So, now that my schedule is finally set, and I am only working ONE job instead of two or three, it’s finally time to get back onto the schedule I originally had. And crazily enough, I did just enough to be able to be on schedule to be finished everything-barring revisions of course-by the end of next week. I got all of my layers over from ArcPro to ArcOnline, and I’ve added the spreadsheet points, and even started setting up my StoryMap. That’s going to take a day or two to re-familiarize myself with the layout and functions of the StoryMaps, but except for that I really do only have to add in the content for all of the slides and points.
Seeing the points finally spread out on the map, the most difficult part here was simply picking out the events I wanted to highlight. It was hard since there could be twenty or so points here, but these were the ones I had the most to discuss about, and more importantly have the exact location of. My idea for the story map, is these points being highlighted to tell the overall story of the Bakumatsu, which will the main draw. After that, I’ll highlight different people from the Bakumatsu, the landmarks of Kyoto, and ‘Bakumatsu today’, which will have any modern day depictions of these people, showing how these men of violence became immortalized as cultural touchstones.
Now, while I expect adding in content and my research into the StoryMap will not take long, I’m going to encounter my old enemy. My tendency to write too much. I remember when I turned in the rough draft of my seminar paper two years ago, the very first thing that Dr. Hague told me was ‘yeah you need to shorten this’. For reference, the paper needed to be 25-30 pages, my rough draft was near 40. And even when I managed to edit it down to 30 pages, I felt it would have been much better with the 40, when in reality I know that trimming it was best since I got way too into ‘too much information territory’. So, when I’m writing out things like what this timeline will be, I need to really make sure that I prepare and trim down what I have in notes about each of these events into what is only necessary.
I painstakingly had to narrow the list of points down to only these 9. It was going to be ten, but I had the problem of not being able to find any events between these that had the perfect mix of importance, crucial figures from the period, and enough information in my notes to write out a dedicated slide. Still, these are what I believe are 9 of the most prevalent events of the Bakumatsu era that will let me better tell the people who come across this project about the impact Kyoto in this era would have on not just the city itself, but the entirety of Japan going forward.
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