Marybeth Moscirella's blog

This is my last time in lab before our presentations next Thursday.  (Everyone should totally come to the WPU Assembly Room to see all of the FER presentations on 4/17 from 4:30-6!)  It's really weird to think that today might have been my last time logging into Itinera.  My freshman year is ending, and it's overall just a really weird feeling.  It's even worse when I think about how I will be in Tanzania in a month and France in a year.  Everyone says college moves so fast and its so true.

My eyes were opened up today.  I never really understood what it was like compliling enough information to fill a text book, especially if someone was organizing this data for the first time.  Working with the source with which Drew provided us was very overwhelming, but not in a bad sense.  There is so much information.  The source contains letters from the director of the Academy of France in Rome, and as you can imagine, there were a lot of letters.

The CRAAP Test tortured me throughout high school.  I used it in basically everyone of my classes.  But honestly, it taught me a lot.  I can determine if a website is credible in like five seconds flat.  I was so suprised to see that Itinera did not pass. Working behind the scenes on Itinera, I know it is credible.  I've seen the process in action.  However, there was no information about Itinera anywhere on the site.  There was no copyright information, no authors, no creators, no editors, no sponsors.

On Friday we learned about metadata, a topic I had never heard of previously, but was nonetheless interesting.  I never really thought about what happened when I searched something on Google, or why websites were always asking me to complete random surveys, but now I understand that they fall under the category of collecting data.  Metadata, I learned, is not only a large part of research and academia, but it is also very relevant to everyday life.