Journal 6

I have been spending a lot of time on my project this and have finished some very important parts. The first thing that I did was finish arranging most of my image sources. I edited all of the images that I currently have, and then I organized them by time period to make them easy to find when I add them to my paper. I opened them all up, individually, and edited them to remove excess space, and then I changed the formatting on them. Also for convenience later on, I named them the name of the source location for easier citing.

I spent a bit of time just reviewing everything that needs to get done in order to finish the paper on time. I am currently a little off schedule. I have the page count that I was planning on at this time, but I needed more time during my research for the Cantonese section of the paper. I will need to spend some time next week and the week after catching up on that research.

Although I started writing my paper last week, I have continued to do research in order to make sure that I have the necessary information to write 40 pages. So this week I also spent time looking for key images in the seven-volume set the I received from Inter-library loan on the oracle bone script. I marked about twenty of them and scanned them all. Some of these scanned images were edited, named, and organized as stated above. I was also able to pick up two more books from Inter-library loan and start to look at them and see what information will be helpful for my research. One of the books that I received was on the earlier development of Chinese and the other was on the Cantonese vernacular script.

The end of this week, and the beginning of next week I will start to write my primary source analysis. What I plan to do to accomplish this is to look at each source and then determine its purpose and value. From there, I plan on listing the key features of each source and why it is important and a good representative sample of the snapshot of script development. Then at the end of each explanation of the sources I will highlight the main idea that gets carried on into the later scripts, to show how the different scripts are linked together.

The last thing that I did this week was to edit my original outline. At first I planned on having a quarter of my paper focus on the historical narrative, and then another quarter on the primary sources. As I was writing and thinking about the paper, I decided that it would be much easier for the reader to follow the importance of the sources if they were embedded within the narrative history. This way the context of each source will be remembered as the reader is learning about the importance of the source. This should make the essay less choppy and allow the reader to focus more on the information and less on the structure of the essay.