Milestone 3: November 9

The semester has been really flying by. Especially now that the excitement of October and Halloween is gone. But me and Tyler are making a lot of progress on our word press sites and have steered the project in a direction that works for our goals and time availability. There were a few new components we added and many parts that we elaborated on to make the pieces fit together.

• We gave almost all the newspaper images and articles captions. The captions are meant to summarize the importance and purpose of the article of photograph. We explained why the article was important to the narrative of the timeline. Also for the articles that were challenging to read because of small or faded print I quoted the most important lines for easier access.
• I introduced the two different decades with their own page without any pictures. On the 90’s and 2000’s introduction pages I summarized the gist of what the newspapers and photographs were saying so the reader could know what they were looking for before going through the years.
• Photographs of the 2017 Pumpkin Festival. Two weekends ago was the 2017 Pumpkin Festival so I took about 12 photographs of the event and put them on a tab called “photos and videos”. Along with these photos Tyler wrote a few paragraphs about the mood of the festival and talked about its success as a kids festival.
• Broader picture. Under the “Media Portrayal” menu there is a new page called “Riots in America Today”. This brings the Pumpkin Fest conflict into a wider lens and looks at other riots that happened in the same year. The two that were focused on are the Ferguson riots and the Uconn riot all taking place in 2014. I found sources that had very different reactions to the riots and talked about the double standard for white college students rioting compared to black people protesting an injustice. This might step out of the focus of our project a little bit but it was very important for me and Tyler because we are American Studies majors and our major is all about looking at America through a wider lens and making connections between events and society and to ignore this aspect of the conflict would feel wrong.