As a history major, I knew that I wanted to do something historically related for my final project. I ran though several ideas, and I happened to be watching a documentary on the Kennedy family, which ultimately brought me to my decision. I knew that these what-if  history questions we popular, especially this one, so I figured I would give it a try. I found that I have been playing with the idea of my final project quite a few times. It wasn’t catching on the storytelling aspect that I wanted it to. Ultimately, I decided to trace the campaign, but rather than going through a series of historical events as planned, I chose to make it from the point-of-view of a Secret Service Agent, watching from behind-the-scences. This is storytelling because it follows the story of his travels and carries a plot. Looking back, I think I would have chosen a completely different project idea, but I’m content with my project.

In order to make this project, I created a new blog from my domain. It is mostly writing about what the agent would have said as he followed the campaign to each of the different stops.  Since it is a hypothetical blog, there are obviously no pictures of him in 1964, so I used previous pictures that unless you really knew a lot about the picture you wouldn’t be able to tell. All of the pictures I used came from Life Magazine. I wrote about the thoughts that would go through his head, his emotions, and the things he would see as he was traveling. I didn’t really know where to take the blog in terms of having an ending. In order to have it end it would need to have blog posts for four years, which would obviously be a lot. So, I didn’t really have an ending point, I just kinda let it fall wherever it ended up.

To me, this project means the ability to do something I am interested in for a class. I took this class as a gen-ed, with no intentions of continuing in the computer sciences or the arts. I enjoy that ds106 allows us to create our own final project, depending on our interests, rather than making us do things we have no desire to do. This final project has allowed me to take the things we have done in class and apply them more broadly to something that I could use elsewhere.