Since we’re so behind on blogging I thought it would be a good idea to recount the journey of our project from the very, very beginning. So here begins Part 1: The Beginning.
Lizzie and I met in a research methods course last semester when we found out that we had both been recommended for COPLAC Digital. Unfortunately we had no idea what we wanted to do—Quakers was something that we selected pretty last minute because it seemed to fit the criteria. I liked it in part because of my particular interest in religious history. Beyond that we came into this project with an extremely limited knowledge of who the Quakers were and what they meant in the larger context of American colonial history.
As we began looking into some of the preliminary research, it was clear that we were looking at a group of counterculture rebels. They are an unusually inflexible group—standing up in the face of intense scrutiny and discrimination. Immediately the centerpiece of the early part of their story in North America became apparent: the tensions between the Quakers and the Puritans. The narrative is almost cliché: a hypocritical majority challenged by a parallel minority group. It’s that conflict that really captured our attention and helped fuel the creative process.
So how to distill what was a very complicated and dynamic relationship into a website? We were immediately attracted to the idea of a story map primarily because it’s not a static tool. It struck us as being unique. It’s not a traditional blog post or web page which frankly could read as an essay with more sparkle or even the timeline which is nice but isn’t great at reflecting the power of physical change. So the use of this tool became the cornerstone around how the rest of the website developed.