1. Project Summary

Goals:

Corona Chronicles is a global digital collection for middle and high school students to share their lived experiences through the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as to allow them to witness and learn what students in other geographical locations (locally, nationally, and internationally) express about their experiences. In order to foster a space for building empathy and a sense of connection, participants tell their stories through various artistic mediums such as poetry, visual images, film, short responses and essays, 3D rendering, and short documentaries.

The Corona Chronicles collection provided an opportunity for young people to co-create and design the collection with the project team in order for them to develop the website in ways that feels representative and accessible to their age demographic. This in turn provides honest and unadulterated information to educators, guardians, and institutions regarding ways to better support young people during this time. From a pedagogical perspective, this project may serve the objectives of affective curriculum development, including support of socio-emotional well being, which will take on great importance as students return to in-person schooling after extended periods or remote learning.

From a Digital Humanities, “tech for good” perspective, the Corona Chronicles is not only youth centered, but it also trusts that our student contributors and collaborators are experts of their own experiences and that the value of their voices are what make this digital endeavor necessary and vital. Documenting and collecting their stories in real time is crucial to offering a more complete account of what will be written and understood about this unprecedented time.

 Outcomes:

 The general outcomes of the Corona Chronicles digital collection were primarily successful. With the initial expectation of receiving only six contributions, the project exceedingly surpassed its goal and collected more than 30 submissions. Students living in New York, Vermont, Virginia, Texas, and Lima, Peru offered their experiences through the various art forms stated above. The digital collection now displays 32 pieces with accompanying descriptions.

After collaborating with our Student Advisory Board, and regularly meeting with them for brainstorming sessions and focus group meetings, we successfully integrated most of their ideas on aesthetics, content, and representation. Our student advisors and other contributors were largely satisfied with the final product. 

Primary Collaborators:

Corona Chronicles Collection’s primary collaborators were 3 students chosen for the Student Advisory Board and all of the students who contributed to the collection. Also, the project members received an informal consultation from Lara Alonso and Victor Clemente, the creators of coronastories.world, and implemented many Digital Humanities approaches provided from a presentation by Dr. Lisa Rhody. Lastly, Debora Vasquez from The Point CDC, translated the project’s consent form to Spanish.

Link to Project: corona-chronicles.world

2. Project Origins and Goals

Motivation for Development & Funding:

There are currently a range of digital archives collecting and sharing stories of individuals living through the Covid-19 pandemic, however, there is no collection dedicated to telling and connecting the stories of children across diverse geographic regions and backgrounds through a range of multimedia. We believe that the act of producing, sharing, and engaging with these stories is allowing students to develop a sense of connection through a period of widespread isolation, as well as to develop empathy and understanding of others living in different circumstances of their own. In order to continue developing this project, funding will be necessary to cover the following expenses: expand outreach across international networks, provide some form of compensation to contributors (not necessarily monetary), extend Adobe Portfolio licenses, and hiring consultants and team members to sustain the long-term maintenance of the collection.

Intended Audiences & Fields of Study:

Adolescents and teenagers (ages 11-18) are the intended primary users and audiences, but it is also equally important for parents, educators, other adults, and institutions to engage with the digital collection. Our hope is that these care-takers and educational providers will be able to empathize and better understand the ways in which young people need support during the pandemic and moving forward. This project also offers other graduate students and researchers, particularly those interested in child and developmental psychologies, with material to analyze and build upon. The fields of studies we engaged were education, art, archive, digital humanities, data visualization, and mapping.

Past Work We Built On:

There are many examples of archives collecting the experiences of college students and adults, such as Providence College Pandemic Archive, The Ball Statue University Pandemic Archive, and The Los Angeles Public Library Archive, but the presence of children’s voices and expression in storytelling collections during the pandemic is limited. Among child-focused projects, Child Art focuses on younger children and visual expression, and from a global or international perspective, Corona Stories are all video documentations of people (many adults and a handful of children) explaining their experiences. Still other collections are contest-based and exhibit only a small number of student submissions. While all of these projects are important foundational references, Corona Chronicles seeks to address several gaps: our collection is exclusively student voices, a range of multimedia and art is encouraged, young people ages 11-18 are co-creators of the collection, and the user interface were intentionally designed for ease and interest of engagement by the intended end-user (youth).

3. Project Activities, Team, & Participants

Concrete Activities:

Over the course of 14 weeks, the team completed concrete activities to get us to our end goal of creating an ethically and socially safe digital collection where students can share their voices. For our initial group organization activities, we first created a week by week work plan with our major milestones as checkpoints to guide the deliverables. We also drafted and signed a collaborator’s work agreement to keep us all committed and accountable as we worked together. 

Next we tackled the challenge of writing the submission and consent form that students and parents fill out together to participate in our digital collection. Our translation consultant provided us with a Spanish version of this form to help reach a wider audience of contributors. Our outreach coordinators put together the plan for working with the team’s existing professional education network via in-person and email campaigns. We also set up an Instagram account to recruit submissions from the public as well as foster a community for students who have already contributed to further share their artwork. To help students create their submissions in the best possible format for uploading, we created a submission checklist document. The final outreach component we created is a trailer advertising the project for viewers to learn more about the project’s mission. 

After deciding on the Content Management System for our site, we met with our Student Advisory Board and pitched them a few options for the home page and overall design elements. The team agreed on a designed masthead, color scheme, and layout. We established a careful folder organization system to intake student submissions, as well as a naming convention to follow. As submissions started coming in, our multimedia manager edited videos for length and added an icon that details the name and location of each student. Once video editing is complete, they’re uploaded to the student’s individual gallery page on the site by our web developer. The same process is followed for the other submission formats (photo, text, artwork) that didn’t require editing. All of this was documented in a process workflow diagram for team members to reference. 

Finally as a thank you to participating students, we created a letter of recognition and certificate with the site’s branding displayed. Each student’s individual name is added before our outreach coordinators send out to them over email. At the end of our scheduled 14 weeks, the team created a presentation that features student submissions and explains the purpose of Corona Chronicles. 

Recruiting Participants: The team was constructed from professor guidelines for a praxis seminar. Our team leader presented the idea for the project and interested participants signed up.

Social Challenges: Due to covid-19, many/most of our contributors are participating in distant learning. This made physical outreach and access to our in-state student networks difficult. Some of the challenges of soliciting work from students who were off-site were: implementing deadlines, students’ difficulties completing projects due to zoom-fatigue and other responsibilities, depending on students to have consent forms completed by parents, not being able to visit institutions in order to discuss and answer questions regarding the archive, and being unable to monitor signs of distress and self harm from afar.

Technical Challenges: The selection of a platform that would meet our requirements involved a process of prioritizing the needs and creating work arounds for the requirements that could not be satisfied. Collaboration capabilities were deferred in favor of functionalities that directly impacted our audience and stakeholders. We also discussed what kind of editing would be required of the submissions without taking the students’ work out of context. It was important that we honor that student agency vs heavily editing for the sake of site curation. At the same time, we know that students had different access to technology for recording and creating submissions and we deliberately retained the authenticity that came with these technical differences. Finally, perhaps our greatest technical challenge of all was building this project entirely over Zoom without ever meeting in person. We were able to make comparisons to the same frustrations students were expressing about virtual learning through their pieces.

Institutional Challenges: Our earliest and perhaps most difficult challenge was understanding how to navigate the ethical and legal considerations our project needed to face. CUNY has a well-organized Institutional Review Board (IRB) process set up through the Human Research Protection Program (HRPP), and they were willing to consult with us on whether we would be required to submit our project protocols. Fortunately we were excused from this paperwork and review process because of the limited information we were planning to collect from our student research participants as well as the project not falling under definitions of research. We were careful to only collect the very minimum information from these students (via submission through their parent or guardian) and to not use it for any systematic research investigation. Sharing our plans with the IRB group helped us define the boundary of our project. Additionally we ran out of time within our defined timeframe to include all of the features we wanted to on the site. We had hoped to build a more interactive map as well as a search tool to filter by media type or prompt answered. 

Project contributors and expertise: The working team members for this project are Phil Agee (Web Developer), Karyn Delay (Team Leader & Outreach Co-Coordinator), Maggi Delgado (Multimedia Manager), Amanda Filchock (Project Manager), and Vallerie Matos (Research & Outreach Co-Coordinator). Our expertise includes project management, data management, media editing/development, outreach, and education. Our project advisors were Bret Maney and Micki Koffman. We also recruited 3 students as members of our student advisory board. 

Project management challenges: Juggling five unique schedules and varying workloads was the biggest project management challenge for our group. Responsibilities for this project would pile up on one or two roles at specific points in the schedule, so we worked as a team to share knowledge with other teammates and shift the schedule around as needed. We also worked out setting a clear process for intaking submissions as they were passing through multiple teammates before going up on the site and some workflow confusion occurred.

Collaboration challenges: We ended up defaulting to using email for our main channel of communication. This was after trying to use Discord and Trello to help us stay in touch and organized transparently. Not all teammates were receptive to learning the new software on top of the challenges that came with building this project while juggling everything else. Email ended up getting the job done, but inboxes can become unwieldy. In order to meet the project’s goal of reaching a global audience, the site and its submissions form were sent to an email list serve of schools connected via an international exchange program for high school students. This resulted in a response from a school in Peru and 5 student contributions. In future iterations of the project, this network may be more actively engaged (in contrast to a relatively passive email request).In order to meet the project’s goal of reaching a global audience, the site and its submissions form were sent to an email list serve of schools connected via an international exchange program for high school students. This resulted in a response from a school in Peru and 5 student contributions. In future iterations of the project, this network may be more actively engaged (in contrast to a relatively passive email request). 

Labor challenges: As briefly mentioned earlier, we ran into times where the division of workload was uneven amongst the team. The timing of our outreach meant that the majority of student submissions were received all around the same time, causing work to pile up on our multimedia manager and web developer. At the beginning of our project we created a collaborators agreement and held ourselves to it, but found that overtime some responsibilities and roles changed as we ironed out this intake and publishing process. Construction of the submission and consent form was a huge effort. We had multiple rounds of reviews with careful version control to collect feedback from parents, Bret Maney, and our student advisors. Independently, we engaged a translator through our professional network to produce a Spanish version of the form for our students. At the very end before going live with the site during the Digital Showcase, we rushed to incorporate edits received during the final proofread. Finally, some of our prototype features needed special attention: stretching the capabilities of Adobe Portfolio, monitoring the internal sheet collecting student information, and checking in on the Tableau map to ensure the geographic entries were captured correctly.

4. Project Outcomes

During a time when students have felt even more invisible/unheard than they already are, the Corona Chronicles team created a digital space where student voices are respectfully heard and shared. The products and outcomes of our project can be described in terms of the following matrix, which enumerates and associates both tangible and intangible outcomes.

Audience

The main audience of Corona Chronicles is first and foremost middle and high school students. These students live and study in places located across the world. They make up both the contributors who submit works as well as other students who visit the website to learn about and experience the visual art, poetry, videos, and prose. A secondary audience is the general public which includes the parents, family, and educators of the student contributors and student visitors. Another segment of the general public which Corona Chronicles serves is the network of educational, social advocacy, and public policy professionals who make decisions that impact the lives of our main audience.

The audiences were contacted through a variety of channels and modes of communication in conformance with the outreach plan developed by the project team. This outreach included email, telephone, and word-of-mouth efforts to a range of educational institutions based locally, regionally, and internationally.

Technical Decisions

The technical decisions made by the team covered the of areas of:

(a) A CMS hosting platform

(b) A data management and repository platform

(c) Website technologies

(d) Multimedia authoring tools

(e) Team collaboration tools

The team’s decision making process was based on a team-oriented needs analysis which formed a key component of the project plan and the consensus decision making process defined in the team’s collaboration agreement.

CMS Hosting Platform

The team chose to leverage the Adobe Portfolio hosting platform. The decision was based on an analysis of the project’s objectives and technical needs, which concluded that the capabilities of specialized archival solutions, such as Omeka and Scalar, were beyond the archival needs of the project. In considering open source CMS platforms, including WordPress, the team determined that given the project time frame constraints, the importance of the project’s non-technical deliverables, and the skillsets of the team the best choice for the first version of the website was Adobe Portfolio.

Three features and functionalities of the Adobe Portfolio platform contributed to the decision:

(a) The ease of use for a target audience including young users 

(b) The capability to support and manage the content for a range of media formats

(c) The specificity of the design in displaying artist’s work that complement the artistry of the students’ submissions

(d) Budget goals

Data Repository Services

As described in the data management plan, the team chose Dropbox as the content and archive repository for the following reasons: 

(a) Enterprise level data redundancy

(b) Team collaboration features

(c) Budget goals

The team also chose Google Sheets and Google Forms for the initial data and content capture. For metadata standards, the team authored a data management plan, which defined the project’s metadata and the standards, norms, naming conventions, and rules for data management and preservation.

Website Technologies

The team chose Tableau Software for its map feature, which offers interactive functionality, data driven capabilities, ease of design and programming, and the ability to automatically update itself as new submissions come in through the Google Form into the Google Sheet. As part of the project’s outreach strategies and the website user experience design, the team leveraged Google Analytics. The team also leveraged a number of website software and hosting technologies, including Typekit, core-js, Letsencrypt SSL, and GoDaddy DNS.

Multimedia and Graphics Authoring Tools

The team chose a range of open source and proprietary content editing software. Criteria for selection included ease of use, robust feature set, quality of output, and budget goals. These tools and services included the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), OBS Studio, Adobe Premier, Adobe Photoshop.

Collaboration Tools

Additionally, the team evaluated a range of collaboration tools and selected tools based on the size of the team, learning curves, and budget goals. These tools included Gmail, Trello, Discord, Doodle Meeting Management, Google Docs, and Zoom Technologies Video Conferencing. The free tier subscriptions of these tools aligned with the budget goals of the project.

Challenges

The team faced the following challenges and special areas of concern:

(a) Content submissions workflow management. With the content submissions workflow, the challenges the team faced included enabling team collaboration of multiple versions of the Google Submissions Form. Since Google Forms does not support team collaboration, workarounds were devised to allow team members to undertake the tasks of the content workflow.

(b) Website content management, user experience design, and responsive design. With the website, since Adobe Portfolio does not support team collaboration, collaborative workarounds were also devised to enable changes to the web pages and processing of the content. The team also devised workarounds to meet the requirements related to the user experience and accessibility. Limitations that were addressed included cover images for embedded videos, the information architecture for and navigation paths between content exhibits, and the responsiveness of graphics for mobile devices.

(c) Submission and consent form. Based on initial user feedback, users faced challenges completing the consent and submission form. User feedback suggested that the length and wording was the source of the challenge. A series of revisions were made and evaluated by the team and project’s student advisors.

(d) Website accessibility. Given the results of the Wave Accessibility Tool, a number of issues prevented the website from being accessible for differently-abled people. After consultation with an accessibility expert, changes were made to add alt-text, closed captions, and increase contrast for text and hyperlinks.

(e) Multilingual support. To enable submissions by speakers of Spanish, the submissions and consent form was translated into Spanish. However, the team chose not to translate the Spanish language submissions in order to preserve the contributors’ intention and work. The work to translate the submissions and consent form into Spanish will serve as a starting point for the development of full multi-lingual support.

(f) User license agreement. The team researched user licenses and selected the Creative Commons International user license, giving special attention to the concordance with the consent and copyright agreement.

(g) Privacy protection. The team discussed and developed ways to protect the privacy and identity of its student contributors as follows:

• Only the first name, age, and general geographic location of each student is displayed on the website. 
• The contributors are only visible if they decide to share work that includes videos and pictures of themselves. 
• The excel sheet with student email addresses can only be accessed by project members. 
• The website accepts anonymous contributions. 
• Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is removed from the submissions before publication. 
• Privacy concerns are taken into account with the project’s student advisory board.
• Only first names are included on the certificates of recognition. 
• The submission guidelines encourage students to not display their school name/info within submissions.
• The website’s map feature places its markers at a state-city geographic zoom level.
• A cookie privacy banner is enabled on the website. 

Educational Impact and Future Plans

As a result of the project, the members of the team earned academic credit towards the fulfillment of the requirements for CUNY Graduate Center’s Masters’ and Doctoral Programs. The project was undertaken by the team as the principal requirement for the course Digital Digital Humanities: Methods and Practices, which as described in the course syllabus is “the second course in a year-long sequence of two, three-credit courses that introduce students to the landscape of digital humanities tools and methods through readings and classroom and online discussions, lectures offered by prominent scholars and technologists, hands-on workshops, and collaborative projects”. The completion of the initial version of the Corona Chronicles website also prepares the way for the second phase of the project, which has yet to be formally defined and may involve the further development of outreach, team collaborators, and ongoing student submissions. The project will also serve as a basis for a Master’s capstone project. 

Access/Contact info:

web: https://corona-chronicles.world/ 

email: [email protected]

instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coronachronicles.world/

5. Project Evaluation and Impact

In our Work Plan, we described our initial goals by saying: “In its final form, the archive will be a publicly available, easy-to-navigate website that displays a range of multimedia projects from students aged 10-18 (middle and high school).” In its current form, the project achieves each part of this stated goal with the exception of a definitional shift from conceiving of the project as an archive to a collection. The substantive aspects of the project that have changed related to the process behind how we reached our end goal. 

In the early stages of web development, our conversations evaluated the benefits of open source web hosting platforms, as well as free-for-student options that maximize multimedia capacities; access, mission consistency, and sustainability were central to our discussions. We determined that to build a project distinguished from parallel projects in the field, the optimal hosting site was Adobe Portfolio. While not an open access platform, we made this determination for three specific reasons: (1) ease of use for a target audience including young users (2) the capacity to support a range of media forms (3) specificity of design in displaying artist’s work to honoring the artistry of the student submissions. 

Consistent with our intentions to build multiple forms of accessibility into the site, our original outreach intentions included an emphasis on engaging students who may not otherwise independently access the archive due to a variety of technological or informational barriers. We imagined this to include providing filming and audio recording opportunities, however, as our scope narrowed, this was deemed outside of our capacities for this semester and will be revisited in the next phase.

Our outreach strategies began with personal networks and the creation of social media pages. We were successful in recruiting a geographically diverse student population within the United States, as well as a set of international submissions from Peru. Our team’s work with an after school program in Inwood made clear the importance of centering an ethics of care above a focus on sheer volume. We engaged in conversations on compensation and recognition of student work that informed how we defined the scope for this semester, as well as thanking students for their submissions.

Over the course of the project, our team learned several key lessons. First, an ethics of care was essential to the mission of the project as well as ethical conduct, particularly when working with minors. Erring on the side of not putting pressure on or over-extending our student collaborators and possible contributors guided us. 

Our work with student collaborators also reinforced a key lesson regarding audience: we are in collaboration with our audience and engagement with them starts at the onset of project planning and continues throughout, not just at the end. Overall, we recognized that one of the points of fear is also the point of opportunity – working with minors meant that we put enormous time into the consent form. The difficulty of getting this right was not a reason to give up on it; the messiness is part of the process and might never get fully resolved. Moreover, our team learned to make decisions and go with them and understand that we could take the risk of failing quickly and adjust accordingly if needed. 

Breaking away from the work plan led to useful new directions and connected back to an ethics of care. Within our team, this also extended to ensuring open, clear, and kind communication between team members.

6. Project Continuation and Long-Term Impact

The project will be maintained and expanded through the end of the 2021 calendar year. This timing aligns with the second phase of the project serving as a MALS digital capstone project, as well as the period through which we anticipate being able to solicit student reflections on the pandemic. The success of outreach efforts and the viability of the site maintaining new content will help determine the final end date of the project. While the original team of the Digital Humanities graduate candidates will continue to support the Corona Chronicles archive, the main administrators of the project will change in the next phase except for Karyn Delay will continue with the digital collective as her graduate capstone project. 

Corona Chronicles is a great example of the open pedagogical practice of co-creation between educators and learners. As such, the project can serve as a model to further this practice. With this in mind, during the next phase of the project taking place this upcoming summer, the team is constructing different possibilities to incorporate and engage more students as co-producers. While student advisor to Corona Chronicles Isabelle, might take this archive on as her senior project, another possibility might take the form of a Digital Humanities seminar or course at Karyn’s school . The team might also receive student input and support by a new group of selected student advisors. Having such as successful student involvement during the initial phase provides a good foundation to continue as a learner centered creation. More information on the various ways students will remain as partners will be determined after the end of the school calendar year and will depend upon student enrollment and availability through the end of 2021.

The first phase of the project revealed challenges to be addressed in the next iteration of the site. Those challenges may be broadly grouped into three categories: technical, outreach, and scope of the mission. With regard to the technical: our team will compile nd share documentation regarding processes that will allow a smooth transition. In this also considering a possible change of hosting site, one that is more sustainable and offers better support and space for multimedia contributions. In changing sites, commenting and other social features are being considered to further student engagement and global connection. Funding to support future iterations of the project will be sought through grant funding to cover software costs. Outreach to the next group of student contributors will be carefully planned to ensure a sustainable workflow over the summer months; summer and fall outreach will likely differ – students will be reached through different means at these times. At present, there are three additional branches of outreach currently showing promise: 1) a historical society 2) an individual school’s art department 3) a small group of individual students whose parents have provided consent to contribute. These three branches may serve as a model for future outreach: community-based organizations, individual schools, and personal connections. 

Moving forward, as schools reopen, our primary questions/prompts regarding virtual learning and life during a pandemic might change to fit the changing times while still providing a space for learners to express themselves in their ever-evolving surroundings. Another challenge that will arise as the project heads into the next phase has to do with scope. Our mission is global and as Corona Chronicle expands, so will the responsibilities to accessibility, privacy, and the maintenance of ethics of care. As the collection advances, the team will need to innovate to sustain community, educators, and student relationships.

The team will continue to create, solidify, and conserve relationships. This goal will be accomplished by incentivizing existing alliances between school administrators, educators, and community-based organizations. Social media, particularly the project’s public-facing Instagram profile, is a great tool to highlight student contributions while also forging new global connections. Another way to maintain communication with new and ongoing partners is through a newsletter. This one will be used to keep all parties aware of new developments, new partnerships, and celebrate milestones. The team will also form a strong and reliable crew composed of new and former administrators to be reached for consultation and collaboration.