Our first writing project was my first real experience using a mark up language. I had worked with HTML really briefly before, so at least I wasn’t terribly intimidated by working without a text editor, but aside from that, I went into it completely inexperienced. As a whole I appreciated doing this project. I feel it’s a useful skill to have learned a markup language, and the learning-through-doing aspect of it was very helpful. The fact that I had a project to complete forced me to really get a workable baseline understanding of XML, Oxygen, and GitHub. The markup schema we came up with in class served as a very good checklist of sorts. It was helpful to basically have boxes I had to fill in to complete each annotation. It also helped me make sure that what I was writing actually qualified as an annotation and not some kind of weird tangent. XML on it’s own was also fairly easy to understand, the hardest part was probably understanding how all these programs worked together to make my published project on the WordPress page. I still don’t think I know how GitHub works, but thats a work in progress.
My only gripe with having done project 1 in XML is that I feel like I got distracted from the ultimate goal of making an annotated bibliography. I was focused on learning XML and building and understanding the schema that I feel like I didn’t allot enough time to finding appropriate sources and thinking about what I really wanted to make my bibliography about. With design entry 1, I genuinely just came up with something that I think is the biggest problem in Boston (transportation/traffic). When it came down to it, it was really difficult to find sources that I felt were applicable and well focused on this topic. I tried not to stray too much from my original idea, but my problem statement in Project 1 is about lighting in Boston which is related, but different. There also isn’t much that would be a city/campus related problem that would call for expertise from a mechanical engineer before some other kind of engineer too, so I wish I had taken more time understanding genre analysis and finding ways of applying it to something I can relate to. Basically, I think that had I not been working through the XML learning curve, I would have accomplished better annotations and compiled much better sources. That being said, now I know, and shouldn’t run into the same problem with Project 2.
