PostSecret: I’m not sure whether to say PostSecret does or doesn’t make the user think.  If you were to arrive at postsecret.com with no prior knowledge of the site, I admit, you’d probably be pretty confused, and you’d be asking a lot of questions, so I guess in that way it’s poorly designed (as much […]

What I learned from The Chicago Homicide Project: On the night of Mach 12, 1924, Walter Law was found shot and dead in a car with an automatic pistol beside him. The car was parked on Belva Gaertner’s property. Belva Gaertner was arrested shortly thereafter for the crime, drunken and covered in blood. She was […]

I do not understand geolocation. The word didn’t appear in our readings, so I googled it and found definitions from various sources that essentially amounted to this: geolocation is locating objects based on their geographic situation.  Which basically sounds like mapping, ie, placing a “pin” on a map in google maps.  But we just did […]

I had a lot of fun making my map.  I started with my house, since that’s where I spend most of my time.  Then I just tried to think of important things that happened in my life and where they happened, so I chose my secondary school, my elementary school, my boyfriend’s house, etc.  I […]

I started off my research with a nice online game of Kings Corner.  But I realized that wasn’t getting me very far, so I decided to try Google instead. I started by searching “1950s federal polio vaccine,” which resulted in nothing useful.  Then I tried “federally mandated polio vaccine” (also useless) and several others.  I […]

Oh gosh.  This is a big question.  I’m glad to say that I’ve already started preserving my family history, and I wasn’t the first one.  My dad’s first cousin Rick started doing family history research before the era of the Internet, and his mom, who lives a few hours from my immediate family, still has […]

I’m going to start off being completely honest and let you know that I feel like the legal concepts we learned about in the readings for this week went completely over my head.  Much to my former-lawyer-father’s dismay, this is something I’ve always struggled to understand.  It’s as if legality goes in one ear and […]

Looking over my topics from last week, I realized that the first one, my linguistics interest, would be essentially impossible to research from the standpoint of primary sources (that is, language development is a slow process, so people don’t realize it’s happening, and therefore there are no primary sources on the topic).  Because of that, […]

One thing that has always really interested me about history is linguistic history, specifically the history of phrases and idioms.  When I was in middle or high school, I remember reading a chain email that contained the supposed history of several phrases such as “graveyard shift” and “raining cats and dogs.”  I have no idea […]