Artifact One: Reflection

My object lesson has been an amazing opportunity for me to delve into the history of an object that I hold close to my heart. I also got to know about other forms, or versions of the object that I had never imagined would exist. My best resource for this project has been a 27-pages research paper, published in the Journal of Asian Studies, thoroughly explaining the “aesthetics, acoustics, and politics” intertwined in the context of the harmonium. I gained access to this resource as an authorized user by linking the Georgia Tech Library in my Google Scholar profile.

The written mode has inevitably been used the most for this project, as there are political discourse and expert opinions involved. I would have loved to add an interview of scholars debating on this object but I could not find one, and understandably so, since recording facilities were very limited then. I also spent a considerable amount of time looking with different keywords for the prototypes of the French and Indian harmoniums that I mentioned in my post. Although I could not find any such pictures, I feel that I should have at least included pictures of the later versions of the instruments to illustrate the differences between the French and the Indian harmonium.

This project marks my introduction to web design. I enjoyed exploring different block elements, such as image carousels, post carousel, and buttons. I also generated a logo using Looka. I struggled with a few things, such as, with the page that shows the posts. I couldn’t customize the sequence and the portion of the post as it appears on the blog page. I also couldn’t adjust the size of the feature image of the post despite following the instructions which is why I opted against adding feature images to the posts. Overall, with a bit more experience with site design, the project would have come together more beautifully.