Although this is technically true, I still wanted to see if I could locate a few sources that could potentially give a more specific location of each event. Turner was someone who I had already taken an interest in after our second Portfolio Activity involving the construction of metadata and close reading primary sources, but I knew that there were some loose ends that I wanted to tie up when approaching this assignment.Īfter completing the narrative map, I realized that every event I recorded takes place in one area, Southampton County, Virginia. I decided to create my narrative map around the life of Nat Turner, but more specifically what he was notorious for, the Southampton Insurrection. The Portfolio Activity that I wanted to revise was our seventh entry, the construction of a narrative map. Learning to use the Voyant AI to break down sources and point out similarities and patterns among them was especially helpful in gaining insight on the topic. This activity required us to take on a massive amount of information and develop an understanding of the topic in the most efficient way through the use of computational text analysis. One of the key takeaways from this activity was how to determine whether close reading or corroboration is a more efficient approach to starting your historical inquiry. In our fourth Portfolio Activity, we examined the importance of computational text analysis and how to utilize the “Model of Historical Thinking”. Most of the information comes from white members of the community, including letters recalling the events to family members out of state. Finding the required amount of primary sources wasn’t very difficult, however in my reading I hadn’t found a single source coming from a fellow enslaved African American that was involved in the Insurrection. This was evident to me in our second Portfolio Activity, where I decided I wanted to find some primary sources related to Nat Turner and his slave rebellion. The reasoning for this is that many events and first-hand recollections of what it’s like to be a slave have been, or attempted to be, erased from written history. Once I started this class, I thought it was especially interesting the fact that the history of slavery in the United States was going to be the focal point this semester. Even the bare minimum of looking to cite the actual primary source was something that I assumed I would eventually need to do in college, but never thought was expected in high school. Utilizing technology and the countless amount of resources available to aid my research process was something that I always relied on in high school, however, before this class I had never really cared to look further into the possibilities available from the tools we used this semester. Teaching kids methods like the ones we used this semester early on would help reduce any stress involved in the transition from high school to the college level and would make learning even more advanced techniques much easier. Not that the content being taught is useless, but after taking multiple of these types of classes I struggle to remember anything that was taught that I already didn’t have a basic understanding of. The skill of being able to use a computer efficiently is something that children are learning as early as the third grade, so I begin to question the curriculum of most high school technology classes. What I was doing in the past wasn’t necessarily wrong, but after gaining this new perspective I begin to wonder why this sort, of course, isn’t taught earlier on.I am aware that trying to work out all of the imperfections and difficulties with online resources was difficult at times, but I still believe that in a 5 day a week high school class with the teacher walking their students through step by step would ensure that at least some of these skills could be taught early on.Īfter all, more and more resources that students rely on are transitioning to some form of digital method. However not even a week into this class I had realized that I’ve only scratched the surface. I have taken a fair amount of history classes that seemed to assure me that the process I had been using was sufficient enough. Before I started this class, I thought that I had a good understanding of how to construct a research process that involves gathering data from reputable sources and applying it to my writing.
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