Week 11?: Reflections on the Project

Hello all!

So I lied in my last blog post, and this will most likely be my final blog post. Overall, I had a great time with my project, doing research on a topic I was really interested and curious about. Though there was hardship with finding sources and accurate information, through cold emailing and lots of digging on the internet, I feel like I covered more ground than I ever could have imagined, finding out about things that I had no clue about at the beginning of the project. Learning about different metals and how some metal processes are lost to time was something I definitely didn’t expect and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would have.

Polling was lovely and everyone on r/fountainpens was really helpful and nice. Most left a thoughtful comment wishing me good luck with my polling and research. Infact, the entire community as a whole has been really helpful and willing to speak with me for the most part. Cold emailing went way better than I expected and although I was still ghosted a decent amount, most people were responsive and more than willing to help. If I had more time, I wish I did more concise polling and worked with more archives to see if I could find newspaper scraps on the state of nib manufacturing in the 1800s-1900s but sadly, I ran out of time. I also had a point of interest I wanted to talk to Andrew Midkiff about and even though my project is over, I feel I will continue corresponding with him because he does bring up some interesting points.

Anyways, thank you so much for reading my blog posts and being a part of my journey. And I would like to give a special thanks to my internal advisor Ms. Canevaro for being extremely helpful with ideas and paper writing and my external advisor Pat Blair who helped me find lots of information on dip pens and provide some physical book information that was helpful with pinpointing research topics.