Back in the fall of 2019 when I was applying for this program, I was asked the question of what I wanted to do with a computer science degree. Back then my answer to this question was that I wanted to create a flexible database for good research. The issue I had beforehand was finding credible resources to read about for my research papers. For instance, I was studying Japanese history at the time, and sifting through the documents and archives was a long and arduous task, especially when the sources were decades to even a century old and in Japanese. The library of documents felt overwhelming since I was looking for specific articles and written statements that pertained within a certain time period which was the 1930s. These issues plagued my time as a history undergrad since good research and sources of a specific time period were scarce and hard to find. This obstacle led me to the idea of creating a website that could be used as a base for good research. My general idea is to create a website where people can go into and click on a place and time period and that brings up relevant books, articles, and resources relevant to that search. While so far this sounds pretty basic, what will also show up are the cited sources of these books and articles that the user will have access to at ease. This will help with good research because the person digging into this library of information has a pathway. How this would work is say if a person was looking into Japan’s imperial history around the 1930s, the book Japan’s Total Empire, a landmark piece of work on Imperial Japan, will be among the first results to show up with its sources and documents accessible or at least where to find them. This allows the user to dig into the first-hand source and see for them and make interpretations that may differ from the author as well. That would be the basic idea of the website and there are still plenty of other ideas that I’d like to implement to organize it and hopefully after I graduate I’d like to take some time out and delve deeper and make it into reality.
