FOS* group project update #1

This week, the FOS* team got our website and our two social media sites up and running. Joanne put in some crucial legwork on our dataset, Kevin designed our landing page and starter style guide, Eva built the landing page, and Martin sorted out our social media posting schedule and organizational software. All of us also made and/or critiqued each others’ memes as we worked on bulking up the content we have to share.

We set some very ambitious goals for making a complete, clean dataset, as well as for finishing the website’s midi-fi wireframes; this is obviously the best way to lead up to saying those aren’t done yet, but they’re being done properly. As a group, we’re not concerned with being behind on those deadlines, since 1. We baked in enough time to be “behind”, 2. There is no way of rushing quality data here and 3. More time on the data means more time available for designing. 

We’ll meet, as usual, on Sunday. This week, Joanne outlined some QC and data-sorting tasks that are best done manually, so we’ll apply an hour of our time together towards that. We like to work in a Discord voice channel, which has a great coworking vibe and relevant tech capabilities without the complication and screen fatigue of videoconferencing. 

By the end of Spring Break, we’ll aim to have:

  • our dataset finished
  • Observable prototypes for visualizations
  • Mid-fi wireframes complete for the website
  • 2-3 posts per week on our social media + engagement with other relevant accounts
  • Outreach to CUNY law students (and others, potentially)

Reading Rebuses – Project Update

A screenshot from the site’s front page. Unfortunately, the animation on it wasn’t able to be captured via screenshot.

(Apologies for posting somewhat after midnight, I was having trouble logging into my gmail account.)

At the moment, progress remains steady, and in general, it seems as though we’re hitting our milestones. In terms of specifics, I (Matt) have had to expand on my original plan to document different types of symbolism and iconography in rebuses and heraldry and their meanings, turning my small-scale collection of footnotes into a more expansive, comprehensive guide to interpretation. The audit log I proposed is also seeing some more use, and I’m still gathering resources from Codex Seraphinianus and some other niche texts.

Patricia’s progress on the site is genuinely impressive; while I’m certainly not the expert on web design, even at a glance, the site looks great. The formatting is intuitive already, even in its in-progress state. Briana has been examining “verbal” rebuses in the form of poems and the exchange thereof. She’s made something of a breakthrough as she’s taken a look at a certain collection of 18th-19th century rebuses containing some of the first known ones from black women in the United States.

In the realm of our social media and outreach, Rachel may have made notable discovery: in her personal blog, she mentions that our group may not need NFTs “in order to digitize art for the internet++” era. To elaborate, this will greatly expand the amount of material we can use and upload, in part due to a large quantity of open-access resources that we now can potentially use. Ostap is working on an index/table of contents for the site, which should improve the user experience and make it easier to navigate. He has also been doing an excellent job the outreach front.

We plan on using break to catch up somewhat on work, although we plan on meeting only once this coming week, on Thursday when class is normally held. We decided that we may need to think harder about categorization, and we’ve decided to give Zotaro a try to help in that area. We’re also looking to schedule a meeting with Micki Kaufman at some point, ideally this week. Finally, we plan to write a short scholarly piece on some of our more general findings, which we will likely host on the site.

A screenshot highlighting our appearance as the 3rd result on Ecosia for the term “19th century rebus collection.” Sadly, we’ve dropped one place since the last time I checked in. 3rd place isn’t bad at all though.

Project Update: Corona Chronicles

In yesterday’s class we reviewed feedback on our prototype from our 3 student advisors who have been working with us. This was so helpful and we have some tweaks to make over the next couple weeks. We’ve already had to change the name of our project and we’re still looking to adjust elements of our design (font, colors), so things are still very much a work in progress.

So far I think we all feel that we’re in a great place and have hit our milestones. It was a huge challenge to get past the initial legal and consent questions for our student submissions, so we’re happily now focused on new challenges that come with putting together the prototype. We’re definitely all eager to continue to receive student submissions, but we want to recognize what that work will look like for our team to intake and edit them all for posting to the site.

We all decided to take a break from our weekend group meetings over Spring Break, so the next time we’ll all meet together will be in class on April 8th. Here are the group’s action items to keep aligned and ready to continue the work when we get back. I typically send these out to the group over email after we meet, so it’s odd to post here for everyone to see!

All

  • Have your top color palette choice ready to share on April 6th.
  • If you want to draft a logo, have that ready to share on April 6th.
  • Work on draft of newsletter/brochure content. Goal: have a template with info to share with schools or other networks. This way we’re not rewriting an email each time we’re reaching out to groups for submissions.
  • Explore the site and watch how it behaves differently on desktop vs mobile vs tablet. Keep track of anything you notice that needs adjusting.
  • Think about how to manage the editing and development overload that Maggi and Phil will face when we receive influx of submissions in April. How can we support them?
  • What do we think about group submissions? Collect individual consent form from each of them in the group? One person submits on behalf of everyone? We’ll want to document what this process looks like.

Amanda

  • Set up Google doc draft of newsletter/brochure content.
  • Set up Google doc to dump our team color palette and logo options into by April 6th.
  • Continue work on the map. Explore what kind of interactive features are possible. Check that submissions are coming in OK through connection. Add a title.
  • Work on intake workflow documentation.
  • Create Trello card with our final/gold source resources listed to reference.

Karyn

  • Get new photo from Elise for her submission.
  • Submission form edits:
    • “If you’re over 18 and want to share your store, consider participating in coronastories.world…”
    • Edit question: “How does it convey your response…”
    • Ask them to submit title of their work.
    • “If you were to display this at a museum, what would you want to accompany your work on a display card?…” Encourage description with submission.
    • Link pdf with terms and conditions at beginning of the form.
  • Consider tracking version control of questions we’re asking students in case they change over time. Have detailed record of which students are answering which prompts.
  • Open Q: Does the GC have someone we can run the creative license by?
  • Reach out to your contact in MA to have their students start creating!
  • Ask our student advisors to help us think about our logo/design/colors. What are the young people trends these days? 🙂

Maggi

  • Change the display image on Isabelle’s video to be a screenshot or beginning of her video, rather than the same still photo she submitted. Reduce duplication when clicking into entry.
  • Take out “swipe up” from mast head. On phone this is true, but on desktop it’s “scroll down”. What the best language/animation to use?
  • Can we make the mast head more “edgy”? Per Vallerie: older students aren’t as interest because it seems too juvenile.

Phil

  • Upload new Elise photo for her submission.
  • Reach out to coronastories.world to share and discuss. (Based on what we talked about on Thursday.)
  • Provide linked pdf to terms and conditions on the “Add your story” page.
  • Also on “Add your story” page, mention up front that parent/guardian permission will be required.
  • Add age and location (state/country) to each submission’s cover photo.
  • Start work on an instruction resource for Vallerie and Karyn to learn how to use Adobe Portfolio. Hoping to help with bandwidth.
  • Share Adobe cost with Karyn so we can come up with reimbursement plan via Bret and Matt.

Vallerie

  • Think more about the incentive for submissions.
  • Stay in contact with your networks.
    • 6 students with April 5th deadline
    • Larger after school program with end of April deadline. Ideally we’re not receiving them all at the same time, but we can figure this out.
  • Work with Phil to learn how to support the activities in Adobe Portfolio.

NYC Community Fridge Archive – Our next steps

Last night, the NYC Community Fridge Archive got some really good news: we can install Omeka Classic! Omeka S, which Montage had installed initially, did not reflect what we wanted our archive to be and to do for the community (and it was making all of us really frustrated).

I am happy to announce that Montage has made the switch to Omeka Classic, and this is going to make our lives SO. MUCH. EASIER. Hurray!

Having Omeka Classic means that now we can create the Submission plugin we always dreamed of, streamline the creation of the interactive map, and add the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer plugin that will allow us to index and display our Oral History project (which I am working on for Prof. Borrachero’s class, with Emily Pagano and Emily Maanum).

So, these are the main thing we are going to focus on over Spring Break.

  1. Consult with Prof. Maney and Micki: we want to update them about where we are, and we can really use their advice for the way ahead!
  2. Work on the Submission Guidelines, which will help contributors understand how they can share their memories to the Archive
  3. Outreach Meeting: Allison, Lola, and I will meet on Monday 3/29 to create a template for the outreach emails that we’ll send out to launch our contributions campaign.
  4. Omeka Meeting: the team will meet on Saturday 4/3 so Montage can give us a tour of the Omeka platform and we can all create the metadata fields for our archive.
  5. Social Media: we’ll create some more social media posts, so we are good for the weeks ahead. We will write them collaboratively on Google Docs and create the graphics on Canva.
  6. We will contact the artists that decorated the fridges and invite them to contribute to our archive. We will also ask their permission to use pictures of their fridge artwork on our social media.
  7. Lola will periodically check the lists of fridges online, in case there are any new ones we can add to the archive.
  8. Jean will be reviewing and editing our release form and our submission guidelines before we add them to Omeka.

A lot of work ahead, but I really feel like we are seeing the light at the end of this Omeka tunnel: very soon, we’ll be able to start crowdsourcing materials for the archive!

Mapping Cemeteries: Project Updates

We’ve really gotten a lot done this week, and (as many others have commented in their blogs already) it’s really feeling real now. It was especially wonderful having so much of our class time devoted to group work this week.

Site Updates

We have a lot of great data already in our shared data management sheet, and Nadia will be working over the next week to get it up on our site so we can better see how our pages are working together.

And I’ve made our site on the Commons live and publicly available now too. Check us out at https://mappingcemeteries.commons.gc.cuny.edu/. Still a lot of work to be done here, but we’ve at least defined how each of our pages will be used and how they will serve our audiences, and we’re very excited to start building it out more.

We’re trying to stay focused on our research as much as possible until April 15, at which point we will focus our energies more on design and how we can use imagery and branding across our two sites, and our social media posts, to create a cohesive overall experience.

What’s Changed Along the Way?

We’re all trying to be mindful of our workloads and accepting that all of what we thought could be accomplished back in February is just not possible. And that’s OK! We’re taking the proverbial “less is more” approach. We initially envisioned each of us being responsible for researching a cemetery or memorial location, but Nadia is already tackling so much as our development lead, so we’ve moved that area of inquiry to our wish list. If we find time, great. But a proof of concept built around four locations will be just as great; maybe more so as we can spend more time on the site and user experience of it.

In my original proposal I was so focused on the spaces for the dead that had been obliterated that I never even stopped to think about the spaces for the dead that have never been officially recognized and respected as such to begin with. We’re all so grateful to Asma for helping us think about this and challenge our map to allow for what has previously been (and may continue to be) unmappable. And it also brings us very thoughtfully back to our original question: Who gets to be remembered?

Freedom Of Speech* Landing Page

https://freedom-of-speech-project.github.io/fos/src/

 

Our Landing Page features our mascot who will join the visitor and offer hints as they navigate the website. It’s also a preview of the tone and level of interactivity we hope to achieve through the project pages. The use of anthropomorphized characters, and mix between handwritten and Editorial font types are meant to convey the interplay of attitudes in FOS*. The asterisk will serve a “home” button function available on every page.

Also up is the “About” Section which offers an abstract and intended goals of the project. Our Team Bios are below it along with a Github link which users can click to access our data.

Two Social Media Accounts are linked in the footer as well: Twitter and Instagram. They will be instrumental in drumming up interest as well as fostering the conversation with the public, once the webpage is up and running.

 

Nadia’s Reflections

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.

 

Personal Blog Post — Landing Page and other things

This week was good, and I feel a lot better than last week mentally (given everything that happened). I was able to put together a fun little landing page, a color scheme, typography standards, and finalized logos/characters for the team. After handing off the landing page design, Eva and Joanne really pulled through—and so quickly! It was nice to see things start to come together, and I’m happy with how understanding and cooperative my teammates are. I’m also looking forward to putting more dedicated time in this week into finalizing some mid-fi wireframes for the site experience, and hopefully start doing some final iterating by beginning of April. Luckily, having decided on colors and typography already, the designing should come a lot easier moving forward. It seems to be a just a matter of standardizing what particular pages look like (ex. the page for a particular case, vs. the home page), and how transitions will happen. I’m excited to eventually get into micro-interaction work as well.

Also excited about the launch of our social media pages! S/O to the team for putting together really great content and memes. Martin spearheaded a lot of the logistical work in the process, which was really nice. Excited to see where these pages go!

Rachel’s Rebus Ruminations

We had a great team session this weekend where Bianca unveiled a great rebus find that really pulls the rebus room together (forgive me). I’m really excited to dig deeper into this in the days ahead as I look into my own corner of the project. This week I began saying “this rebus just won’t work,” so I think it’s fair to say I am in editing mode. The first rebus in question was in older French and was scanned at a lower resolution, so it cannot stay. Neither my mother or I could get through it – though it was fun (and ridiculous) to try. Additionally, this week I found many helpful passages in a dense few pages in The Puzzle Instinct by Marcel Danesi about rebuses, which created a kind of framework for the varieties of different types of rebuses we’re finding (spoiler alert: some do not have images at all).

Fun fact: I was inspired to do more rebus hunting after someone on Twitter made a very convincing argument that we do not need NFTs in order to digitize art for the internet++ era, posting copious additional links to image & open access resources I hadn’t yet considered. As a result, I found many images. There were some great objects like lighters and quilts with rebuses in them from Mexico and the US in the 18th and 19th centuries, from the Smithsonian and National Gallery of Art among others. Very useful resources. Now I have to figure out how to reference a tweet and a semi-anonymous Twitter user. I started using Zotero for my own edification (and organization) so I hope it can collect some relevant information from sources like this.

Not necessarily relevant to the rebuses, but relevant to the class, I also reached out to some of my teacher friends from my writing workshop who all live in Texas to tell them about the COVID project in case they had any interest in hearing more. I take it they are very busy this week – but I hope to hear back from them by the next. Looking forward to a mini break over the next week, though I fully plan to play around with more rebuses.

Personal Blog: landing page dev + social media content

This was a good week! I got to work a lot on getting our landing page launched, as well as make some content for our social media sites.

The landing page was very fun, not least of all because of Kevin’s great design vision and prototypes. Design-from-scratch is one aspect I find very daunting in my own web design, so it was a treat to re-make Kevin’s designs in HTML/CSS rather than having to come up with everything on my own as I’m used to. Joanne also helped to get the interactivity up and running, and her help and company were yet more bonuses of group project work.

I was struck by the difference of what “web developer” means when it’s not “designer/developer” — instead of designing as I build (my own bad habit/lack of a better way), I got to work out a puzzle of how to translate Kevin’s designs into responsive pieces of a web page. The 2D design was taken care of, and my job felt more like getting it to feel “natural” on the webpage so that, for example, if you change the size of the window, the content resizes instead of getting stuck in 2002. I’m personally very interested in the ways in which web design aims to replicate real-life forms of sensory input (i.e. the mouse icon “senses” and changes to a pointing hand when you mouse over something clickable, in the same way that your real fingers might sense the edge of a table and tell you it’s solid if they brush against it), so it was fun for me to have more time to think about making Kevin’s designs web-live and responsive.

The social media content remains a secret for now, but suffice it to say it’s been an enjoyable challenge both to nail down the tone I want and to say everything I want to in few enough words to keep internet-level attention. Very excited to get some posts up on our instagram and twitter pages soon!