I can’t believe the semester is almost over!!! This journey has been so rewarding but so exhausting at times. And I’m happy we are getting to a point where we get to wrap things up, look at what we created and present it to other people. I feel like my team has done amazing. The way we have managed to work together since the first day we became a team has been very eye-opening to me and now I won’t ever lower my standards as to how group projects have to be 🙂 Everyone worked so hard on their research and their role in the project while being so graceful and compassionate, and I appreciate that a lot. I usually have the busiest Tuesdays and Thursdays during the week, since I work from 9 to 6, have class 6:30 to 8:30 and then group meeting at 8:45. Although by the time I got to our meetings, I was drained, the team was always understanding and appreciative of the progress I made, whether it be on the website or my research. Last week, Bri has the brilliant idea to create an inventory of the github website to look at it together and have a list of what still needs to be worked on/changed. I found that extremely helpful and it allowed me to make a lot of changes to the website. It now has such a different look and feel and as Asma said “It’s like watching a child grow”. I’m just very happy that the team is liking where the website is going and I appreciate all the feedback.

We recorded two more episodes for the podcast. This allowed me to combine all my data points and think more about how I wanted to present them. We then talked about our vertical timeline and each chose three data points that we wanted to include.

I’m very excited for the Digital Showcase Presentation!! Bri has done an amazing job on the slides and I can’t wait to see it.

I also wanted to congratulate all the groups for their amazing projects. I looks forward to seeing your presentations.

Last week, we discussed some of the design decisions for the website and I implemented them. I changed the fonts for the headers and the text body. I also changed the colors, since we decided to have dark backgrounds with white text instead of the white background with black text that we initially had. I liked the changes a lot because, first, they fit with our theme of exploring the deathscape and necropolitics, and second they helped turn the focus on the cards of the vertical timeline.

We had a bug in the horizontal timeline that we also finally (partially) fixed! Wooohooo. I am using vuejs and the vuetify framework to develop the website. Vuetify makes it easy to use html components and integrating user actions to them and that is what we used to create the vertical timeline. However, vuetify does not have a horizontal timeline component so I chose to create the horizontal timeline using d3js, a JavaScript data visualization library. I started by creating the fish bone structure of the timeline, then binded it to the data. We chose to display the dates at the top. A hover over those dates will show a tooltip that has the event that corresponds to a certain date. This is where we had the bug. The hover action was only detected if the user mouses over the timeline from right to left, it did not work in the opposite direction. I found this very odd, since the mouseover event listener is bi-directional. I figured out part of the issue. When I was positioning the tooltip, I did it in a way where it is too close to the mouse icon, so every time the tooltip shows up, it immediately disappears without it even showing. Moving the tooltip a bit farther from the mouse solved the problem partially, the hover is working 80% of the time. I still need to troubleshoot to make it perform better.

We also recorded the first episode of the Mapping Cemeteries podcast and it was so fun!!!! We talked about the process, how we ended up working on the project and why we chose the cemeteries we are working on and so much more. I’m very excited to record the rest and for everyone to listen to it. I know I won’t be listening, I can’t be the only one who hates hearing their voice in recording!! But no, I will definitely make the exception for this.

During the past two weeks, our team has achieved a big part of the functionality we hoped to get to with our timeline. The vertical and horizontal timelines are now interactively dependent, which is really nice to see, since we have only been talking about how we imagine it to be since the beginning. I have also created one of the individual cemetery pages as a way to show the team for our upcoming meeting and discuss layout and data presentation on the pages.

One thing I am looking forward to is our branding meeting which will be this week. We are finally getting to the fun part!!! Choosing color schemes, fonts, icons, a logo will reinforce our vision and make it come to life by applying to the website.

Other than working on the website development this week, I finally got to do some research on the New York Marble Cemetery. The cemetery is actually becoming a common place to organize weddings. It has also put its last two vaults  (supposedly the last two burial plots in Manhattan) for sale, each for 350,000$ in 2015. How crazy is that!!?? Clearly, this research is turning to be fascinating. It has been really cool to look at the history and progression of the two marble cemeteries, although my focus will be on the New York Marble Cemetery, not the New York City Marble Cemetery.

Finally, I wanted to express how happy I am about the ways which our team has found to document the process. I believe that the WordPress commons website works hand in hand with the project website hosted on Github to show process and product in harmony.

It’s been a fun experience to share the website with my team and get their input and feelings on each page. Each one of the team brings a fresh perspective from the cemetery they are researching on the project and to see all of it come together onto our data and slowly reflecting on the website has been so rewarding. Last week, I have spent so much time working on website responsiveness. Iusually have this bad habit of leaving the mobile responsiveness till the end thinking “I will get to it later” and then running out of time and never getting to it 🙂 This always leaves a sense of incompleteness to the project. So for our Mapping Cemeteries project, I have been determined to work on the mobile and larger screen content simultaneously, which has been working well. I have been testing the website on smaller and bigger screens and changing the look of the cards and timelines to be accessible on mobile. I implemented the resizing of the horizontal timeline when the screen is resized, I also changed the sizes of the text and buttons on smaller screens and changed the way the vertical timeline looks on mobile phones so it does not look too crowded. This has been a fun learning experience for me, using a combination of tools I have used before and some I have not.

I have also really enjoyed all of our meeting discussions. We address so many things that come up in our research, data collection methods, design ideas and everything in between. Lane and Asma’s work on Social Media was a highlight in the past two weeks, it has made all of us even more excited about the future of the project and its purpose.

This week, I progressed in the development of the wireframes for all our website components. I felt a relief to be finally able to show something to my team and get real-time feedback. I think with web development, it is really hard to make things look exactly how everyone is imagining them to be, sometimes it’s even hard to understand what a component looks like in someone’s mind. In our latest group meeting, I showed an initial draft of vertical timeline and the horizontal timeline with a couple data points. My team member’s thoughts really helped reimagine some things and we did a little whiteboard session to understand the interaction between both timelines. I took a lot of notes from this discussion and have a long list of to-do items for the website.

The vertical timeline component will be updated to become a one-sided timeline on smaller screens like mobile and to stay an opposite-sided timeline on laptops and bigger screens. The horizontal timeline will have a whole new design. I initially chose to use a knots design example I found online, but the team suggested we go with lines, instead of knots or circles. I think this will be even easier to implement than the knots design as I am thinking about using a simple d3 timeline line to implement this.

I am not going to lie but I am starting to get a bit anxious about all the amount of work there is to do between now and April 15th. We have set that date as the final date to complete our data collection and to have the website functionalities ready for branding.

I am definitely grateful for my team for valuing each other’s time and efforts. They have all agreed to help me with my research on the cemeteries I have chosen to work on for the project in case I need help, as I also navigate the project web development.

My work schedule and inability to sign up to some sessions prevented me to attend most NYCDH week events. However, I tried to make the most of it 🙂

I have signed up to attend the “Introduction to Arabic Text Processing with Python and CAMeL Tools” workshop. Although I was not able to attend due to work, I still received the slides and some useful links sent by Salam Khalifa and Ossama Obeid who led the workshop. The topic was of special interest to me as a native Arabic speaker, I have worked with Arabic test parsing and processing and found it to be challenging because the Arabic Alphabet (Abajadia) and its orthographic ambiguity made any existing tools hard to adapt. I learnt a lot by looking at the slides and the python collab notebook used in the session. CAMeL tools, built by the Computational Approaches to Modeling Languages Lab (CAMeL) an NYU Abu Dhabi, is an open-source python toolkit for Arabic Natural Language Processing.

CAMeL tools support different forms of processing of Arabic text:

• Preprocessing (cleaning and preparing the text for analysis): an example of this is dediacritization processing. Diacritical marks are part of the Arabic language and are used on each letter to specify its phonetic pronunciation. Since it is almost impossible for any NPL tool to analyse diacritical marks, the tool provides a function to remove them from the text.
• Morphological Analysis: an example of this is generation which is the process of “inflicting a lemma for a set of morphological features”, for example it generates all the possible inflections for a word that are a masculine plural or dual feminine, depending on what the developer uses.

The tool also provides a sentiment analysis system and a few other NLP features. I specifically found the dialect identification feature very cool. The tool is able to classify a certain text’s dialect by city, country and region.

I will definitely be using CAMeL for a future Arabic text project!

For CAMeL documentation: https://camel-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview.html

I also signed up for the kickoff event but was only able to attend the networking session with Lisa Rhody and Madiha Choksy. As soon as I joined the zoom call, one of the participant had finished sharing the amazing work they were doing on language labs and the group decided to go down the list of participants to see if anyone wanted to share anything. Ironically, my name was the first to be called on. I thought it was a good idea to share one of the projects I worked on during Interactive Data Visualization, it was a way for me to improvise a presentation and get some feedback on my work. The project which you can take a look at here (https://nedjaem.github.io/med_migration_scrolly/) is still a work in progress. The visualization entitled “Migrants and State Violence in the Mediterranean” aims to highlight the migration events between 2014 and 2019 with a focus on the involvements of Nation States in the crisis. I went over the project rationale and some of the decisions I made during the project development. Overall, I was glad to have the opportunity to spontaneously present my work at the event.