This past week, the four of us at Mary Washington got together to try and divvy up the responsibilities for the site, both for our own project and for the creation of the overall site for this Century America project.  It was an interesting process just because I have never worked on a group endeavor in such extensive terms before, and planning a website is a lot different than simply proposing a paper!  I think we did a decent job of trying to assess what each of our roles within the project are going to be, and how we will work together to create an overarching site that everyone involved will be proud of.

For my part, I will be collecting and publishing the narrative about Josiah P. Rowe (which will be found in the Fredericksburg section of the site) and compiling the information from President Russell’s papers into a section on Administration at the State Normal School (to be found in the SNS section of the site).  This will entail digitizing whatever sources that I think will best contribute to these narratives, as well as writing about what we’ve discovered and what the two sections that I am in charge of will entail.  With Leah, I will also be responsible for creating the page for the State Normal School, from which the viewer will be able to see the different sections about the school during that time.

Lastly, Candice and I will be making a map using Maps Alive in order to show which states have schools participating in the Century America project that is sponsored by COPLAC and the Teagle Foundation.  This map will live on the site home page for the entire Century America project and will hopefully be able to engage the reader and excite them about the diversity of the project.  I might just be a little bitter (just a bit) that we won’t be using GIS and this software isn’t spatial, but I know that for the purpose of this project this will be much easier and user-friendly than trying to incorporate elements from ArcMap.

As for advertising, we have considered going to the Bullet to get an article published on the school website either for our ADH class or the Century America project, which would then hopefully provide links to each of the participating websites so that we can get viewers from there.  On a more realistic scale, we will try to reach out to those students already at our school, and proceed by word of mouth and via social media to get our friends and their acquaintances to view our website.  Because the project is about our school, it should be interesting to those of us who attend the university to see what life was like here during the Great War.  Alumni would also be a potential audience since again they are invested in the university and are likely interested in its history.  Finally, another outlet that would be useful in cultivating an audience would be those who participate in reenacting – these individuals are already interested in military history and would most likely be interested in what was happening on the home front of this war as well.

All in all, I think our group is making headway and great progress!  Jack, Candice, Leah, and I can’t wait for what the semester holds for us in this project.  Now to see what bumps we might encounter along the way…