Project Journal

January 15

I officially joined the course Digital Scholarship and Media Studies. I will create a final digital project under the guidance of Dr. Tullos and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS). Since I am an undergraduate student working on my Honors Thesis about how students at Emory’s Goizueta Business School understand and trust AI, and how that affects their ability and willingness to use AI in their studies, my digital project will present this thesis. In class today, we shared websites related to our research. One student introduced a site called “AINOW.” It’s a great website that shares AI news. I’m happy I learned something new and I look forward to the rest of the class.

January 16–21

Based on feedback I received at the end of last semester, I finished a new version of the introduction and background section of my thesis. I also started the research part, contacted business school students, and began interviews.

January 22

Because of the weather, today’s class was on Zoom. We learned about Exhibits and Tours, and I was introduced to a new platform called Omeka.net. This platform is great for visual arts and is perfect for students who want to create digital history archives or a digital museum. But since I’m only sharing one thesis paper, I think it’s not the best fit for me. However, I will recommend it to students whose projects match better.

January 23–28

I have now interviewed 23 business school students. I still need to reach 50, which is the number I listed in my IRB. I need to keep going. (Maybe I should get a membership card at the Goizueta Costa coffee shop.)

January 29

I missed class today, but I saw that the topic was GIS and Mapping. It’s a system that combines location and data to create visual maps and analyze information. I’ve used GIS in a past group project, so I understand how useful it is for research that needs map visuals and spatial data.

January 29–February 4

I continued interviewing students and collecting research materials.

February 5

Today’s guest speaker, Dr. Bailey Betik, introduced the platform WordPress. It’s great for projects that aim to show and share research, like blogs, papers, portfolios, or interdisciplinary websites. I think this platform is perfect for my final project. Since I’ve built websites before, I discussed it with Dr. Tullos, and we decided that I will use WordPress.

February 6–11

I chose the platform I will use for my digital project. But right now, the most important task is still finishing my thesis.

February 12

Today’s platform was Sounding Spirit. It is good for editing and annotating documents in music, humanities, religion, and culture. We looked at many rare and old music scores.

February 13–18

I faced a big problem in my thesis. I planned to interview 40–50 students and 10 professors, but no professors replied to my emails. Without enough interviews, my original research plan cannot work. I must quickly find a new direction. I decided to focus only on student research, using more data and qualitative methods.

February 19

We explored Data by Design, an interactive digital humanities project. It tells the history of data visualization from 1786 to 1900, and shows its deep links to colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism.

February 20–25

I decided to use the TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) as the new core of my thesis. I will now use a quantitative method and give up on interviews. I will use a Likert scale survey instead and aim to collect answers from about 100 students. This will help keep the data stable and professional. I will use SPSS and AMOS to analyze and test the results. I need to send the survey to students as soon as possible.

February 26

The article I chose from Digital Humanities Quarterly is “Varieties of Digital Literary Studies:Micro, Macro, Meso.” The author, Murray, uses digital literature to reflect on extreme ideas like “digital always wins” and “death of the book.” She believes both print and digital can work together. She says today’s digital literature studies focus too much on either very big or very small views and ignore the real world. So, she introduces a “meso-level” idea, to look at how platforms, algorithms, and society all shape literature today.

February 27–March 4

Murray’s writing gave me important inspiration. We can add new ideas to old models to better fit today’s world. So in my thesis, I added perceived credibility to the TAM model. This made it a brand-new version of TAM that fits research about how business students want to use AI.

March 5

John Morgenstern visited and gave a talk about intellectual property and copyright. It was a very interesting lecture, especially learning how music copyright is very complex—it includes sheet music, melody, lyrics, culture, and even how instruments are played.

March 6–12

I continued working on my thesis.

Spring Break

This was the final sprint for my thesis. I collected enough student responses. I started using SPSS and AMOS to analyze data and finished the findings, conclusion, and all other parts of the paper. I sent it to my thesis advisor, Mark Risjord, for review. During my free time, I also registered my WordPress domain:cmackye.blog.

March 19

I got feedback from my advisor and started revising the thesis and preparing for the thesis defense. I was too nervous and stayed up working—eventually, I fell asleep at my desk and missed class.Shame on you, Cormack.

March 20–25

I kept improving my thesis. I was still feeling sad about missing class.

March 26

Yang Li visited and introduced the platform Manifold. It’s great for open-access publishing and interactive annotations. The design is clean, and the features are perfect for a thesis. I really liked the platform, especially the footnote feature. After class, I contacted Yang Li to learn more about Manifold and how to get permission to use it.

March 27–31

Yang Li replied and kindly shared a lot of helpful information and links. After talking with Dr. Tullos, we realized that applying to use Manifold might be too late, and it’s a bit hard for undergraduates. So I decided to stick with WordPress—but I’ll always remember Manifold and hope to use it in the future.

April 1–3

Thesis Defense. Yes, on April Fools’ Day.I passed. Not a joke. I gave myself a short break to rest.

April 9

Jake Bograd-Denton visited. It was my favorite lecture! He is a true expert in artificial intelligence. I learned many new things about AI.

April 10–15

I started editing my thesis content. I think just copying and pasting the thesis into a website would be boring and meaningless for a final project. I also need to consider that visitors might not know anything about my topic, so I have to change the way I explain things. I also want the website to look nice and be meaningful. Since I only have one article to present, designing the site is a challenge. I plan to browse other people’s academic websites for ideas.

April 16

Jo Guldi visited and shared her book The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History. I learned that text mining can show historical trends, but without guidance from the humanities, data science might distort the past and lead to serious mistakes.

April 17

I attempted to officially start building my website and creating footnotes for my thesis.

April 18

I met with Dr. Tullos. He pointed out that my website was almost entirely composed of the original text from my thesis, which did not meet his expectations. He was somewhat concerned about my project, as I seemed to have a major misunderstanding about what a personal academic website should be. I realized that I needed to study and explore other academic websites. I scheduled another meeting with Dr. Tullos for April 21 to ensure I would present new and improved content.

April 19

After browsing and learning from other people’s academic websites, I reflected on and restructured my website plan. A personal academic website is mainly composed of two themes: introducing the site owner and showcasing academic work. In the personal introduction section, it is important to thoroughly present personal information (ideally with photos) and academic
background. The academic showcase section is used to present previous research and projects.

The challenge I faced was that I only had one thesis to showcase. I needed to think about how to make my website feel rich and engaging with just one major piece of research. After reflection, I outlined my website structure as follows:

Home (introducing myself and my research at a basic level)
About Me (providing more personal background and stories)
Research (breaking down my thesis into multiple sections, including: the research purpose and social background, the methods I used and detailed introductions for each method, my data, the conclusion, and a full version of my thesis for those interested)
Project Journal (recording the process of building the website and the progress of the thesis)
Explore AI (providing many resources for beginners, advanced learners, and AI news readers)

I planned to officially start building the website the next day.

April 20

I filled in the basic personal and research information on the homepage and added photos to make it more visually appealing. I started creating the most challenging section, “Research,” by rewriting my thesis content into more accessible, easy-to-understand language. I also added explanations for any technical terms that appeared on the site. I included research charts and provided plain-language explanations for each figure and data point.

April 21

I completed all the content for the “Research” and “Explore AI” sections. The “Project Journal” is still being updated, but all current content has been uploaded to WordPress. I also learned how to add hyperlinks so that readers can easily navigate to sections they are interested in. I met with Dr. Tullos again today, and he was very pleased with the current website design and content. During the presentation, we discovered some minor design flaws and small errors. I decided to take a break for the rest of the day.

April 22

I fixed the small errors on the website and prepared for my website presentation in class the next day.

April 23

The presentation was a great success! I also got to see the thoughtfully made websites by my classmates. The last class officially ended today. It has been a wonderful semester and course. I’m incredibly happy that in my final semester at Emory, I not only completed my thesis but also created such a meaningful website!

April 26

During this time, I made one final optimization to the website. Since the “Research” section contained a lot of content, I created a sub-menu to allow readers to more easily choose which parts they wanted to explore. I also finished updating the “Project Journal.”