We all know that navigating unfamiliar sites is hard enough, but navigating our own was a really interesting task. Cody and I met up on Sunday night to look over our extremely bare-bones project website and get to work. We pulled from other students’ course websites to get some inspiration for “Pages” we could make to allow site visitors to easily access our project’s conclusions.

Cody and I settled on pages titled “About Us”, “Our Contract,” “Media,” “Differing Perspectives,” and “Our Conclusion,” while agreeing we may add more depending on the sort of data we collect along the way. I think it’s important for site visitors to know a little bit about our personal interests in the course, and it helps build a relationship even if it may be a virtual one. We think of this section as more colloquial and friendly. Our contract still needs editing but we can’t work on that until we’ve talked to the monks one-on-one. “Media” will include photographs and videos obtained from the visits to the abbey, as well as archived photos and videos. “Differing Perspectives” will allow us to further explore our conclusion but in a more personal sense where both Cody and I can write about our experience with the project and our differing interpretations of the collected data. Our conclusion will be a comprehensive collection of both Cody and my work and will be less separated than the aforementioned page.

Today we applied to be exempt from review by the Institutional Review Board and hopefully will hear back soon. I don’t think Cody and I knew what we were getting into; the process is tricky and it seems like they’re looking for very precise responses from us. In general, I hope that we are accepted as exempt because it’s a shorter wait process. As soon as we have the OK, we will begin interviewing the monks.