It was around 5 am on what seemed like an average night when all of a sudden I woke up in cold sweat as the thought hit me like a brick, I had completely forgotten about the most important part of my project, the Humanities booklet.
About a month ago I went on a trip to alberta where I learned about it’s history, tourism and how this was and currently is affected by the area’s geography. During this trip I was also told to make a booklet about all of this, the main question of this book and of the project itself being “How does the geography of the west shape who we are?” Much like in my Maker reflection https://www.blog44.ca/julianh/2023/10/15/alberta-trip-maker-reflection/ this blog will be separated into two different categories, Booklet and Comic Life as these are the two main projects we did in Humanities.
Comic life:
The comic life consisted on a simple document which showed a picture for each of the 5 themes of geography. These include location which is the exact location of a place on the globe. Movement which is simply any form of transportation (cars, boats, planes), it can also mean movement of ideas. Place which is any place with physical (trees, mountains, lakes) and or cultural characteristics (religion, language, etc). Human-environment interaction which consists on humans modifying or adapting to an environment (bridges or any other structure built by humans).
This whole activity ended up helping me learn some really important skills for such a simple activity. I ended up learning all about photography, the different and creative angles you can use to capture a landscape, the importance of lighting, how to choose the perfect landscape to capture and much more. All these seemingly small things helped me take great pictures of scenic views, with perfect lighting which highlighted the image, and a creative camera angle, all of these factors offered a serious improvement compared to my pictures during the oregon trip https://www.blog44.ca/julianh/2023/06/29/oregon-trip-2023/
Even though I am pretty proud of the images themselves the same cannot be said about the written text under every image. These apart from barely being detailed didn’t even have that much to do with the definitions of each one of these which greatly hurt the product as a whole. This wouldn’t have been the case if I had taken my time to learn about the definition of each one of these and had a great understanding of each one of them which was key for this project. Overall the final product looks really good and each one of the descriptions gets the point across even though there’s room to improve.
The Alberta trip booklet:
As I said in the humanities reflection this activity consisted on something slightly more complicated than my comic life. I was told to make a booklet with around 23 pages about each one of the many places I visited, each place had to have a detailed description of their relation to one or more of the 5 themes of geography, how the place influences the economics of the west and my interpretation of what the place is all about.
Just like the comic life did this activity also helped me learn a couple of skills which helped me then and I believe will help me even more in the future. One of these is my design skills. At first this may sound rather silly coming from a project based around history but this was actually one of the most crucial things in the making of my project as I believe that it added even more to the text by helping paint the picture of the weather, feel or even the time period of the places I travelled to. I added a variety of different fonts, backrounds and more in the attempt of succesfully creating a theme (which I believe I succeeded in doing). Overall this all seriously boosted the final product making it look nice while adding to it in more ways than one. Finally my biggest takeaway from this activity was the history of each place and how it was influenced by it’s geography. Each and every one of the places we visited had an important history which was greatly impacted by it’s geography, be it Cave and Basin and it’s hot springs which brought loads of tourism into the area and brought the idea of putting hotels all across canada into the founders of huge hotel companies which still remain today, or the Roger’s Pass which brought people from all across the world because of it’s huge railroad and provided work for all of them. All of these place’s have an important history who’s main focus is their geography which actually shows me how important the geography of a place actually is and how it can affect an entire country and it’s history.
