Over the past two weeks, I have spent quite a bit of time working on my A Woman of the Century Project.  I’ve put a lot of work into creating items, collections and exhibits, gathering and training contributors, planning my site’s design, and just thinking.

The readings from Modules four and five have given me lots of food for thought and words of wisdom.  As I noted last week, I learned a lot by viewing the sites from Module Four.  In Module Five, I had the opportunity to explore more sites to get ideas from.  The Raid on Deerfield , Slavery in New York ,  A More Perfect Union , and Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives , all taught me about narrative interpretation.  I saw the different ways that the curators attempted to reach their audiences and how they used several different kinds of approaches on their sites, such as timelines, maps, and objects, to tell stories.

The practical, hands-on advice about prototyping and the tips on content strategies  in the readings from Module Five helped me as I made decisions about my site’s design.  While I took a course in Buyer Behavior a few years ago, until I read Erin Kissane and Angela Colter, I had not been giving enough thought to the different reasons that people would be coming to my site.  Steven Lubar’s advice about Curating and Exhibit Labels was very helpful as well.   Having had my curatorship training several years ago, I needed to know the latest ideas in the field and found his writing to be both informative and inspirational.   I keep thinking about the piece on generous interfaces from module four, and I would like to do something out of the box with my project. Suzanne Fischer’s piece on developing synthetic powers was spot on and reminded me why I am so excited to be in this field.  I have striven to take the time for thinking that she deems essential!

Slowly, but surely, A Woman of the Century:  A Crowdsourcing Project of the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries is becoming a reality.