Now that we have a landing page and are more active on social media, this project is starting to feel more real. It has been very busy so far, especially on the research end of things, but this online presence helps visualize the final project. We needed something tangible and it feels great to have it. Community fridges are becoming more recognized and growing in number along with our project, and I continue to learn about how they have impacted people in my life as well. This week a neighbor told me that he had to rely on a community fridge a few times early in the pandemic, because he was left stranded when his gigs disappeared. Now he volunteers at the same fridge. I realized today that what I am more and more excited about the archive and upcoming steps.

In our team the roles are both consolidating and changing with each stage of the project. I am very happy to be able to take on parts of this project that I am more passionate about, especially writing. This semester I am attending three courses that call for extensive writing and I love it. It is an affirmation of recent life choices. Although I have written and published professionally, it has always been very difficult for me to share personal work publicly, but in this program I have learned to overcome my hangups about sharing my annotations and assignments, or even casual blog posts.

It has been really wonderful to learn about how these fridges operate and about the people who make them happen. While I love learning about these people and the communities they serve, I also find it disappointing that these fridges need to exist to feed people. The joy that I feel watching these people come together to serve and even create communities, is always matched with a feeling of profound sadness that in the wealthiest nation in the world (a place that produces so much food waste) so many people have to rely on these fridges. I hope that this archive and the community it serves continues to thrive past the pandemic, but also that this project becomes more about eliminating food waste than serving an active need from communities.

Last week I finally felt like I had a concrete picture of what our archive might look like for the first time and it was a great relief. I think I was more worried about arriving to a final ‘product’ than I realized. Now we can look forward to building on our vision and define how we approach the following steps. It is not easy to work on a project that involves diverse groups from the community and a diverse team of different backgrounds, skills, availability or commitment. I think we have fallen into some level of routine in accomplishing assignments and we have a shared vision. The next challenge might be for us to keep things simple and manageable when working with such a large and diverse group of participants. I am absolutely delighted that I got to design our logo and that I will be more involved with the design end of things once we have our site up and running.

As the research lead for our project, at this stage of the project I have also de facto become the data manager. Our data management class was very timely, as this past week I researched and collected our initial database of NYC fridges and began cleaning the data. It was useful to think about the process more structurally. Most helpfully it helped to consider file naming conventions as I was working on the different categories of information and think about questions like who will see the data, and how accessible it needs to be

Thinking about data management also underlined that collecting, cleaning the data, or naming conventions we need to consider our final product and what our chosen platform (Omeka) can do and what it needs from our database. It also inspired some research for additional resources on data management and I found this worksheet from Caltech Library that might be helpful to other groups in the class. In the next stages of data work, this process will be more collaborative with our wonderful developer lead (Senom), and I am very much looking forward to that stage of this process after thinking about all these questions together this week.

At this stage of the project we are further along with our planning than I expected to be. We have a lively ongoing conversation over email and Slack, and are following our tasks on Trello. Because Elena had already set up these spaces, we are fully immersed in the stage of learning how each team member approaches their tasks, defining our roles, and have already started to make decisions on our next steps.

The most important realization this week was how the project itself will further define our roles. I have also had a reminder of how much I love writing and realized that we will all probably have the opportunity to take on those roles more than I thought. This week we all took a part in writing and editing our project proposal (I wrote the Environmental Scan) and I think it was a very useful exercise in ironing out the kinks of our communication flow.

I am very happy to be a part of this team and deeply impressed with how engaged everyone is. I am concerned about the development side of things, because I began this project as a complete OMEKA novice. Although we are using OMEKA for our project, we are all beginners so this is probably something we share. But the resources are great (workshops, fellows, etc) so I think we’ll make it. I plan to use Omeka at least for part of my capstone, so this is a great opportunity to learn.

I also attended the Fair Use in the Digital Humanities workshop. Many classmates have already gone over some of the main points and highlighted some possible gray areas, so I will focus on what was most relevant and new to my own projects. If you were unable to attend the workshop and decide to look through the included slides, the first important bit of information to note is that copyright protection begins as soon as your work is fixed in tangible form. Like everything else in copyright law, there are many scenarios where this is not so clearly defined, but only when your work in fixed on paper, computer file, or film does copyright protection begin. Jill pointed out that the copyright protection begins at this point with or without a copyright notice by the author.

But perhaps the most relevant part of this workshop for DH projects is in the 1994 SCOTUS ruling in Campbell vs Acuff-Rose, which introduced the concept of ‘transformative’ as fair use of an existing creation. This is important as in many DH projects we use existing works as data, which are usually transformative. But many DH projects are not transformative and many transformative projects are not necessarily fair. I would recommend going through the slides considering your own projects. Although it may not give you a definite legal answer, it will certainly give you a good idea on what you might need to clarify for your own project.