Vnmercouris

Victoria Mercouris' Profile

Upload your own image, then replace the "yourprofilepicture.jpg" above with the new image name. Replace "Student Name" in both the image line and the top-level heading above with your first and last name. Delete this whole paragraph beneath the Student Name title but not including the Table of Contents tag __TOC__.

Overview

The paragraph should give a three to five sentence abstract about your entire London HUA experience including 1) a summary of the aims of your project, 2) your prior experience with humanities and arts courses and disciplines, and 3) your major takeaways from the experience.

Milestone 1

Strategical Architecture
Objective: replace this text with a one-sentence statement that summarized your main objective for this milestone such as "a comparison of the text of Medieval English choral music to that of the Baroque" or it may be a question such as "to what extent did religion influence Christopher Wren's sense of design?"

Below the objective statement, Insert a one or two paragraph summary of your findings from having reached this milestone. Edit the link below to link to your milestone page.
Read More

Milestone 2

Regional Fighting Styles
Objective: replace this text with a one-sentence statement that summarized your main objective for this milestone such as "a comparison of the text of Medieval English choral music to that of the Baroque" or it may be a question such as "to what extent did religion influence Christopher Wren's sense of design?"

Below the objective statement, Insert a one or two paragraph summary of your findings from having reached this milestone. Edit the link below to link to your milestone page.
Read More

Milestone 3

The Crafting of A Sword
Objective: replace this text with a one-sentence statement that summarized your main objective for this milestone such as "a comparison of the text of Medieval English choral music to that of the Baroque" or it may be a question such as "to what extent did religion influence Christopher Wren's sense of design?"

Below the objective statement, Insert a one or two paragraph summary of your findings from having reached this milestone. If this milestone, for you, represents a humanities and arts capstone, please indicate so. Edit the link below to link to your milestone page.
Read More

Activity Journal

The activity journal represents an ongoing log of reflections gained through each and every project activity on the calendar.

Leave the above sentence in place exactly as it is, delete this sentence, and add a new activity journal entry for each major trip or activity in which you participate (museum visit, cultural experience, etc.).

Monday May 8, 2017 Westminster Abbey, Tower of London, British Library

The first stop of the day was Westminster Abbey, where we toured the cathedral and graves of the many that were buried inside. This activity didn’t relate to any of my milestones. The architecture of the building was amazing though. I really enjoyed the gothic style and the engineering aspect of how since the weight is distributed through the columns walls become unimportant in terms of bearing weight. For this activity, I created The Order of The Bath section in the Westminster Abbey page, in which I wrote about the knights that are honored in the church. The next place that we traveled to was the Tower of London. This castle was simply amazing and fit right into my first milestone on defensive architecture. I ended up spending 4 hours touring through all the different buildings, visiting the crown jewels, Beauchamp Tower, Bloody Tower, the Torture Chamber, and walking on the outside wall. The one major piece of defensive architecture that I could easily see where all of the small cross-shaped holes for archers in the towers, that allowed them to shoot at incoming enemies while providing as much protection as possible. I was also able to view some beautifully crafted swords in the armory that relates to my third miles stone. After finishing up at the Tower of London the last stop of the day was the British Library where I started my research on what castles to visit and wrote my article on The Order of The Bath.

Tuesday May 9, 2017 Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum is easily one of the largest museums that I have been in, while this made it slightly hard to navigate it was also a fun challenge to try and see all the exhibits that were available. This Museum didn't really relate to any of my milestones at all in terms of content, I did however like they way they displayed a lot of their information. In the body exhibit, there is a section on The Human Mind which I wrote about, that uses many interactive games to prove different concepts to the player. There was also a very creative display on the 2011 earthquake that hit Japan; it allowed visitors to stand in a fake store in Japan and experience the earthquake first hand.

Wednesday May 10, 2017 The National Gallery

As a person who is not very interested in paintings as an art form I wasn't conpleatly interested in The National Gallery. That did end up working to my advantage though, because I wasn't interested in the art hanging the wall, I ended up noticing how brilliant the architechture of the building is. I ended up writing my article on what I consider the Hidden Art inside the gallery. All around there was evidence of great care that went into crafting the building. Many of the upstairs rooms focus on using natural light to show-off the painting in the room, with beautifully designed large windows surrounded by elegant carvings and paintings on the wall. Even the way the wood was placed on the floor gave way to different patterns that complimented the rest of the room. While this was more on the side of an art perspective to architecture rather than a practical side it provided practice to try and notice what is often overlooked which I hope will help me when I go to explore castles this upcoming weekend.

Thursday May 11, 2017 British Muesum

This so far has been my favorite location out of the places we have been. The collection of items available to view was humongous ranging everywhere, from clocks to the history of Japan. This museum was also a big help with my capstone project as there was a lot of information available on the different ways that other countries used to make swords which included practical and decorative one that were on display. The sword that really stood out for me was the one from the samurai collection on the top floor in the Japanese exhibit which was what I wrote my article on. The displaces of different weapons were pretty inspiring in terms of designs and it makes me upset that I will need to wait so long to attempt to make my own.

Friday May 12, 2017 St. Paul's Catherdral

The statues within St. Paul's Cathedral were absolutely stunning. The other thing that stood out to me today was a picture done by a street artist that was on display in the cathedral, which they used to relate the Virgin Mary to signal mothers all over the world. This piece of art in the cathedral was inspiring because it showed a connection between a 300-year-old church and a modern day artist. For my contributions today, since there was so much already written on St. Paul's Cathedral I decided to just do some editing on the whole page.

Monday May 15, 2017 Tate Modern

As a person who doesn't like modern art, this museum pleasantly surprised me. I enjoyed playing on the interactive doodle bar that was set up on the 1 level. I feel that it was a great way to try show what the art you had just seen meant to you. I also really like the exhibit Monument 1980-1, which was what I ended up writing about. The piece of art really gave everyday heroes that may have gone unknown a voice. I also enjoyed that the artist memorialized herself in the art by recording a tape on the heroes and the topic of death. It felt like I was able to make a personal connection with her especially since I was the only one listening to it at the time.

Tuesday May 16, 2017 Museum of London

For this museum, I really like the timeline layout. I feel that it really put all of London's advancements into perspective by having them one after another, it showed all of the growth. This will be important as I continue with my first milestone because after visiting the castles I have noticed that the best defenses weren't always around, they happened overtime. So after seeing this, I may want to make a timeline for each of the castles I will be studying to show their growth and the development of their architecture. Also after seeing the museum we took the time to travel over to Borough Market which was simply amazing. For me, this is exactly how I would imagine a modern day medieval market to look so I ended up creating an article on that instead of the museum.

Thursday May 18, 2017 Tate Britain

By this point, I am getting a little tired of art museums since I am not much of an art admirer. I did enjoy the collection from the 1800s the most.What I ended up noticing in a lot of the pieces of art was the theme of being inspired by literature. There were paintings based off of plays, poems, and myths which I found interesting.

Friday May 19, 2017 Victoria and Albert Museum

The museum today had a large selection of things to view. Some of my favorite exhibits included the castings, the jewelry, and the middle ages. While I just enjoy the first two because I found the pieces in their stunning, the last one had pretty good significance in terms of my milestone since it was set in the same time period. Unfortunately, there was not a lot in the way of weapons or architecture, but I did enjoy the woven tapestries and the selection of trunks that were on display. My favorite trunk was the one that purpose was specifically to hold important documents. The trunk weighted an immense amount, had a secret catch level in order to open it and even if a thief got in they would also need to break into the safe located inside to get the papers. So while this doesn't necessarily fall into the architecture level of defense it would have been very critical for the safe keeping of important or secret documents. Also since our group was the last one to visit this museum there wasn't much left to work on for the page so I just did some spelling and grammar editing on the page.

Monday May 22, 2017 Horniman Museum and Garden

This museum didn't relate at all to any of my milestones, I did however enjoy spending time in the gardens. We ended up just relaxing and working in them for a few hours because it was so peaceful.

Activity #1 Name

Add a paragraph about this experience noting the ways in which it related to one or more of your milestone aims. Did this experience directly relate to your milestones, or was the relation more indirect? In what ways did this experience cause you to think differently about your milestone aims? What were some of your other takeaways from the experience? For each site-specific term that you enter, check to see if there is a page in this wiki that exists and link to it. For example, if your reflection mentions William Shakespeare, check to see if William Shakespeare exists on this site. If an article page does exist, 1) link to it here, and 2) edit the page with a section or just a few sentences to ensure that the content on that page relates to this activity journal entry. For example, if while writing your activity journal reflection about your trip to Westminster Abbey, you recall seeing the headstone of William Shakespeare, note it in your reflection, and then edit the William Shakespeare with, at least, a sentence or two in an appropriate section about having a memorial site in Westminster Abbey. While your at it, edit the entry for Westminster Abbey with the relevant information. Did you take some interesting pictures or videos at those sites? Add those to the relevant pages. If an article page does not exist, create the page for the missing topic (link from main menu) and add some general information. For each activity scheduled on our calendar, you should 1) create an Active Journal Entry here, and 2) add/edit at least three related articles. The tone of this article can be personal, but still quality professional writing; the tone of article pages that you edit should be objective professional writing.
Think of this process as building a platform or a case that will help you make particular claims and conclusions through your project milestones.

Activity #2 Name

A paragraph for your personal reflection for another activity on our calendar goes here, just it was outlined in the previous example. Repeat this same process for the remaining activities. Whenever there's an activity on the calendar, complete an activity journal reflection.

My Complete Contributions

The journal section should end with the following link to your complete contributions (new articles, edited articles, added media, etc.); delete this sentence and replace the username Vjmanzo below with your own username:

Category Tags

Category tags for your profile page must include 1) the tag [[Category:Profiles]] and 2) the present year in which you are participating in the London HUA experience, and 3) the advisor(s) tags; that's it!

• Do not list any other tags especially "Project Category" pages as you do for Milestone pages.
  
• Do not list all of the categories available in this page; list only the categories related to your three milestones.
• Do not add the Template Pages category to any of your pages :)

For example:

[[Category:Profiles]]

plus the year the project was completed by you, like this:

[[Category:2017]]

plus the year the advisor tag(s) like this:

[[Category:Advisor:Manzo]]

Note that the last name of the advisor may be different depending on who your advisors are.
Refer to the Profile Template for specific formatting instructions.

Delete this entire section when adding category tags--category tags don't need a section. Also, don't include the Template category tag below!!

  C