When coming into this DHSS experience, I had so many huge ideas in my head that I wanted to explore.

My first concept was to explore the efficacy of eugenics propaganda. I wanted to do this massive comparative analysis looking at the eugenics messaging of different countries and comparing their census statistics to gauge their effectiveness. Then, after our initial pitches and some feedback, I realized that I only had 6 weeks and that this was basically impossible! So, I had to narrow down. I ditched the whole comparative angle and chose to focus solely on the history of eugenics in the United States. Once I settled in on that, I had to ask myself if propaganda is still what I wanted to focus on. After a little research, I found some really fascinating work on the connection between American eugenics and the birth of genetic and marriage counseling in the United States. I jumped at it, and before I knew it, I had basically changed the whole idea of my project and dove very excitedly back into square 1. 

In my first talks with Ms. Angela Perkins, our incredible librarian advisor, she reassured me that there was really something in this. She urged me to speak to Janna Avon, a librarian here at Lafayette College, who had a wealth of knowledge and some great ideas as to where to take this project. We talked for a little bit about a couple of different angles and she offered some great sources that would help me narrow down what I was looking for. However, the one thing that stuck out from our conversation was her idea of a network analysis, basically tying a bunch of these figures together and seeing if there were any dark horses that stood out as influential figures. I could never have predicted the wealth of knowledge that came from this idea. 

I did a little more research and found that there was real substance in this idea and so I made the jump and locked this in as my idea for my final project. I just had one problemu2013I did not have the slightest idea how to visualize this. I didnu2019t know what tools to use, I didn't know how to code it, and the idea was quite overwhelming to me. Luckily, Angela pointed me in the direction of Professor Caleb Gallemore who met with me and offered some great advice and even better questions. He really helped me put into words exactly what I wanted to do and gave me direction on how to do it. He recommended Web of Science as a means of digging into how scholars interacted with each other and with their organizations. He also recommended RStudio to visualize this information in a way that made sense to the reader. He came to meet with our whole cohort and gave a wonderful presentation on vibe-coding and how we could use it to help our project in a way that used as few tokens as possible. His meeting with me and his presentation to our cohort were the reasons I was able to present this data in a way that made more sense to the reader than my scribbled notes.