In the past week, my project has finally been taking shape into something where all the parts seem to be falling into place. By choosing my focus to be student activism as seen through The Lafayette, I have found purpose and academic placement for my project. I have spent my first week doing a number of productive things. I have found a lot of excellent primary and secondary sources about student activism in the US and at Lafayette, which has led to me narrowing down the years I plan on using.

After meeting with Diane Shaw, I also have some great resources on my hand. I have good primary/secondary sources about my topic in the context of Lafayette. Additionally, the index about the Lafayette and social-issue related articles is going to be extremely useful and gives me more time to focus on the rest of the project. From this point on, I have some clear-cut work to do. I will continue to do background research, particularly finding article on the modern state of student activism. I also want to make edits to the already created index to adjust it to what I want to focus on, and also to go through and double check the articles they included. I also will be making a modern index. I also discovered a cool tool call Cytoscape which looks like it will lend itself nicely to the type of topic modeling I want to do. However, I definitely need to mess around with it more and I anticipate that it will take some time to get it to do what I want. Overall, things are going well and I feel more secure in what I am doing and what my next steps should be.