The original goal for our MileStone 2 was to have all interviews completed. The whole interview process had been a road block throughout the semester. It wasn’t the fault of our school but the idea of the long proccess seemed to distract us from our other research so I have been focusing more on archival research. The interviews and opinion pieces we found in those newspapers and news station reports have been just as, if not more, beneficial to the project as a personal interview might have been. We decided to shift our project more into the direction of primary sources through different forms of media to create a narrative and timeline. But Tyler is setting up a time to meet with a women who worked on a city council board in 2015 to resolve the conflict in the city.
Some progress that we have made is uploading 30 primary source newspaper articles and images each organized by year. Also I have included a tab about mass media news stations and their coverage of the Pumpkin Festival Riots because much of the conflict that has happened since the riots has been revolved around Keene’s damaged image. So far I have internet articles and videos from MSNBC, NBC and the BBC. I was very surprised to find the BBC article because I didn’t realize the riots made international news.
I have also added a tab for “First Hand Accounts and Interviews” this is where the interview with local politician Maggie Rice will be located and different online first hand accounts coming from various social media platforms like Twitter, blogs and Youtube. One of the interviews is with the former president of the college.
Moving forward I will work on making captions and descriptions for each of the newspaper articles and pulling out important quotes so the reader doesn’t have to read the whole article to understand why it was important. With the Pumpkin Fest coming up this weekend and the drama and pressure surrounding it I’m feeling how many students probably felt in in the years leading up to the riot, happy once the whole thing is over with. But this weekend will bring good first hand accounts and photos of the 2017 Pumpkin Festival.