My First Dead Body

Today I thought I would write just a quick blurb about … you guessed it… death! I was trying to think of interesting topics when I remembered that I saw my first real dead body just in the last 5 months! That’s pretty interesting; at least I think it is.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous entry, I have been lucky enough to have only one close family member die in my lifetime. He was cremated and there was no formal funeral. Since then, I have been in attendance at two funerals (an old elementary school teacher and a girl I once played volleyball with) but, thankfully, neither of them had open caskets. Unless you count family pets and /or road kill, I had never seen a dead body.

However, just this last November/December, my roommate and I were driving down Quadra after dark; we had just reached the downtown area when we saw someone being wheeled out of an apartment building on a stretcher. We were slowing down to stop at a red light and so it seemed to unfold before us very slowly. The moment I saw the stretcher I began to say, “Oh no, it looks like someone was hurt”, but before the words were even out of my mouth it registered in my mind that the person was in a body bag.

My roommate and I saw it at the same time and our jaws dropped open – it’s a miracle we didn’t rear end the car in front of us. It seemed very surreal since we were so removed from the situation but the feeling stayed with us all night. It makes you think about how our actions, conscious or unconscious, may affect others’ lives. I guarantee you that the man inside the body bag never imagined he would be the topic of this blog entry about “My First Dead Body”. 

Website Analysis

For this particular blog prompt, I chose to focus on Wikipedia because I couldn’t think of another website more geared towards the general public. Because my group and I have focused on Tse-whit-zen, the ancient Native American burial ground discovered in Port Angeles in 2003, I decided to see what Wikipedia had to say about it.  Unfortunately, I found Wikipedia to have a shocking lack of information on Tse-whit-zen, especially considering the amount of available information I know is out there. So, I decided to see how much information was to be found on the Hood Canal Bridge instead. The Hood Canal Bridge was the reason for the accidental discovery of Tse-whit-zen due to a large rehabilitation project which was to take place in Port Angeles.  The Hood Canal Bridge has much more written about it; therefore, I have decided evaluate it based on the rubric my group created.

Scope:  5/5 – This isn’t very relevant to this particular website as there is no introduction defining the scope of the topic or explaining why certain information was included or omitted.

Depth of Analysis:  4/5 – The information included is relevant, with no irrelevant information included. However, the background information provided does not have much depth and could use more connections to other material.  

Presentation: 5/5 – The information is presented in a very clear and accessible way with obvious headings and subsections and there are no grammatical or spelling errors. Three types of media are used as well: writing, images, and I’m including links to external websites .

Evidence: 2/5 – Despite the inclusion of reference material at the bottom of the page, many statements of fact are not referenced with a foot note or other form of in-text citation. The sources used are also imbalanced. Based on the topic, I feel that a variety of sources could be used rather than simply relying on an online encyclopedia.

Summary: N/A – I chose not to include this in the evaluation due to the nature of the website as an encyclopedia-like informational source.

References: 1/5 – While the citation style was consistent and without grammatical errors, the lack of references throughout the text was unacceptable. Furthermore, none of the sources used were scholarly or peer reviewed.

When discussing the Hood Canal Bridge, Wikipedia scored a 17/25 for a total of 68%. To improve the website, I would include far more references throughout the text, and increase the scope and depth of material by using more varied and credible sources. I’m glad I didn’t choose to evaluate the page on Tse-whit-zen!

Reference: 

Wikipedia, 2011. Hood Canal Bridge. [online] Available at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hood_Canal_Bridge> [Accessed 20 March 2012].