The Making of “Wives of Agency” (Progress Update #5)

Progress

Besides a few filler events where I am deciding whether or not to include primary source text about Catherine of Aragon, her first draft events are all complete. The same can be said for Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, though Seymour is one of the wives with a lot less scholarly research which means she still has a few events with filler text. I’m still in the drafting stage for the events of Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Katherine Parr, but progress is moving quickly as these marriages (and lives) are shorter than their earlier counterparts.

One of the recent steps taken for the project was compiling a list of the things necessary for me to consider it a polished final project:

• Complete Research, Writing, and Importation of Events pertaining to Anne of Cleves.
• Complete Research, Writing, and Importation of Events pertaining to Katherine Howard.
• Complete Research, Writing, and Importation of Events pertaining to Katherine Parr.
• Complete Events with placeholder descriptions.
• Complete search and file of appropriate media to use in project.
• Make determination over whether primary source texts have a place in the audience side of the project.
• Revise events to include media when available, correct poor grammar, use more audience friendly language, and standardize stylization (i.e. Always refer to the queen by her full name in the event title, standardize verb tense of events either in present or past)
• Revise “about” on landing page to include descriptions of historical approximations, including rules about halving a time-span for undetermined events, and how approximations were created for day by the 01 Jan rule.
• Replace background images of marriage spans with cropped alternatives that do not primarily focus on the Queen’s chest region. (Optionally change the assigned colors for Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves to be less similar)
• Create a “Suggested Reading” event, which showcases my most used sources and references.
• Embed in professional blog and create announcement post.
• Find a way to back up the timeline so that it does not require a premium plan after course completion.

Challenges

My biggest challenge is time. I’ve said previously that I could work on this project for a year, but I’ve only got three weeks left and I still feel like there’s a lot of work left to do. I’ve got a pretty long to-do list as you can from the progress section of the blog.

A few of the things on the list I’m actually most worried for are potentially embedding them on this website and finding a way to back up the project. The timeline, as it currently stands, includes premium plan content from Tiki-Toki, specifically the free plan only allows for 5 “spans” which I used to create distinctions of when each woman was married to Henry VIII, and there are six wives, which meant I had to upgrade to get a plan for each. It would be unsustainable for me to pay ten dollars a month in perpetuity to maintain the site as is, so while I love the timeline, I may need to find a way to make a static version of the site to capture it as a final product. One way I might go about this is by creating a video walk-through of the timeline, though I am still exploring other options as well.

Next Step

Obviously the next step is finishing my project and working through my to-do list. But there are a few other things to consider that I should blog about:

Project Justifications

Throughout this project I’ve had to make decisions about what is best for the project in a number of ways (including upgrading to the premium plan for ease of use for the audience seeing each marriage span). Some of these decisions included: Date Estimations, Consolidated Sources, Excluding Events that didn’t match my argument, and a focus on audience enjoyment over strict scholarship:

Date Estimations: Many events in the timeline have an estimated date. In some cases, it is the most popular date accepted by academics and scholars, in some cases it is halfway between a range of dates, and in some cases, I know the event happened between two others and I just had to slide it in, even without knowing the real date. In these cases I opt for the first of a month if I know what month, or the first of January if I only know the year or had to approximate the year. It is not perfect, but it keeps all events uniform with having a single day associated.

Consolidated Sources: My timeline will not have my sources in the individual events. This means it will be harder for people to replicate my research exactly, but it means that audiences will be more able to understand and navigate through the timeline without being bogged-down but constant citations. Because of this, I will have a curated event that only contains sources that can easily be skipped over by the audience if they don’t want to read it.

Excluding Events: Some known events in the Wives’ lives do not fit with my argument. For instance, Catherine of Aragon had a pet monkey, which did not get along with Anne Boleyn when both women lived in the same palace. This is a fun fact to know about Catherine of Aragon, but it is not an accomplishment or an example of her exercising her agency. I am also excluding any events about Henry VIII and his advisors that do not directly affect the women’s accomplishments or agency. This project is about Catherine, Anne, Jane, Anne, Katherine, and Katherine, not about Henry, though I cannot remove him entirely.

Focus on Audience Enjoyment: This is a public history project, the public is my chief concern. While I do not wish to make up lies about Tudor History, many concepts must be simplified or written in alternate language that is more accessible to a greater audience. For instance, while the famous rhyme is “Divorce, Beheaded, Died, Divorce, Beheaded, Survived.” It is actually slightly untrue, Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves were not “divorced” but their marriages were annulled, which is a very similar idea, with different connotations. In addition, Anne Boleyn’s marriage was annulled prior to her treason trial and beheading. I still refer to these events in the common way, because the truth is not too far off, even if there are slight differences. I also don’t bother to go into detail about how some of the images that are used in the project have disputed origins, namely the portraits of Anne Boleyn (painted after her death), and Katherine Howard (not without a doubt Katherine as opposed to other Tudor women). These pictures are largely attributed to these women, and while it is nearly impossible to prove the portraits are of these women, I would rather include them than have no visual aids for the story of the timeline.

Evaluation

Since this project is for a class, I do have to think of how I would want to evaluate my project, and I’ve come up with two ideas: Major Success and Moderate Success.

Major Success: 

• Outcome Goals: Timeline receives increased site traffic and engagement on related blog posts.
• Assets/Resources: The interactive timeline and built-in sorting game is accompanied with the progress blog posts on Cecilia Ward’s portfolio.
• Activities: The timeline launches with a blog post that describes the creation of the timeline, with fun facts about Tudor history that were left out, and an announcement for a videogame tutorial prototype coming this summer.
• Audience: The project reaches its intended audience (Teachers, Students, Ren Faire enthusiasts) as well as additional visitors.
• Indicators of Success: The timeline reaches its maximum amount of views for current software plan (5000)
• Long-Term Impacts: Audience has a greater appreciation for the accomplishments and agency of women throughout history.

Moderate Success: 

• Outcome Goals: Timeline receives increased site traffic.
• Assets/Resources: The interactive timeline and built-in sorting game is accompanied with the progress blog posts on Cecilia Ward’s portfolio.
• Activities: The timeline launches with a blog post that describes the creation of the timeline.
• Audience: The project reaches its intended audience (Teachers, Students, Ren Faire enthusiasts).
• Indicators of Success: The timelines reaches 1/10 of view capacity (500) views
• Long-Term Impacts: Audience has a greater appreciation for the accomplishments and agency of Henry VIII’s wives.

 

While I’m not excited for my project to potentially do poorly, I do have a preferred outcome in that case to: The project does not reach it’s intended or unintended audience, but provides a framework that makes the production of the Wives of Agency video-game prototype simpler. No matter what happens at this point, I don’t think I can be too upset. The project is something I’ve enjoyed creating and has given me an outlet for learning new Digital Public History ideas.