A Day in the Life of Madison Phillips

Reflection

Madison Phillips and Her Husband Jeremy Phillips

Madison Phillips and her husband Jeremy Phillips on June 12, 2021. 

      For this project, I chose the 24 hours at the beginning of my week because I wanted to present how I typically began my week and set myself up for success during the rest of the week through the weekend. This was not a special or singled out day, just a typical day in the life of me so that it would accurately reflect my daily life. I feel so often as a student in history, when I research into people of the past, their daily lives are often what is missing. Typically we know special events or situations in their lives, but not what happened to them on a daily basis, which was the sole motivator for my decision on what 24 hours I would document. 

      I wanted to include artifacts that truly represented my daily life but also the things in my life that bring me the most joy. Thus I included some daily items for school and a copy of my work schedule, but I also wanted to include my pets and loved ones as I am with them daily as well. I did not have any specific pictures of myself and my husband on these days, so I chose a photo of us together that best represented our two personalities. I wanted to include my pets as much as possible because I am a huge animal lover and I am constantly caring for them and loving them. Had I not included things like my laptop or school books, it would not have been an accurate representation of my daily life, especially on this day--I am always utilizing my laptop and school books. The only difficulty I found in creating these artifacts was that my phone is older so the photos are not always as high of a quality that I would like and Omeka will only accept a certain size of an image, other than that I found it quite easy to determine which artifacts were important to include. 

      The most difficult part of the assignment was ensuring that I was writing in a professional manner, but also being personable and relatable in my assignment. I felt there were a plethora of items I could have included but I wanted to choose the most important that were the most representative of what it was like to be me, thus choosing photos where my pets are invading, photos of my room, etc. 

      The narrative of the day in which I collected evidence presents a very mundane and routine day. This narrative emphasizes my organization as well as the organized chaos which occurs in my home. This narrative does however leave out how quite unorganized I really am. I often appear as though I have everything figured out, although that is quite the opposite. I am a chaotic, joyful, and boisterous individual which is quite difficult to read off of a screen. A person who reads this in the future and tries to interpret it might observe me as a very composed individual. Which, as I stated above is not always the case. 

      One thing I did notice with creating this Mini Me site is that when creating artifacts and archives the information provided can be taken in numerous ways unless explicitly detailed and outlined within the archive. There is not really a way to know how individuals in the future will utilize these images or will interpret the evidence collected in this archive. This truly made me wonder how often we have looked at historical events, evidence, and archives and used them in a different way than their original intention. 

      I quite enjoyed the construction of this assignment and felt it to be relaxing. I do however want to note that this process would have been much more difficult had it not been about myself. There are numerous components that go into creating historically accurate archives and evidence, which can become quite the challenge for historians. I believe archiving is something perhaps we don't do enough of but definitely takes a professional to accurately create.