Week 8

This Week

This week we were assigned to come up with an overview of our project to be used in our website.  The overview must include an introduction, history of our topic, and our methodology, my product can be seen below.  Not much progress was made on my two projects due to Thanksgiving break.  I am still making progress on my two story maps and hope to finish those up soon. 

 Project Overview

Background

As a geography major at the University of Wisconsin Eau-Claire I have the opportunity to go on many field trips across the United States and the World.  When I first heard about this class and how it involved a ten day trip to France I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to take advantage of, by going to a different culture while also getting credit towards my major.   After learning that the trip would involve a study of World War I by actually going on the battlefields, I knew this trip is right up my alley with my interests in Geography and History.

Introduction

During the trip when our class was able to walk across the battlefields and memorials of Somme and Verdun I became fascinated with World War I.  I especially became interested in the Battle of Verdun.  As our class was walking around the area where the Battle of Verdun took place we were lucky enough to have a great tour guide, Christina Holstein, walk along with us.  She would talk about every aspect of the War at each location we were at.  She knew everything about the Battle of Verdun of who did what and when, and if they were successful or not.  Listening to Christina talk made me very interested in the Battle of Verdun leading me towards wanting more knowledge of the battle.  This lead to my project idea of studying and gathering information of the Battle of Verdun and making a map of the Battle that features front lines, forts, and key events during the war. 

History

The Battle of Verdun Started on February 21^st 1916 as the Germans, behind Falkenhayn, launched a somewhat surprised attack on France.  The Germans quickly gained ground on France by capturing the biggest fort in Verdun, For Douaumont.   After losing Fort Douaumount France turned to General Pétain to lead the defenses in Verdun.  After the Germans captured Fort Douaumont the Battle started to stall as little ground was gained due heavy artillery shelling and trench war fare.  The Germans managed some substantial ground and Fort Vaux but eventually the French ended up gaining back the ground and forts lost and winning the Battle.   Because of the constant shelling, bad war tactics, and high ground the Battle of Verdun is considered to be one of the impactful and deadliest battles of all time accounting in huge amounts of casualties for both the French and Germans.  My two projects go into further detail about the Battle of Verdun with an interactive map and a Tour Story Map of the Battle. 

Methods

After having an idea of what my project was going to be I knew that it was going to require me to do a lot of research and reading.  To gather my information on the Battle of Verdun I went online and found many great websites on the Battle of Verdun I also went to the Library and used books from Amazon to complete my research.  Some great resources that cover the Battle of Verdun are: The Western Front Association, The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne, and books by our tour guide Christina Holstein.   I used the website ArcGIS to create my two projects.  This first one creating a map on ArcGIS and editing the map by adding map features as lines, points, and polygons and adding pictures and descriptions to each of them.  The second project called a story map is a template available for use on ArcGIS.  In this template I uploaded the same map from my first project but then added pictures and descriptions to make a tour of the Battle of Verdun.