what a semester this has been! perhaps it’s a bit cliche to remark about how quickly this semester has flown by but it must be said! as the final dissemination of our project draws nearer, I have been trying to finalize my data and other contributions relating to our outreach plan.

I recorded myself chatting about my cemetery earlier this week for our podcast. hearing myself talk is not something i actively seek out (i typically avoid this) but i am learning to enjoy the process and even appreciate my own voice. Asma showed the group a sneak peak at our first episode!!! I’m looking forward to everyone being able to hear it because Asma is doing an amazing job at recording, editing, and mixing it together. anticipate some rad dreamy vibes!

during our team’s weekly meeting today, we set aside some time to choose crucial data points to add to the vertical timeline of our project. we were able to find some significant connections and overlap based on our decisions, which sparked some fun dialogue. this seems to be a pattern for the team as we are continually uncovering intersections of our cemeteries and how they relate to one another in the different deathscapes of the city. Lisa noted that they’re excited to compare the bits that we’ve composed for our cemetery pages as there are bound to be even more connections in our research than we realize.

this course, this project, my classmates, my team members; all have been so foundational for me this semester and have made this course such a joy, something that I look forward to every week. I have discovered so many things about myself: niche areas that pique my interest (necropolitics) and (debatable, of course) skills I did not know I possessed (crafting social media posts). I feel immensely more confident in myself as a student, teammate, and academic. while I can easily say that i feel more comfortable with prospective independent digital projects, the thought of doing it without my team saddens me! in a few of our meetings, the team has tossed around the idea of continuing this project for future class credit if something like that was even possible. regardless, we do have plans that extend after the end of the semester. Asma and I have a lot more ideas for our outreach plan that will ideally bring more awareness to MC!

if you made it this far, thank you for reading! see everyone on thursday 🙂

-lane

This has been a somewhat hectic week for me. My time has been consumed with work, finalizing research for other projects, and attempting to plan out  next semester. However, when it comes to this course, I have been able to slow down a bit and take time to enjoy the work. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I revisited the African Burial Ground National Monument to record some sounds for our podcast. This was a moment of serenity for me as I took a break from other responsibilities to just sit with myself, observe my surroundings, and appreciate minute details I typically don’t even notice – the distant smell of salt in the air, fleeting snapshots of others’ lives, and the city’s hectic cacophony of sounds which are simultaneously abrasive and beautiful. I’ve been looking forward our team’s next podcast recording, which will be happening very soon!

In terms of outreach, my most recent post that went up on Instagram and Facebook promoted our Making Mapping Cemeteries site that Bri has put together. The site houses so much information and Bri did a wonderful job building it so if you have not checked it out yet I highly encourage you to! I’ll link it below. Asma and I will be meeting tomorrow to go over our first Tik Tok post. I will unashamedly admit to having posted a video or two on the platform before myself so I will be helping Asma with the editing process if needed.

In our last meeting, I presented the team with some logo designs I had created. After some helpful feedback, I have a better idea of a logo that best represents the project (and looks cool/cohesive with our aesthetics). Because I’ve been so busy this week, I haven’t had a lot of time to dedicate to this but this is something I plan to have done by our next class on Thursday!

Check out Making Mapping Cemeteries

This week has been eventful! Our deadline for research was Thursday, so I spent some time finishing my final reflection for my cemetery. While I got the bulk of my research transferred into our data management sheet, I plan to spend a little time going over my work again to correct any potential grammatical errors, poor structure and etc. Additionally, I’ll be adding my citations and resources to our team’s Zotero account (I’m grateful that we’re using this tool as it will make the process of organizing our citations much easier).

Now that we have finished our research for the most part, we can focus more on visual aspects of our sites, which I am looking forward to. In the past couple days, I have played around with logo ideas keeping in mind our team’s unanimous decision on font styles and overall themes that we want our logo to convey. In previous meetings we discussed our inclination toward including intersecting lines in our overall theme due to this visual aligning with some of the topics our project explores.

Last night we recorded the first episode of our limited podcast series and it was so much fun. Asma has done an amazing job planning and executing this. I was slightly nervous prior to recording due to having never done anything like this before as well as my tendency to get all anxious and word jumbly (I don’t know if that even makes sense!) whenever I’m speaking on Zoom. But, overall it was such a cool experience, and I’m beyond excited to record the next episodes. Also, I revisited the African Burial Ground cemetery this week to capture some sounds for an upcoming podcast episode; I’m eager to see how these recordings play into the episode!

This past week has been productive and quite eventful. I took on the task of creating visual images of each team member’s definition of Mapping Cemeteries, which will be included on our Making Mapping Cemeteries site, social media, and potentially our final website. I had a lot of fun finding images, toying around with different visual effects, colors, and fonts (our group, particularly Asma can really appreciate a good font). I created similar visual images which include definitions of necropolitics and deathscapes — two key topics in our project that may be new to our audience.  

Our first social media posts have gone up on our Instagram and Facebook pages! While it may seem trivial, it was both exciting and gratifying to receive some positive feedback on the posts. Asma and I have been brainstorming our Outreach Plan for the past few weeks, meeting outside of class via Facetime or chatting over text. It’s been such a fun experience for myriad reasons, one being that Asma is an outstanding person to work with!  

The first post included the previously mentioned images of our team definitions along with a caption introducing the project in a little more detail. Our next post which will include the definitions of necropolitics and deathscapes will be going up on Friday! Another fun update is that we are planning on interviewing Asma’s professor for one of our Soundcloud episodes where we’ll explore the metaphysics of our project. Asma and I are still in the process of compiling ideas for post topics in our Work Plan System sheet, so look out for more fun posts on our Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, and Soundcloud accounts.  

This Thursday is our cutoff for research and data submission in our Data Management Sheet, so the next few days will consist of wrapping up research for the African Burial Ground National Monument. While I’ve enjoyed the research process, I’m looking forward to moving on to the visual aspects of our final site.  

l.v.

During last week’s class, the group collectively decided on our primary and secondary roles.  Based on prior professional experience with outreach as well as some social media management, I selected these areas to be my primary focus in the project. My secondary role is going to be in design, as it is an area where I have little experience and want to optimize my skills for future projects. While we’ve each selected specific areas in which we plan to prioritize, everyone is so open and eager to learn/assist any way that they can.

Before our first recurring meeting, I will be doing research and selecting tools/platforms for our social media presence and outreach process. As of right now, I am thinking Twitter, but I plan on checking out other platforms as well. I will also be selecting the cemetery I will be doing my research on. Specifically, I am going to be focusing on a cemetery in the city that was repurposed, rediscovered and now exists as a cemetery again. Thus far, I have found an African burial ground that was previously repurposed, rediscovered by construction workers excavating the area in the early 1990’s and reestablished as a national monument.

Already in the first week the scope of this project along with the digital tools and platforms we initially anticipated we’d use have changed. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the original project is evolving into something drastically different. This is my first time working on an academic project like this, and it’s been so fun to see how quickly things evolve based on the expertise and interests that each team member brings to the group.

I’m excited to read others’ posts and see how these fantastic projects are coming along. See y’all on Thursday 🙂

-l.v.

The NYCDH Week workshop I had the pleasure of attending was the introductory course to mapping with Palladio – a mapping tool developed at Stanford which aims to analyze relationships across time. Since recently delving into the world of the digital humanities along with the myriad tools used by digital humanists, I have found that I am particularly interested in mapping. I think the artist in me is especially fascinated by the aesthetics and overall design process of the maps, and I have come to appreciate the artistry that goes into cartography, whether digital or not.

 Most of my experience with mapping tools thus far has been with Tableau and QGIS, and admittedly I’d never even heard of Palladio until I checked out the description for the workshop. While other participants in the workshop had heard of Palladio, some even having dabbled with it in the past, they maintained that they had forgotten about it or assumed that it was no longer a functioning tool. The reason for this became quite evident as we started tinkering with data and found that the tool seemed a bit outdated and tedious when compared to more known tools such as the ones I mentioned above. For example, after transferring the data into Palladio, one must manually confirm characters that the tool doesn’t recognize, which can become a bit time consuming. Other tools like Tableau or QGIS have the capacity to essentially do all of this for you, which of course saves a lot of time. Additionally, Palladio does not allow you to save the visualizations that you’ve made; if you need to save anything, your best option is to screenshot it. 

Despite its flaws, however, Palladio is still a fun tool and has its perks! It offers myriad visualization methods aside from mapping, such as graphs and a gallery option. Moreover, our instructor Caterina Agostini was such an expert on the tool and really made the workshop an enjoyable experience. While I don’t think that I would use Palladio for any of my future projects, I’m thankful that I was able to participate in this workshop; it gave me better insight on the various methods that go into mapping as well as how each tool differs based on its intended purpose.  

l.v.