Category Archives: Group Project Updates

FOS* Group Project update: crunch edition

This group project update from last week is coming in no-so-hot because we’re working hard to get everything squared away for Thursday! There may have been some scope creep, and some of us are wondering for the second year in a row what happened to April…

We met all together on Monday to finalize presentation details and discuss feedback from the class practice session. Kevin has been working hard on the presentation and a few last minute asks for the website (like a little courthouse icon to denote landmark cases). Martin has been helping with the presentation script and with some important last minute manual data work. Joanne is continuing to work on making our text data perfectly ready for web display,  as well as working on the map and timeline. And Eva is working on the sort/filter/display functions for the website’s explore page.

Last Group ReadingRebus Project Report: thyme to go

Thursday’s meeting was our most candid and productive yet.  By Sunday, we seemed to have grown fully into our roles and responsibilities and delivered what we need for the presentation.  We still have fantastical dreams for the site, but voting collectively using the 0-3 rating system made our core-rebus-artifact group and their relevant categories for tags and metadata emerge clearly.  We took many of the class responses to heart and decided to embrace the visual delights of the project enthusiastically.

At the same time, getting the essay drafts was like a birthday party for me: I hadn’t realized my co-workers had been thinking such interesting thoughts throughout the semester.  Of course, I’d caught glimpses: however, the different minds, personalities, and sources of pleasure that we each bring to the project can best be seen in those individual explorations and explanations.

Hence, the project embodies what the early moderns called a “Raccolta” or a “gathering”: a synonym for the English “anthology” but one that resembles a harvest rather than a single-minded collection.  Or, to borrow a Renaissance trope used by Montaigne (and StarTrek, Seneca, et al), our results are the workings of a sort of hive-mind: individually “[t]he bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram” [“On the Education of Children”].

In sum, I need not have worried about scarcity or drones; we have 30 + rebuses that received a top ranking from all members.  If we eventually add the ones that got a single good (2), not great (3), among the highest marks, we will have 80+.  All this inspires us to keep feeding  the project collaboratively over the summer, from our various fields: seeing if we can attract more social media attention now that Twitter has allowed us to post again, and developing more sub-themes and ludic experiences for our audiences—and ourselves.

https://collation.folger.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/AlvearieTitlePage.jpg

Final Group Project Update: Corona Chronicles

The end of the semester always brings lots of competing work and priorities to juggle. I think we’re all looking forward to a much deserved break (a short one for those of us taking a summer course), but we’re also sad to come to the end of the road for this precious project we’ve been building for months now. Our expectations for the number of submissions we actually received and the features we were able to create on the site were all blown away. It’s especially amazing considering none of us ever met up in person to collaborate.

For our last group update, I encouraged the team to submit their current thoughts on where we are:

Phil: “Now that our MVP (minimum viable product) has been delivered and our project has more or less reached GETGO (good enough to go), we are attempting to leverage our technology platform to make further enhancements.  This effort, which includes changes to the user experience of the website as well as to the underlying contribution processing workflow, is testing the limits of our initial technologies.  Encountering these issues puts us in a good place for identifying the objectives of the project’s next iteration.”

GETGO really stands out here as a theme for us. We had so many ambitious plans that changed over time, specifically our scope of student outreach. But it was all for the best as we were able to maintain control, instill care for these students, and not feel overwhelmed with our workload. It’s hard to punt features to the next phase, but we’ve come to a good point where we’re happy with what we’ve put together and feel confident about sharing it out in its current state.

Karyn: “Seeing all that has been expressed in the student work submitted to this point has reaffirmed the original motivation for this project while also sobering me to the reality of what we may see in the work moving forward. Care – in different forms – should be infused in every aspect of the project. As such, questions of scale remain in play for the future, but we are well-situated to see the project into its next stages as a direct result of the individual and collective contributions from our team. As a group, we have built something better than what any one of us could have and that brings a great deal of meaning in and of itself.”

So well put. In the theme of care for these students, we can’t just be good enough. We learned how important it is to have this be top of mind in everything we do. While we were focusing on putting together the end product, these students are generously taking time out of their pandemic-affected lives to create expressive works for us. It’s an experience of digging up memories that some might’ve found stressful and traumatic. During outreach, we found ourselves questioning in group syncs, “Are we asking too much from them? How do we navigate this with utmost respect?” Thankfully we stumbled across these important questions and worked to create solutions. It’s not only made Corona Chronicles better, but it’s also made us better as digital humanists.

NYC Community Fridge Archive – Group Project Update

Last week we received a large number of submissions to the archive, which made managing contributions the focus of much of our work and future planning.

Outreach
Our outreach strategies seem to be working because a total of 5 different fridges have sent us materials officially through our platform. We have come up with a method to help spread the work of submissions go around if they happen to come via Email or Instagram. To sum it up, the ‘one-at-a-time’ file submission may be a barrier in collecting submissions, so we’ve decided to include in our confirmation email (that’s triggered by Omeka) a welcoming note to directly email us their photos if they should have 3+ documents to submit. This is not done yet, but we will be working on this toward next week.
On Instagram, Allison curated the Community Fridge Art Show and it’s happening right now! The art images (along with the info of contributing artists) look aesthetically pleasing and cheerful, so we really appreciate Allison’s meticulous work on this show. Plus, Allison is trying to figure out how to include the direction to our Omeka site in the show. 

Omeka
Montage fixed file upload issues, created and uploaded a banner. She also checked, approved, and edited contributions. For OHMS integration, she installed Hide Elements, OHMS Import, and OHMS Object Plugins; installed OHMS Viewer (been fixing a few issues upon communication with technical staff at Reclaim); she installed and edited a new Theme (Philly) as required by OHMS.

Other discussion from the meetings (about the final papers and the press release)
We realized that we need to ask Prof. Maney about what he wants to see in our final report (due Thursday, May 20th). Once we learn Prof. Maney’s guidelines for that paper, each member will give Andy what each wants/needs to include in the report. After that, Andy will put together those contributions and edit the text for the group’s final paper. (But we agreed that we need to wait for Prof. Maney’s specific instructions.) PS. In class, Prof. Maney promised to give us the prompt next week.
As for the individual paper, we reminded ourselves that the personal paper is separate from the team’s final report since that’s more of an individual reflection on their contribution to the project in connection to their academic and/or professional interest. 

 Press Release 
Andy has been composing the press release for the archive. The press release will be brief (around 500 words) but it aims to capture our philosophy and practice together succinctly in consideration of the general audience. However, Andy will try to avoid highlighting selected members of our team in the text. Instead, Andy will try to address our efforts rather in collective terms. The press release will be ready by our rehearsal day (May 6th). Next week, we will discuss where and how we will be using this.

Mapping Cemeteries: To the End of the Semester and Beyond

Echoing the sentiment in others posts–how is tomorrow May? Part of me still feels like it’s February and we’re still in the early planning days. But when I try to list everything we’ve accomplished, wow, we’ve really come so far as a team.

Mapping Cemeteries: After Life

We’ve now all completed recording our individual components for our second audio episode, in which we all spend time musing about our individual locations. And for the second half of class yesterday we recorded most of our third episode, in which we shared more of our individual research and drew connections between our locations. And it was such a wonderful experience. This is something we had put off for the most part; we were drawing a few connections here and there in previous meetings, but until last night, I don’t think we quite knew just how many connections there were to draw (I am primarily speaking for myself, but I don’t think I’m alone on the team in this sentiment) between our individual research efforts.

Added bonus: much of what we discussed will also inform the vertical timeline aspect of our project. Aside from completing our content for the location pages, the vertical timeline is probably the biggest deliverable we have yet to complete. And we’ve agreed to complete it together in our next team meeting. And it’s not even a bonus per se; that makes it sound like happenstance, when in reality Asma has put in so much work to create our audio plan, and pick themes for each of our episodes, and write prompts for us, and generally be our amazing audio guide. I think several of us were nervous, never having worked on content like this before (I know at least I was), but Asma has made the process so enjoyable and rewarding.

And she’s been hard at work editing our first episode, which she expects will be ready on SoundCloud this Sunday. I will update the post, or share in a reply, when our episode is ready.

Final Inventory

As I mentioned in my personal blog, we’ve completed an inventory of our final must-haves before the Digital Showcase for our GitHub site, and a similar inventory is in the works for our Commons site.

We’ve worked backward from the showcase, knowing we want to add in screenshots and/or video of our GitHub site for our revised presentation, and set two more data deadlines so Nadia only has to pull our data to update our content twice more.

Our plan for these last two weeks is admittedly demanding, but I think we can do it. And we still have at least two more meetings before the Digital Showcase where we can readjust and scale back as needed.

Freedom of Speech* Group Project Update 4/25

After a fairly hectic few weeks, everything seems to be coming together! Group-wise, we’ve been communicating consistently via our Discord server, and Eva and I have been working on putting our code scaffolding into practice. So far, we’ve built out the skeleton and matched our site design to Kevin’s fantastic designs, which the whole group has been actively suggesting minor tweaks to in order to match our project’s goal of providing information on the boundaries of freedom of speech in a clear and accessible way.

The topic model is essential to our functional website, so Martin is doing a manual quality check on the resulting dataset to understand if our predicted threshold would be viable for determining if a case falls into a certain topic. The template question that’s being asked in investigating the threshold for a topic is “Does the topic in question accurately reflect the case’s content at a 25% threshold?” and we will replace the percentage with any percentage that is needed in order to do this in the most accurate way possible. Thankfully, the topics have been super clear since Eva removed common judicial stop words, so hopefully this goes well!

Development-wise, we’ve been trying to have fun with putting everything together. Eva and I have been sharing work in progress screenshots of things that go horrifically wrong during coding (in a way that is hilarious and can be fixed in two minutes) and, of course, memeing about it.

A picture of a large, hand-drawn map of the US with a smaller, computer-generated map of the US beneath it. user eva_sibinga replies,

An image comparing a website to a high fidelity mock-up. The mockup is very detailed and looks complete, while the website looks simple and is in progress. The caption reads "you vs the guy she told you not to worry about"

The great thing about having designs done is that putting the skeleton together for a site becomes much easier. The most work is definitely in assembling the logic that we’ll need in order for everything to flow correctly according to our prototypes.

In terms of design, as noted, Kevin’s made some cosmetic tweaks after our group meeting to make major revisions, and everything looks great! We added Alaska and Hawaii to our map and changed a few things like buttons and colors, and those things are super easy to tweak in our code.

The schedule we set at the beginning of the semester is relatively blank, but internally, we’ve set deadlines for ourselves and we’re aiming for complete rather than perfect. We, of course, want the project to be as good as possible, but to get a little pretentious, the root of perfection is completion.

Some things that we’re actively working on include:

  • The code for the website
  • Finishing touches on data
  • Web copy
  • Outreach

NYC Community Fridge Archive – Group Project Update (Week 12)

Last week we were super excited about our first contribution to the archive – now, we are trying to figure out how to manage the flux of incoming contributions!

Contributions

Thanks to Allison’s extensive outreach on Instagram, a lot of fridges have answered our call for contributions – and are sharing stories and pictures with us! One of the issues is that Omeka only allows users to contribute one item at a time, so many fridge organizers have started sending us photos via email and in our Instagram DMs. This is pretty awesome contributions-wise, but it causes some additional steps on our end:

  1. We need to ask/glean info about these pictures since they often come without sufficient information
  2. We need to make sure that the photos respect our Terms and Contributions: for example, are the people in the pictures consenting to have their image on our archive?

Omeka

We have also been working on Omeka:

  • Metadata standards: we decided on some metadata standards for contributions. Luckily, this can be done at the level of the contributions page, so all the information that users enter falls into the right category in the backend.
  • We have worked on improving the user experience for the contributions page, making our prompts easier to understand. We are working on:
    • adding some text to the contributions page, so people can have some instructions
    • prepare a video tutorial to explain how to contribute
  • We have tested different formats for contributions (PDF, doc, ZIP)

Milestones and Adjustments

Let’s celebrate our Milestones:

  1. We have built a functioning structure for our archive!
  2. People are contributing!
  3. We have raised a lot of awareness and interest in our project within the fridge community!
  4. Our outreach efforts worked, and the Oral History team will start interviewing people next week!

These milestones also mean that we had to make some adjustments to our plan and our priorities.

  1. We need to find a streamlined way to add contributions to our archive, especially when we receive them via email or Instagram DMs
  2. We need to be on top of responding to people’s emails and DMs, especially when they are asking questions about the project or having technical issues when they submit contributions
  3. We need to figure out a day and place for our launch party: our guests may be many, and we want to make sure everybody is safe COVID-wise. Also, we need to decide how to stream our launch party (and who’s going to do it).

Reading Rebus: Group Project Update Week 12

With 13 days to go until the Gran’ Prova, I’m feeling as jittery as a soprano making her debut at La Scala.  While I can see how we can and will be ready, we don’t feel ready to me.  There is so much to do, or still to decide not to do.  That’s what weekends are for, no?

On the plus side: We have more than 100 rebus examples to choose from, in multiple media and languages.  Our final template for proper crediting is in place and beginning to be put to use; the essay responsibilities assigned and word count has been reduced to a manageable amount for producer and user alike.  Information for our rebus map has been entered into our spread sheet in general.  Our rating system is in place and hence our rebuses should be selected and ready to upload by end of Sunday, for the most part. Our social media links have been given to Bret.  The response to our visuals in the 4/23 presentation was extremely positive and we got lots of useful feedback.

On the minus side: We are charitably one to two weeks behind on our work plan time line, primarily regarding the generating and copy-editing of text.  The essays are not written.  We are just starting to add proper metadata & crediting. Our final rebuses are not on the website, aside from what Patricia has uploaded and worked with.  I suspect we will need to provide more individual and specific geolocations so that Rachel can create her map.  Moreover, outreach has flagged: we haven’t posted on social media in over a week and our initial attempts to select and caption posts in advance hasn’t come through, although a spread sheet has been created.  Personal posting and contacting seem to have slowed as well.

Tentative triage plan proposed by PM (dates subject to group approval):

  • Social Media posts on Sunday 4/25 morning and Sunday 5/2 morning.
  • Final rebuses will be chosen by Thursday 4/29 and uploaded by Friday 4/30.
  • Essays will be shared, in whatever state, for first review by Saturday 5/1.
  • Credits & metadata for each uploaded rebus will be completed & shared with Patricia by  Monday 5/3
  • Talking points for each slide by Tuesday 5/4
  • Map in rough form completed by Wednesday 5/5
  • Final essays for proof-reading by Saturday 5/8

Corona Chronicles: Wrapping Up Loose Ends

This week we watched our published submissions increase to a whopping sixteen! As a team, we’ve loved monitoring the Google sheet for the new voices and we’re so excited to share them with a wider audience. Check out the latest here: https://corona-chronicles.world/

Thanks to everyone for the helpful feedback from our presentation. We’re going to work on including a lot more visuals, including a trailer of our project that really sheds more light on its meaning. We’re asking ourselves: What would the students want us to say about their work? It was helpful to come away from Thursday’s class knowing that our presentation should be more about the project itself and less about how we built it.

Other than posting the submissions and prepping the presentation, this past week we were busy with tying up some of our loose ends. We’re wrapping up the certificate of achievement and how students will be able to download it, getting back the Spanish translated version of the submission form, continuing to post on Instagram, and understanding our Google analytics. Coming up this weekend, we’ll be talking more about creating our trailer and sharing other thoughts on final improvements to the site as we head into the final few weeks.

So it’s safe to say that we’ve hit our milestones with number of submissions. Not to mention we received our first international ones which is awesome! After waffling a bit on how wide we wanted to recruit student voices, I think we’re all relieved at the control and thoughtfulness that we’ve been able to put into our prototype by limiting our scope.

Mapping Cemeteries: Inching Closer to “Done”

It is still feeling like we have a lot of work to do before the end of the semester, but it’s also feeling like we’re getting very close to “done.”

Asma is working to code our first audio episode this weekend. We will be sure and post as soon as it’s available for everyone to listen. We had a great time talking about ourselves and our project together (just like every time we meet), so we hope it is as engaging to our audiences as it was for us to make. We are all working asynchronously to record content for our second episode, in which we’re all spending time at and/or discussing our cemetery/memorial locations.

lane debuted preliminary designs for our logo. It was a very exciting moment for all of us! As we’re very drawn to lines (lines on the maps, traces, power lines), and we’ve discovered interesting ways in which our research overlaps and our locations speak to one another, we’re specifically interested in intersecting lines. And this is what lane is highlighting in our logo. The aesthetic matches so well with the aesthetic of our presentation thus far; it’s uncanny as they were developed separately. But Lisa rightly pointed out that we allowed this to happen–for us to be in sync with these design aspects of our sites and other aspects of the project–because we took our time with our research and we keep grappling with basic questions like “why mapping and why cemeteries?” and “what is Mapping Cemeteries?”

Nadia has made great progress with our GitHub site, having identified and mostly fixed the issue that was causing problems with our horizontal timeline. She’s going to spend some time building up our locations pages with the data we’ve gathered, so it will be very exciting to see our pages differentiate themselves from the template. And we’ve purchased a domain name (mappingcemeteries.com), so Nadia will be getting our new URL up and running soon.

And I’m already working to take in everyone’s constructive suggestions to improve our presentation, as well as working on updates to our Commons site.