Week 7 [7/5 - 7/11]

We're in the home stretch of the program! This week, I completed my mapping and began work on my final presentation. I still have lots of work to do, but the end is in sight and I have a better idea of my project's narrative!

Beautiful Hot Springs, AR

Accomplishments

I'm happy to say that I created three maps of my data this week! One shows the distribution of aid requests across Mississippi, one shows the aid deliveries, and one shows the most popular counties and locations for deliveries. I then uploaded these as webmaps via Leaflet, copied them to a GitHub repository, and embedded them in the Project page of my website. I even played around with formatting in the webmap css files! This week, I also created a (very) rough draft of my final presentation and practiced it in front of my fellow researchers and USM faculty. The presentation went well, and I got some very helpful feedback, but I wish I had prepared more. Finally, we also finished creating an AI chatbot to help us analyze our letters!

Barriers to my best work

Thanks to the plethora of design options within QGIS, I spent longer creating and formatting my maps and tables than I had originally hoped. While I'm happy with the outcome, it took away valuable time that I could and should have used to draft my presentation.

Things i learned

Although it's crunch time, we had time for some informative lectures. First, we learned how the Wayback Machine and other sites harvest webpages, and practiced uploading our websites through Conifer. We also got an introduction to scholarly publishing, including the review process and how to avoid predatory journals. During the practice presentation, I was told to focus less on the data analysis aspect and emphasize the 'human' narrative of my project. I also need to contextualize the 1874 flood for my audience, explain the limitations of my study, and give more credit to my research (manually reading letters and extrapolating data).

Next Research steps

The next steps are pretty cut and dry this week. I need to prioritize my presentation and slides, and continue working on my paper draft. There are also some housekeeping tasks to complete like write my citations and reformat my tables.

A snippet of the South

For the Fourth of July weekend, a bunch of us took a road trip to Little Rock and Hot Springs, Arkansas! Highlights included a trip to the Bill Clinton Presidential Museum, a firework show with a symphony, and a wonderful hike through Hot Springs National Park followed by a refreshing stay in the historic Quapaw Bathhouse. We also had lunch in a railroad themed restaurant, and passed around a cold!

Road trip!

Bug of the week

I saw many candidates for Bug of the Week on the Arkansas trip, but there can only be one winner. This gorgeous katydid, who I think is a fork-tailed bush katydid, was perched perfectly on this heart shaped leaf! Out of all the pictures I've taken so far in my brief amateur insect photography career, this is my favorite.

Say cheese!

Pose for the camera