Project Changes

As is inevitable with any major undertaking, we have reached a few snags and have had to change our plans somewhat.

Whereas we had previously hoped to go through the entire city in the first month, that is clearly going to be impossible. We are still plugging away in the same two sestieri (San Marco is giving us particular trouble because it is so densely populated with tourists and thus stores) and it seems like that is all we will be able to do. Apparently, none of the preceding groups were able to map the entire city, so we don't feel all too bad about it.

The flooding is not as regular as we thought. We were informed that it occurred every other week, with the full and new moon, but the flooding really only becomes a problem at the full moon. Since we only have two major periods of flooding to work with instead of four, we are going to dig more heavily into researching newspapers instead of data collection.

We originally planned to track flower sellers at night using our cameras, but most of them won't take good night photos. Because they are almost always dark-skinned, it makes the problem even worse. We won't be doing this until after Thanksgiving, though, so we will have to test it out, maybe go at twilight for as long as we can, though the sun is setting earlier and earlier.

Apart from that, things are pretty much on track. We have people on the databases and maps, and the data collection and entry is continuing at a steady rate. We hope to finish entirely by Thanksgiving.