As a student Fellow for Libby’s project “Student Activism at Grinnell,” I have been learning the history of student activism and series of events from the 19th century to 1960 from the book. I have gained understanding of development of activism that sync with the canonical political events and also the connection with today’s activism, such as student activism on racism after the WWII and Civil Rights movement, which also connects with the Black Lives Matter movement and the student activism at Grinnell related to that topic. This week, I chose five topics that I will focus for the rest of the research process: the coalition between Black and White students at Grinnell; the Church discussion; Nisei (Second generation Japanese-American) program; Social Gospel and Sen Katayama; Anti-nuclear movement.
Technology wise, I have been gradually acquiring and adjusting to using Git. The other day, Libby explained the difference between Git and VS code: Git is like one drive where you can see the versions of the data/code that you or someone else creates and shares. VS code is a localized platform like Words where you edit your data/code and create files with update every time you make change. This acknowledgement was necessary and helpful for me to use those two different tools in the future. I think I need to ask more questions about how we visualize our research outcome as for now we have our interests in many branches in Grinnell history, which I think is great for us and also for the website as it aims to benefit the students who might use it as a resource for the research project for various types of courses.
My next step is to dive into the topics of my choice and gain deeper understanding of the origin, development, student involvement, and connection to the national/local political movement now and then. I will also learn to adopt the spreadsheet into VS code and share my local code on Git with Libby. Over all, I have been enjoying and am excited to continue my journey of learning aspects of Grinnell history that are new to me along with the digital tools like Git and VS code!