Another week of working on My Fair Lady has come and gone. My Fair Lady continues to be a digital project focused on the speeches given by women at the Congress of Representative Women during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Hundreds of women spoke on matters of gender roles, race, science, religion, and so much more. This course has prompted me to create an extension, a model of sorts of how I might model using the texts of the speeches to study aspects of the speeches through textual analysis tools like Voyant. In moving forward, this week I focused on tweaking my Omeka page to my liking and making sure it was user friendly and coordinating with the rest of my project. I also took the time to really address the route of what was causing some of my hesitancy regarding speech usage. I hadn’t fully decided whether or not I wanted to focus on a group of speeches or the bigger body of text of all the speeches that occurred during the Congress of Representative Women. I have decided to do both. After some reassurance and talk throughs with a classmate and professor, I have really felt that it could be beneficial to incorporate looking at maybe a smaller portion of speeches, either from the congress or popular speeches given during this time versus what the women were talking about during the congress. As well as the entirety of the texts. I have been consitently playing around in Voyant in order to narrow down some of the things I have looked at within the texts so my thoughts are in choosing anywhere from 3-6 and generate questions with answers, alongside an explanation of implementation in work beyond this projects. My goal has always been the same and that is the highlight the importance of the women and words they spoke while also educating others on the usage of digital tools like Voyant in text work and historical work. As for my audience, it has also remained the same. I always imagine My Fair Lady, the general online project, as something for students to use for research or introductory purposes. I know that my audience has to be those within the learning environment not only because of the content I discuss but the aspect I have now added with this additional project. The extension of My Fair Lady handles textual analysis and digital tools that is not intended for the average audience member. The model is meant to educate and teach students about text analysis and garnering skills in historical thinking in new ways.

As I continue working, I plan to move towards precisely edit the model portion of my project. I want this to be more than a tutorial but less than me solely doing the entire textual analysis. My plan is to have a rough draft of the extension to the website complete and have some friends who aren’t within my courses or even history majors to look over and give me opinions. I’m afraid that it will come across tutorial-ish and that is what I want to avoid the most. However, I feel more confident moving forward as I have slowly narrowed down my main focus and what my intentions are for my audience.

Can’t wait to have the final portion ready to present!