I will be sharing the app that I’ve been building that will provide numerous ways to look for information about what Midwest Quakers have been doing in recent times. The last post about Dynamic Queries was an introduction to this.
Stories are sorely needed in trying times.
In 2015 I began writing on blogs I created. That writing took on a life of its own as I began writing almost every day. Since then, I’ve created eight blog sites and published over three thousand posts. The various sites were related to things like Quakerism, mutual aid, Native affairs, and how to build for the future.
It’s not about me. I have not been building these things to promote myself, but rather to share what I am observing, learning, and being led to do in response.
We will increasingly be forced to come up with solutions as the systems around us fail.
Verified Facts Explorer
As I’ve been exploring this idea, it seemed one way to share the information would be to connect what a given blog post was written about to what was happening in the world at that time. Both to verify what I wrote, and give a better idea of the historical context.
I created the Verified Facts Explorer to check the main topics of these blog posts against the public record. For each topic, I found articles published at the same time as the blog post. Then I gathered them into a table with a link to each one. The main topics are:
- Quaker History
- Boarding Schools
- Treaties and Land
- Pipelines
- Unity March (First Nation-Farmer Climate Unity March)
- Wet’suwet’en
- Climate
- Race and Policing
- War and Peace
- Palestine and Gaza
- Mutual Aid
- Democracy and Immigration
In the example below, “Pipelines” is the selected subject, and it has 42 references. Each row of the table gives a date and states a FACT. The Source column links to articles published publicly at that time. The In the Posts column links to the blog posts that mentions that FACT.
The COPY TABLE button will make a copy of the information that appears in the table, including the links to the articles.
Homework
Click this link to open the Verified Facts Explorer
- Select one of the topics (Quaker history, boarding schools, etc).
- What are the FACTS that appear when you make your selection?
- Follow the links to the SOURCES.
- Follow the links in the column IN THE POSTS
- Write a paragraph about what you found.
- Were the posts in the IN THE POSTS column relevant to the topic?
- Did the public references help you better understand the topic?
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