Week 4 [6/14 - 6/20]

Wow, I can't believe we're at the halfway point already! So much has happened in the last month. During this week alone, I wrote a literature review, began a methodology section, found some more hidden letters, and went on the most amazing hike at Red Bluff!

The view of Red Bluff from the top

Accomplishments

I focused on finding secondary sources and writing my literature review this week. Thankfully, I found some good papers related to flood management policies, and a few that specifically mentioned the flood of 1874. I also gained some more technical experience! As a class, we learned the basics of digital accessibility and updated our personal websites with these standards in mind. We also went through a full workflow in Excel and QGIS, which includes collecting and cleaning census data, joining that data with a shapefile, and using spatial analysis tools.

Barriers to my best work

For the second week in a row, I found a subset of letters that weren't tagged with the ones I had already collected. This list, though, was much shorter, but no less annoying. I also need to manually go through all of my letters once more and extract the relevant data, such as the places mentioned and the amount of aid requested or sent. I plan to spend most of next week just doing this process. I also procrastinated heavily on my literature review, putting it off until the very end of the week! Going forward, I will be more proactive and draft the rest of my paper components in stages.

Things i learned

I gained a lot of technical and practical skills this week! On the technical side, we discussed effective data visualizations and what to avoid. In a more general sense, we learned how to write a good but concise methodology section, and how to 'speed read' secondary sources. Efficient speed reading involves reading the introduction and conclusion in full, and reading topic sentences in the body sections while taking notes. Finally, we attended a short presentation about graduate school at USM, which has an interesting Geology MS program.

Next Research steps

Once I finally have all of my letters together in one document, I will manually extract additional data and add it to the spreadsheet. I will also finish writing my methodology section and begin work on the results component.

A snippet of the South

Last Sunday, I went on a hike with my fellow researchers to Red Bluff, Mississippi, about an hour northwest of Hattiesburg. It's a massive bluff known as the 'Little Grand Canyon,' while I wholeheartedly agree with. The views were breathtaking, but so was the hike, as we descended 150 feet to an abandoned train track, the site of a fascinating wreck, and back up again. My favorite part of the trip was traversing a clay riverbed and getting absolutely covered in orange! One last interesting thing is that the old highway used to pass through the park. Portions of one side eroded and fell into the canyon, however, and the new portion circumvents the bluff entirely.

The view from the bottom

Bug of the week

This week's star is an absolutely gorgeous Eastern Lubber Grasshopper, found along the railroad track at Red Bluff! I have never seen a grasshopper this large or this colorful, and I spent so much time with it that I momentarily lost my hiking group.

Eastern Lubber Grasshopper