Category Archives: Week 15: Presentations- what you learned from your projects

What I have learned from making my final project:

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Working on my final project has made me look at books in a new way. I wanted to show how a book becomes part of someone’s everyday life, but once I started taking photos, I realized how true that really is. A book is always around in small, quiet moments. It sits on a desk while I study, it travels in my backpack, or it rests beside my morning coffee. Seeing these moments through the camera made me notice how naturally a book fits into my day.

Because I am studying abroad, this project feels even more personal. I only brought a few books with me from Germany, and they have become small reminders of home. When I photograph my project book in different places, I see how it slowly collects pieces of my time here, almost like it is sharing this experience with me. I never paid attention to this before.

Thinking about Walter Benjamin while working on the project also helped me understand his ideas better. He talks about how each book has its own story, and now I see what he means. Even small marks on the cover or tiny folds on the pages show where the book has been. While taking photos, I catch myself noticing these details and thinking about the moments behind them. It makes the book feel alive in a quiet way.

I am also learning how much patience a photo project needs. Sometimes the image I imagine in my head does not match the photo I take. The light might feel wrong, or the scene does not have the mood I want. So I try again, move things around, or wait for a different moment. It takes time, but it also makes me slow down, which I actually enjoy.

Overall, this project is teaching me that books are not just things we read. They move with us, stay close to us, and hold small pieces of our lives without us realizing it. Working on this has made me appreciate those simple, everyday connections a lot more.

What I’ve learned while working on my final project.

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With my final project, I’ve learned a lot about what it means to interpret an artifact. On my midterm, I wrote about the Ethiopian Magic Scrolls that we saw in special collections. I put a lot of time into my paper, but after reading Dr. Pressman’s feedback, I realized that my paper wasn’t specifically about one of the scrolls. As I’ve been working on my project, I’ve picked one specific scroll in special collections to focus on, instead of writing about all of them. But in doing so, I realized that it was up to me to figure out what to write. And its been a little awkward. There is no outside source for this specific scroll. I had to figure out what it was that I was looking at, and it makes me feel a bit like a fraud. Are my interpretations of the object valid? I want to say no, that I’m not an expert in the field, but I’m still a researcher in my own way. I feel like I’m making stuff up, even with my own observations. I really haven’t done anything like this before, and I’m glad to be doing it, but I definitely had to increase my confidence through this process.

For the creative aspect, I’m expanding on the concept as books as accessories, specifically individualized ones. For this part, I’ve begun doing outside research on books as fashion, but there aren’t many resources on Ethiopian, or even African, books as accessories. At least not in English. I’ll have to connect it to European and American history, which isn’t bad, but I was hoping to discover something more. Maybe I still will, and I just need to search more efficiently. Admittedly, I haven’t begun the physical creation of my scroll, but I do have it planned out and it shouldn’t take too long, assuming there are no hiccups in my schedule this week. I look forward to making it, but writing on a scroll my height will take some time. I might just make it long enough to wrap around my torso as a sash instead of matching my height. It is meant to be my accessory, after all. Overall, this project has me reevaluating how I conduct my own physical research, and I’m looking forward to sharing with you all!

what i’ve learned

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It’s been interesting to see all the different ways that scholars have discussed the topic I plan to talk about. The topic of digital blackface is so broad that I found it useful to read sources that discuss digital blackface from multiple perspective. I’ve also appreciated how all the sources I’ve read stress an aversion to arguing based on purely moral grounds. I think that a common reaction to discussing digital blackface is to question its legitimacy and tangible harm, and the sources I’ve read are aware of that as well. For example, Tempest M. Henning discusses digital blackface from purely an argumentative and rhetorical perspective.

I think it’s also been helpful to see the way the sources I’ve read had built off of each other. Multiple sources I’ve read reference each other. Seeing how the authors of my sources have built on each other’s research has felt useful in figuring out how I want to build my own argument. Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, felt particularly dense the first time I read it, but seeing how others summarize his findings made his work more comprehensible to me.

I think research has been different for me this for this writing assignment compared to previous ones. I feel like I am probably guilty of knowing the answer i want to find before I research, but that felt kind of impossible this time since the topic is so broad. It’s a little scary because of the fear of looking into something and investing time in it only for that source to be useless for the essay. But this process of researching has allowed me to observe the scholarly context of the topic I’m discussing first.