This week was research and more research.  Bret made me aware that the NYPL will send books to GC students, so I made a request for a copy of the Jenkins Worth biography and the planning report that the NYC Common Council created to commemorate the memorial.  It can take up to three weeks for the request to be processed, so I am unsure I will be able to rely on getting it in time.  However, it’s good to know that I will likely get it at some point.

We need to populate our website’s top navigation timeline with more data.  My research focus for this week was on the broader history of New York City.  Bri had already done super work recording some of the great moments in the NYC deathscape, like the fact the city banned burials below 14^th Street in 1839, or that the state allowed the purchase of tax-free land for cemeteries in 1847.  I focused on demographics (for example, how huge surges in population growth affected culture) and infrastructure (how the opening of the Erie Canal gave NYC a direct water route to the content to the Midwest).  In our team meeting tonight we agreed that we would need to winnow down the number of data points that we’ll use in the timeline, but that we’ll also want to memorialize the bulk of the content in another way.

The biggest challenge is focus.  I started reading Burrows “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” on Friday night, promising to keep to the index and just focus on the deathscape …six hours later I had completely forgotten my promise and was well into just reading!  So now, I have mapped out a set number of hours a week, in three-hour chunks, through 15 April.  I have also fired up Zotero, to keep me on the mission.  [There is nothing like tweezing citations to focus the mind.]  I love reading and doing research, but with such a short timeframe I know I need to keep it on the core aims of the project.  Discipline!