this website will be interactive and allow the viewer to view the Pumpkin Festival in chronological order from its inception and throughout the years.
The website will include a hub of information , where viewers can see what was going on in Keene during that years pumpkin festival.
Included in those informational post will include the findings we have gathered through the research as well as critical analysis of the conflict in its relation to the intersectionality of resolution.

Milestone 4: November 30th
MileStone Goal:  Be ready to present the wordpress website and discuss the conflict resolution of this contemporary event.
Have all the parts of the website working correctly including all videos, links and interview audios.
Prepare what key points we will focus on in the presentation

 

Research Timeline

MileStone One: October 12

Milestone Goals: By October 12th the newspaper and online article collection should be complete. This includes, Keene Equinox articles digitized, Keene Sentinel articles, Youtube news clips, News articles from various perspectives and any town hall transcripts. Also photographs of downtown Keene should be taken

• (Newspaper archive collecting should be done first because it will be more time consuming)
• September 25- Mason library archives. Digitize Equinox articles from 1991 to present
• September 25/26- Keene Public Library. Sentinel articles

• Find a transcript of town hall meetings

• Citi IRB training should be done by the weekend of October 8th
• Finish Entire IRB Process by Oct. 8th

Milestone 2: October 26

Milestone Goals: By October 26th the interviews should be completed and uploaded to the website

• Interviewing students will be the easy part because we are going to interview people we know
• Interviewing community members might be harder because it will involve more scheduling and taking the time to find people who will want to be interviewed.
• The interview workload will be split in half. Tyler will interview around 3 students/faculty and Erin will interview 3 students/faculty. Any community member interviews can be done together

• Interviews will be asked to share their experiences of either how they remembered Pumpkin Fest in the past, the riot incident, or how they’ve seen resolution come out of the conflict
• One or two staff members will be asked to discuss their opinion on the subject and give their point of view
  • Michael Antonucci will be interviewed on his opinion on how the media reaction to the riot is reflective of the double standards

Milestone 3: November 9

Milestone Goal: tentatively by this date we will have gathered all of our information and begin to upload all our findings to our wordpress site.

• The structure of this website will be interactive and allow the viewer to view the Pumpkin Festival in chronological order from its inception and throughout the years.

• The website will include a hub of information , where viewers can see what was going on in Keene during that years pumpkin festival.
• Included in those informational post will include the findings we have gathered through the research as well as critical analysis of the conflict in its relation to the intersectionality of resolution.

 

Milestone 4: November 30th

MileStone Goal- Be ready to present the wordpress website and discuss the conflict resolution of this contemporary event.

• Have all the parts of the website working correctly including all videos, links and interview audios.

 

Today I went to the archives in my school’s library. This was the real first time I took a few hours to sit down and look at newspapers. I started with the first year of the festival in 1991 and looked at the October 30th edition of each year up to 2003. I really liked doing this and it put some pieces of my project together for me. I noticed that with each Halloween edition there was also an article about either arrests, excessive partying or vandalism going back to the early 90’s. This really shows that the riot and mob mentality that the pumpkin festival caused was a long time coming. Also I had the impression that everyone loved the Pumpkin Festival but as the years went on there were many student opinion pieces talking about how they thought the festival was too chaotic and they had wished it wasn’t growing bigger each year. One article even said they thought “It was a disaster waiting to happen” and this was said in 1998.

Overall, my research today made me more excited for the project now that I can see the historical timeline of the event in pictures and in writing.

Guess I need to work on this whole “blog” thing. I’ll be honest I’m not a big computer person so remembering to do this escapes me most of the time. However, it is nice to see where everyone else is with their projects and makes me feel like my own is at the right stage.

So, along with being horrible at blogging and keeping you guys and gals up to date, I’m also pretty bad at setting up websites. Mostly because I’ve never done it before. However, I feel that Shane and I have quite a bit of useful information. We have a lot of strong sources, primary and secondary, images, figures. Lots of stuff to sort through. That will be another challenging part, sorting through it all. Of course we want people to read the website and not just look through the pretty pictures and timelines. As a history major, I find the real meat and potatoes to be in the written parts of a project and not so much in the extra-curricular aspects. But as Shane mentioned in his blog post, we’re going to struggle to make our website not just a lot of endless paragraphs on endless pages.

So, that’s why it’s nice to see what my classmates are posting about! I believe you folks will really help bring out the creativity in Shane and I. Give us some ideas about what we could do with our own website, ideas on how to structure it, so on and so forth.

Attached here is our research plan:

Schedule of Milestones (When Critical Pieces are Ready to Present)

 

• • October 5: Visit the heritage center and revisit the Virginiana Room and campus library to gather research materials.

 

• October 12: All research materials gathered.

 

• • October 19: All research materials are evenly divided among us and analysis has begun.

 

• October 26: All research materials are analyzed and organized neatly by counties/school system

 

• • November 2: Skeleton of website is made and timeline is completed.

 

• November 9: All information is inserted to the website and draft is completed.

 

• • November 16: Perform revisions to website based on professors’ feedback.
  • November 21: Finalize website.

 

• November 30: Website is submitted.

 

• December 5/7: Presentations.

 

Delegation of Responsibilities:

 

Kailee: The timeline, King George County Schools page, Full Integration is realized page, Present Day Conflict in Remembering Desegregation page.

 

Alyssa: Skeleton of Website, Stafford County Schools Page, Tensions Leading up to Brown vs. Board of Education Page, Desegregation Continues in Other Schools in the Fredericksburg Area Page

 

(Pages above are tentative. They will be solidified upon submission of research contract)

Both: Bibliography

Alyssa Macaranas and Kailee Adkins

Conflict In America

Dr. Wallace and Dr. Welsh

9/25/2017

 

Schedule of Milestones (When Critical Pieces are Ready to Present)

• • October 5: Visit the heritage center and revisit the Virginiana Room and campus library to gather research materials.

 

• October 12: All research materials gathered.

 

• • October 19: All research materials are evenly divided among us and analysis has begun.

 

• October 26: All research materials are analyzed and organized neatly by counties/school system

 

• • November 2: Skeleton of website is made and timeline is completed.

 

• November 9: All information is inserted to the website and draft is completed.

 

• • November 16: Perform revisions to website based on professors’ feedback.
  • November 21: Finalize website.

 

• November 30: Website is submitted.

 

• December 5/7: Presentations.

Delegation of Responsibilities:

Kailee: The timeline, King George County Schools page, Full Integration is realized page, Present Day Conflict in Remembering Desegregation page.

Alyssa: Skeleton of Website, Stafford County Schools Page, Tensions Leading up to Brown vs. Board of Education Page, Desegregation Continues in Other Schools in the Fredericksburg Area Page

(Pages above are tentative. They will be solidified upon submission of research contract)

Both: Bibliography

Blog #5 –  September 25, 2017

Kailee and I are starting to finalize the tasks we need to do for the upcoming weeks. We plan to finalize the places we need to research for out topic. We plan to go to our regional library, and to go to the Heritage Center to get archives.  Kailee and I have both been sick and busy, so we have not been able to get ahead in our plans on looking through our research. We are planning to get back into it this week!

For this week we are starting to plan what pages are going to be on the website. Kailee was able to get a book from our school library about different high schools, but it only gave history before the time period that we want. I went looking through some of the articles that we photocopied from the library, and we found some good articles an timelines to have an idea of what information we want for the pages. We plan to do pages on our website for different high schools involved, a page about bringing in all together, a page for what is happening currently in the high schools, and a page on the events leading up to the desegregation. We are still trying to figure out how to do it in a narrative fashion, but with the timeline we will be able to lay out the story.

I also need to work on making sure I am commenting on other people’s posts, and to make sure I approve the comments of other people. I will make sure to have that as a mini goal for me this upcoming week.

I hope you are all doing well, and good luck!