group log

Hi guys,

Here's what I came up with for the group log. I would like to send this off to John tonight if possible. Let me know if you guys have any ideas for changes or items to include.

Scott


Group Awesome Log

Final division of labour for the website:

Scott: Verney page; Irvines page; copy editing
Dan: McKenzie page; website construction and graphics editing
Taryn: Melrose page; Bartleman page; copy editing


Our group began with a very broad conception of our project as examining rural land use, with a particular interest in farming, in the early years of colonial Vancouver Island. As such, we initially made two group visits to the BC Archives (February 14th and 19th) where we investigated such leads as the colonial ‘blue books,’ the McKenzie family papers, and various documents (particularly those filed under colonial correspondence) relating to the HBC and the PSAC. Though at that point our ambitions for the website were still undefined, we did find here several nuclei of our eventual product: Taryn discovered references to the Melrose Diary while examining clippings from a Colonist series on early families in Victoria. Scott also came across the first references to the Irvine family at that point. As mentioned above, we were targeting the McKenzie family from early on, and their extensive records became very valuable.

It was not long after these discoveries that we came to the dual realizations that, first, examining individuals might be a more rewarding (and more microhistorical) endeavour than examining statistics alone, and second, that all the individuals we had been examining had a strong connection to Craigflower farm. The article the class read on Edmund Verney compelled us to add him to our cast of characters, and shortly after, Taryn discovered repeated references to Bartleman in Melrose’s diary, which compelled her to examine his life further as well.

Parallel to these discussions, which had been taking place in class time, over email, on our blog, and at a couple of meetings at the university and downtown, we were considering how we might go about creating a website design which both suited the content of our project and was an innovative, useful method for presenting historical material on the internet. This latter consideration led us to develop the ‘two-window’ system which we believed would help eliminate a problem we had noticed on a number of similar websites – primary sources or other supporting information were generally presented in a format which, to examine them fully, required the viewer to leave the page which they were then reading. We decided that the most useful way to solve this issue would be to present a highly readable account of the character’s life on the left and complement that with a range of supporting text, documents, and other sources on the right. Not only was this a useful way of presenting historical information online in its own right, but we also felt that it would help our site to capture the attention of readers of various interest levels by offering them an easy way to choose how much of the site they explored.

The final assignments of pages took place fairly late in the process; for much of the period we were all working on many leads and swapping ideas for the various people we came across. Scott ended up taking on the Irvines since he had originally discovered their fonds in the BC Archives, and Verney since he had a prior interest in the Royal Navy and his mother had grown up in Esquimalt; Dan, being the most technically accomplished in the group, took on website construction, and as a result wrote only one page of the final site (though an important one) – this was McKenzie, chosen partly because Dan lives near Craigflower and had considered visiting the archives there; Taryn took on Melrose, since she had originally discovered the existence of his diary, and Bartleman, since he was mentioned in that diary.