This week is all about prepping. We’ve crafted our Contract, started setting up our website, and have put everything in place to go visit archives and find our primary sources. Getting our contract ready was a relatively simple process for us. We looked at the old contract that was given as an example and built ours off of that. Kristen and I met up Friday morning and knocked out the majority of it and discussed the rest to be written out later. All in all, our contract lays out pretty well and coherently how we are approaching this project. To start our website we decided on a theme that is no fuss so as to not have the theme distract from the project. When we began to narrow down our topic originally we started thinking about pages and how we wanted to break down the work. That is why once we got the site we already had an idea of the desired format. However, our format is flexible. If it turns out there isn’t all that much information on cyclists who train on the Parkway then maybe they don’t need an entire page to themselves. Maybe they fall better into a category that includes more types of tourists.

 

Personally what I’m most looking forward to is starting to visit archives. We’ve sent out emails to different archivists in the area who we’ve seen have sources of interest to us. Two of them are out of town until next week, but hopefully we hear back from the rest of them soon and are able to start carefully flipping through folders in boxes and finding treasures. Looking at old photos of the Parkway and comparing them to the same stretch of road as it stands today is something I love doing and I’m excited to incorporate that into the StoryMap and website in general. Contacting our community resources put us a week ahead of our desired timeline so I look forward to completing the rest of the things on our list and hopefully taking on our timeline head on.

 

Our contract lives on its own page on this site, on the Blue Ridge Parkway Contract page!