For this week’s research I spent most of my time gathering the content, the bread of this project so to speak. After having my 1 on 1 conversation with professor Ault, it was deemed a good starting point to develop keystones of information going into this project. The keystones I had decided on and researched can be categorized as such: Mythology, Tools/Weapons, Civil Structure, Language/Growth. These are subject to change as the research continues, but as for what I’ve discovered up to this point it’s fair to say these categories will be set in stone.
The Research in Depth:
It might be a bit vague as to what each category covers by just looking at their names, so allow me to delve further into description. Starting with mythology, this was actually what inspired me to start this project. From a young age I’ve been interested in myriad pantheons that exist around the world and the myths that come from them. It was during this study that an interesting point came to mind: all cultures with their different mythology have a same starting point, that being the origin story. With the origin story, we can see how that civilization believed the world came into being, and by observing the differences we can at the very least observe some key cultural differences while also looking at the similarities they share. So, to make a ramble come to an end, the mythology keystone is meant to delve into cultural lore, pick apart the pantheons (essentially the collection of deities a culture believes in), the myths that come with them and the many stories birthed as a result.
Moving onto the next topic, we have tools/weapons. When man discovered fire, did it somehow get passed from one person to the next and travel around the world? Of course not, what happened is different early man civilizations discovered fire and used that, along with other tools, to advance their society. In essence, that’s how many different groups of people were able to exist without knowing about each other, they all discovered the same or similar tools and used them in different ways. What tools/weapons seeks to look at is what civilizations used as tools, weapons, building stones for their society, what houses were made out of and how they progressed. The Roman’s architecture, for example, was different from the Persian’s, the weapons they used were also slightly different. The ancient Chinese used crossbows to make unskilled soldiers fight with the strength of a skilled soldier way before other countries picked up on this. The end goal for tools/weapons is to see how civilizations started from near similar routes, and through those groups specific technological evolution shaped them to be unique.
As we know, early man started as hunter/gatherer societies and traveled in packs, not settling in place for too long. Fast forward to the Babylonians, we have what is recognized as the first set of laws for man, Hammurabi’s Code. Fast forward even further to modern day, where you have vast differences in cultures between countries like America and China. Through Civil structure, the research I have done this past week went into showing the roles of man and woman in ancient cultures, delved into hierarchy, class structure, government in its base form and how it evolved over time. In case it wasn’t clear from the previous two paragraphs, the goal here is to outline the differences between cultures while drawing similarities to modern day practices and connecting the trail back to ancient roots.
Finally, we’ve reached the last cornerstone: language/growth. Along with mythology, this is the other keystone that sparked my interest in this topic. Flashing back to high school, I remember one of my teachers telling us about an article he read that said in 1,000 years from now, the English language will be extinct. Now, needless to say, this intrigued me a great deal and always had me questioning the root of languages and how they are so diverse. There are myths surrounding this story, one being the biblical passage dealing with the Tower of Babil, and how the sins created from that were punished with man being unable to converse with each other. Well, fast forward to modern day and we have bilingual people being a dime a dozen, not to mention multilingual people. This got me to thinking how languages were so different, or rather why certain groups shared a more common route than others. For a brief comparison, look at the difference between romance languages and east Asian languages, the alphabet itself is structured very differently, and while the sounds are structured differently they still use the same vocal patterns. My research over the past week went into hieroglyphics, the ancient Sanskrit language, and how civilizations came to adopt a written language.
Insight/Reflection:
While the research took up a large portion of my time, I also did some minor work into thinking about changing the platform, and am playing with ideas right now after getting feedback from both Professor Ault and Angela (my alumni advisory). While I didn’t do enough research into that field, I still would like to note that I am leaning towards making this into a two part project: one part having all the information and write up from the research while the other is a data visualization, showing in a visual format how everything connects together (or differs, the research at this point isn’t decisive enough to pinpoint this). Given how much I put into solidifying my information keystones, next week I will try to play around with the technology and try to get a concrete direction on how I want this to be represented in the final product. As for the heavier question of “where my place in the field is with this project”, I don’t have a solid answer yet, although after seeing all the interesting information I’ve been able to uncover (and how tedious it was) I’d like to say that learning about the world, different cultures and civilizations, how they advanced and came to shape our modern world is fascinating.