(This is more about you evaluating your ideas than me doing the same, and raises issues that will apply to things you do in any projects, academic or professional or whatever, throughout your lives)
All projects get started --like pearls in oysters-- with bits of grit that accrete. The bits of grit are often interests or idea-fragments or questions that keep floating to the top, and usually the germ that began the project is thoroughly buried at the end. Learning to be in control of the process is really worth putting effort into, and that's part of my objective in putting you through the process of "negotiating" the project you'll be working on for Anthropology 230.
The first issue is usually whether an idea for a project is do-able in scope and resources, and the natural tendency of most of us is to think big and bite off a huge chunk... and then discover that it's too big to get control over. This is not to say that you shouldn't think big, but rather that Big runs the risk of being superficial. So the first stage in evaluating is to ask what are the available resources? and then go through a pretty systematic process of searching, examining, thinking, reading, writing.
This is what I'm trying to bulldoze you into with assignments like Annie and JSTOR searches and log file entries: figuring out strategies that work for you to systematize the development process for your ideas. One can't just do the library catalog thing once and have it done with (that's the high school model for research process) --you need to keep going back as you have new ideas and questions, and you need to process a lot of stuff (a lot of which will be discarded --think of the baleen whales) and you need to keep track of what you find and what you think."Keeping track" is where the log.html file comes in. Clearly I'll make specific assignments for entries to your log.html file, but I most definitely hope that you'll use that same file to record what you're doing and thinking --that you'll explore log.html as a diary medium. Entries don't have to be enormously detailed, but could include notes-to-yourself on what you did, what you found, what you think about what you think, and so on (personally, my own analogs to the log.html file are quite detailed, and prove to be very useful to me later on). I'll certainly be checking on your logs and reading what you put in them, and when it comes to mundanities like grading, an obvious and concerted effort to use the log.html medium will be not-irrelevant. And I hope you'll also look at each other's logs, rising above invidious comparison and maybe even helping each other out with constructive comments. 'Nuff said?