My Story Maps project over the last week, was possibly my favorite project I’ve done so far at Rowan, in any class that I’ve taken. My favorite part of the world to learn about, is East Asia, Japan in particular, it’s my favorite history subject, but unfortunately there’s no classes in that particular subject offered at Rowan in the history department. So, I’ve had to do most of my research myself on the area, all the information I put into my Story Maps project is from the knowledge I’ve loved gathering over the years. From the Yayoi Period, to the Meiji Restoration, I’ve grown this amazing passion for the countries history for years and getting to finally do a project for it was absolutely enthralling, and after a 5 hour editing session I finally finished a four slide presentation on one of my favorite figures from Japanese history, Oda Nobunaga. I could have made the map 10-15 slides if I had more time, the biggest challenge for me was quite honestly narrowing it down to only four slides and locations on the map. I found what I think was the most important parts of Nobunaga’s life, but I think in the future I may really go back and add more slides and map locations. I do wish there was an option to add more images instead of just one to each slide, but the map moving to the location where each event takes place is a good substitute. The map, especially in this case of such a small country like Japan is instrumental in telling the story of Nobunaga, since most people will see Japan as small from a map, being able to zoom on the area of Japan each event takes place in, it helps people see the scale and true distance some of these battles took place in. Especially with a figure like Nobunaga, who’s known as one of the ‘Three Great Unifiers’, it’s important to see how his conquests gradually took up more and more land until his death. This project for me had very few issues, the biggest and only one was truly narrowing down to only a few slides, picking out the biggest moments of Nobunaga’s life, if I had started it two or three days earlier, I probably could have extended the presentation and Story Map to near 20 slides. For now, this also helped since my four slide presentation can be a sort of opening piece for my project for Museum Studies, which is going to be a mock museum exhibit about Nobunaga again. Japanese history has consumed and been a huge part of my life the last two years, I have two tattoos related to my favorite samurai clans and Japanese history topics. I very, very rarely get to use my knowledge of this nations history for class assignments so this was extremely fun and feel like it’s one of the best projects I’ve done, and really hope that everyone who may come across my Story Map learns something about a topic I have a lot of passion about.
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