Personal Blog: Research Mode Activated

This is the first week I think I’ve felt more excited than overwhelmed by the project. I made time to get lost in research, and I learned so many fascinating (read: horrible) things.

After class last week, I decided to poke around the New York Public Library’s digital archives and see what kind of public domain images they have that I could use of City Hall, City Hall Park, and the First Almshouse. And there are many, so that was very reassuring. I found images of Bridewell Prison, which seems to have a pretty brutal reputation. And I also found this image of a public execution (it is not public domain and I would not to replicate an image of an execution on our site even if it were), which was tagged as “Conspiracy of 1741.” So I had to dig further (see here and here). In short, after a string of fires, the wealthy elite and government were afraid of a slave uprising, the ties between the slave community and the multiracial working class community, and also anyone with Spanish and/or Catholic ties as England was at war with Spain. As a result, there were mass executions (both hangings and burnings) and exiles (with many Black people sold into slavery in the Caribbean and white “conspirators” exiled from the colony).

All in all, my research is leading me toward an understanding of the space that is now City Hall and City Hall Park (and was previously the Commons) as a place imbued with a whole lot of death. The seat of power built upon a space so preoccupied with punishing bodies; this inheritance seems more than symbolic.

For the horizontal timeline aspect of our project, which will help put our cemetery and memorial locations into the context of the wider history of the city, I focused my research on different outbreaks–yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, polio, smallpox, influenza, AIDS. Of particular interest, I learned more about “Typhoid Mary.” I realize I knew of her, but knew nothing really about her: a young immigrant woman who worked in the kitchens of several wealthy families on Long Island, with the unfortunate ability to carry typhoid and infect people without ever getting sick herself. She was by no means the first person to do this, nor the worst asymptomatic “offender.” But given her status in comparison with those who she inadvertently infected, she was branded a pariah and forced to spend the last 20+ years of her life in isolation on North Brother Island. And I found similarities to the person wrongly accused of being “patient zero” in the AIDS crisis, and I dare say there are parallels with the upswing in anti-Asian hate crimes being committed now during COVID. Illness being treated as the moral failure of certain individuals.

I really was excited this week, though typing all of this up in my blog post is getting me down. We shall see where my research leads me this week.

Personal Journal Entry – Burrowing Through Texts and More

I’m part of the Reading Rebuses project. Since my last entry, I’ve done my fair share of recording information about icons and symbols found in coats of arms, which are their own sort of stand-alone rebus, but that have iconography and symbology that can be applied to other rebuses. I’ve also come to encounter “wearable” rebuses – mostly in the form of heraldic armor and crowns and other regalia from bygone eras. But perhaps the most interesting journey I’ve gone on involved Arthur Charles Fox-Davies’ A Complete Guide to Heraldry.

Essentially, I’ve gone through the entire text and excised each image from it. Originally, my plan was save time and energy and only extract “useful” images, but only a few images in I realized that I had no real means of determining if an image is “useful” or not. In the end, I amassed over 350 images, which I now have saved both to my computer and to our group’s drive folder, and some of which I’ve begun to appraise and analyze. If nothing else, I’ve archived the text in a format that I don’t think anyone has done before.

I also made my first Twitter post in roughly 7 years as a result of this project. I’m not sure whether or not to feel proud about this.

Reflection on Development Process and Progress

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.

Teammates you can drive my car . . . .

These first few weeks, I’ve done a lot of group posting, presenting, and direction: I’m tired of hearing my ideas.  But being worn thin turns out to be useful for learning: I’m starting to see the advantages of stepping back, or sitting back, watching the trip, and only occasionally shouting “Don’t forget your seatbelts” from the rear of the car.  Actually, it started more as whining, “are we there yet?” and “we’re LOST!!!”  Fortunately, the team has its own communal sense of direction, patience, and a knack for saying “hey don’t worry, just look at that cool view over there while we turn up the music!”  As project manager, I’m the one with the big map.  However, they have control over detours, whether to speed up/slow down, and where we will actually park the re-bus once we get there (I wish I could say this was a Maserati but then—no room for backseat drivers).  I’m not quite napping on the trip, but I’m getting a lot more relaxed back here.

Reading Rebus: Outreach, Scholarly Communication, and Social Media Plan

  1. PROJECT:  An online collection of
    • rebus ephemera,
    • research into their history and cultural uses, and
    • an interactive, digital playground for translations and further exploration
  2. OUTREACH GOALS: Via our website,
    • to build and expand the community of people interested in rebuses, in their past, and in ‘solving’ them;
    • to educate the general public about what rebuses are and their different forms;
    • to get audiences excited about translating rebuses and researching them by using our resources–including examples, analyses, external links to extant collections, and bibliographies–as a starting point.
  3. AUDIENCES:
    • Etymologists and linguistic analysts.
    • Historians, anthropologists, and those interested in history and anthropology.
    • Puzzle and rebus enthusiasts, as well as newcomers to this form of puzzling.
    • Word and Image scholars, scholars of visual culture
    • Digital Humanities students, colleagues, and the NYDH community at large.
    • Wordsmiths and semioticians.
  4. SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS AND PRACTICES: Beginning weekly, and increasing as we identify and acquire content, we will post examples of rebuses, short remarks on interesting features of their development, and links to the website on
      • Twitter
      • Instagram
      • Tumblr and possibly Pinterest
    • The tone will be playful, educational, and suitable for a general audience.  All images will be provided with AltText for accessibility and as an opportunity to explore the scope and translation of rebuses into other media (thank you Micki).
  5. ADDITIONAL OUTREACH & COMMUNICATION: Individual team members will introduce and circulate the project to colleagues and peers among the above audiences, using e-mail and their own social media accounts.  For example,
    • Team member Rachel Dixon has enlisted the interest and support of former colleague Sam Ezersky, Associate Puzzles Editor, New York Times!
    • DHUM70002 classmate Martin Glick has put us in contact with Jane Solomon, Senior Emoji Lexicographer, Emojipedia. (Thank you, Martin!)
  6. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FOR REBUS AWARENESS on website and other platforms;
    • A shared Zotero library of bibliographic sources and links to other collections of rebuses;
    • An intro to rebuses page and a guide to deciphering rebuses and related phenomena.
    • Analytical long essays surveying common themes and backgrounds of rebus production and use.
    • GitHub uploads to document the process of production.

 

Reflections on Platforms and Scalability

In our evaluation of the current crop of leading archival and content platforms, a team consensus emerged that in order to meet the expectations of our audience we would be better off starting with Adobe’s cloud portfolio website authoring platform as the easiest and quickest way to get an impactful user experience up and running.  Hopefully we made the right decision and if not we can benefit from the takeaways of a retrospective and follow the agile mantra of fail fast and fail often.  The following are some of the assumptions, reasoning, and analysis behind our decision as it relates particularly to the question of scalability.

Assumptions:

  1. The principle objective of the project is to deliver within the timeframe a “prototype” website that offers the best user experience and visuals to meet the expectations of the first contributors and other initial audiences as defined by the project definition statement.
  2. A principle methodological goal of the team is to follow iterative agile development in which a “prototype” will be quickly built with the possibility to shift direction when new information becomes available.
  3. While the time, effort, and skills needed for front-end coding, interactive design, and visual design are limited, the team has infrastructure skills needed to move between platforms.
  4. Given the size of the team, the range and number of deliverables, the timeframe for final delivery, and the number of person hours available, the time and skills available for iterating enhancements to a front-end theme are limited, whether at the code level or at the drag-and-drop level.
  5. Given the certainty of uncertainties, the team can increase the probability of a successful outcome by identifying the requirements which are “must-haves” and those which are “nice-to-haves”, so that the team can effectively punt on those requirements which do not jeopardize the success of the project as a whole.

Rationale:

After an initial review and comparison of WordPress themes with themes from other platforms, the team reached a consensus that Adobe Portfolio offers the most visually impactful experience.  The benefits and drawbacks of this choice were evaluated.  Given that assumption #1 was identified as must-have, other requirements, such as open source and longer-term scalability concerns were identified for the time being as nice-to-haves.

There is a wide range and large variety of best practices regarding scalability analysis and planning.  Perhaps more than any other area of technical analysis, scalability analysis can often make or break a project in that the analysis offers the potential to deliver the most productivity or lead to the worst planning mistakes.  Since scalability decisions are based on future projections and future projections are often of necessity based on back-of-the-envelope hunches, there is inherently a wide margin for error.  When placed in the context of an ongoing and dynamically changing environment, scalability decisions would seem most effectively undertaken with a view to answering the following questions:

  1. What is the capacity needed to successfully proceed in the near term (between now and the next 6 months)?
  2. What are the scalability paths that would allow or prevent a path of least resistance for the median term (6 to 12 months)?
  3. What are the scalability paths that would allow or prevent a path of least resistance for the long term (1 to 2 years)?

Figuring out the answers to all three questions leads to the fine art of identifying the sweet spot of scalability at any given moment in the life of a technology project.

Given the nature of the Internet, perhaps the one certainty pertaining to scalability is that no one size fits all.  What is sensible for the majority of infrastructures running on Amazon, Azure, or Google Cloud would not necessarily be sensible for infrastructures running in other contexts.

How might we compare the estimates for scalability decisions with estimates of labor time?  There are fairly successful rules of thumb for multiplying estimates for labor time by a certain factor as well as a range of statistical approaches.  Unlike the estimation of labor time, scaling and capacity planning for a greenfield project in the age of the Internet represents a formidable challenge primarily due the number of variables.  The reduction of variables to a manageable number becomes a crucial step in scaling and capacity analysis.

Corona Chronicles: Social Media and Outreach Plan

AUDIENCE AND NETWORKS

Audience
Our first audience for the Corona Chronicles will be middle and high school students who are invited to share their stories of living through the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to view what students in other geographic locations (locally, nationally, and internationally) express about their experiences. We believe that the act of producing, sharing, and engaging with these stories will allow students to develop a sense of connection through a period of widespread isolation, as well as to develop empathy and understanding of others living in different circumstances from their own. From a pedagogical perspective, this project may reach teachers and school administrators, serving objectives of affective curriculum development, including support of social-emotional well-being, which carries great importance as students continue to live through an extended period of worldwide crisis. 

Networks
1. Corona Stories
Our team met with Lara Alonso and Victor Clemente of Corona Stories: www.CoronaStories.world. During our conversation, we heard about their experiences and covered everything from the inspiration behind their platform to the challenges they faced and strategies they developed in response.  We also discussed our potential to collaborate and bridge projects once ours has more fully evolved.

2.  NYC After School Programs
VM has professional connections with Inwood Community Services, Inc. This Community Based Organization (CBO) offers Inwood residents elementary, middle school, and highschool afterschool programming. We are partnering with two middle school programs in particular and their participants will contribute to the Corona Chronicles collection. These submissions will be collected in the phase of the project we are entering over the next 2-3 weeks.

3.  ELL students – Lynn Public Schools – Lynn, MA
We have a verbal agreement from an ELL teacher in Lynn, MA who works with students who came to the US within the last 2-4 years, primarily from: Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Mexico, and Vietnam. The agreement is to run the project as a class assignment when the site is ready for a significant number of submissions. These submissions are anticipated to be collected in the phase of the project we enter in mid-late April. 

4.   Personal Networks
In the first prototype stages, we will use personal networks to collect submission from 3 students ranging in age from 11-17. Project team members may further distribute the site to their personal networks (family, friends, and community) with children who fit within our given age bracket. The potential for future outreach within our personal networks also includes access to larger, formally organized networks that include international students: 

1) United Principals Association
2) Up With People – an American nonprofit arts organization with global reach and a vast network of program alumni 

These submissions are tentative dependent upon the success of the next stage of the project with Inwood Community Services, Inc. and our capacity to manage larger volumes of submissions in the later phases of the project.

5.  Round Square
Round Square is a network of 200 schools in 50 countries.  A colleague of KD’s is a Round Square representative who has agreed to distribute the project to the Round Square network when the site and the team are ready to take in a greater volume of submissions. Similar to above, these submissions are pending the success of the next stage of the project with Inwood Community Services, Inc. and individuals within our personal networks, as we build our capacity to manage larger volumes of submissions in the later phases of the project. 

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

Instagram
Instagram will be our primary youth outreach platform. This forum will contain information regarding our mission, application process, link to our website, and offer short video clips and photos of our contributors and their work. It will also allow us to quickly communicate with potential contributors via direct message. Lastly, there is an option to promote our project with sponsored ads and focused hashtags that circulate around similar projects. 

Name: Corona Chronicles
Username: coronoachronicles.world

Twitter
Twitter will be utilized for promotional purposes (not for content distribution). This will include retweetable text and providing connections to the website. Across both Instagram and Twitter, we will connect to the website (www.corona-chronicles.world) and hashtags that circulate around similar projects.

Name: Corona Chronicles
Username: CoronaChronicl5

Facebook
Facebook will be the platform used to target parents, guardians, educators, and other adult community members who are able to share our project with potential youth contributors in their personal and professional networks. This platform will also allow us to quickly communicate and answer questions via direct message and will link to our website. Similar to Instagram, we will display photos and short video clips of our contributors. This page still needs to be successfully opened; we faced a roadblock in set up due to unclear Facebook naming convention requirements. 

WEBSITE AND COMMUNICATION 

Website
 Our website will be called Corona Chronicles and it will be hosted at www.corona-chronicles.world. We will use Adobe Portfolio and employ search engine optimization strategies to elevate the site’s presence, our initial effort being focused on optimizing the website for results using keywords, descriptions, and meta tags.  We will also leverage Google’s tools for improving search results ranking, including its webmaster tools.  In addition, Google analytics code will be added to the site and analytics data will be reviewed. We will conduct an evaluation of the cost benefit of undertaking an adwords campaign.

Newsletter
As part of the consent form and through direct sign up on the website and our various social media platforms, we will allow Newsletter sign-up. We have begun prototyping a digital/graphic newsletter that contains all of the project information including mission, website, and submission and consent forms. This newsletter may also be sent to all professional, personal, and community networks. 

Expected Outcomes
As of 3/16, a working prototype of the site is now running on Adobe Portfolio. By 3/20, will have contributions from 3 students, including a mix of video and images. This will allow us to begin adding content to our archive, problem-solve, and manage our data on a controlled scale. Once we are confident with our data management processes, we will open our site to 10-20 contributions. The subsequent phases of the project – including outreach to the networks listed above – will be scaled based upon the success of our data management workflow. All social media accounts except Facebook are open and operational; we will add content and branding in the coming weeks; one student contributor has agreed to assist in the creation of the logo, which we will discuss at our next team meeting.

Measures of Effectiveness
Our success will be measured by student feedback, including from students who have been involved in early stages of the project. We intend to survey student contributors periodically and integrate their feedback into later versions of the site. Success will also be indicated by expanding geographic reach, including to populations not given voice in other parallel projects. Finally, the long term goal includes outreach efforts being effective enough to sustain ongoing submissions from diverse populations.

Personal Journal Entry – Thankful for my team

I’m part of the Student Covid 19 Archive project, also known as CoronaChronicles. Amanda, Karyn, Vallerie, and Phil bring so much energy and productivity to our Thursday and Sunday meetings. I look forward to talking to them every week, not only because we are all into this project, but we also care about one another. I enjoy being part of team that shows up, delegate, and above all listens to everyone’s opinions; even if they disagree.

Though we had lots of conversations regarding our content and our participants, middle school and high school students, we are striving to make this a great platform and outlet  for the youth and the adults around then, like parents and educators. This past week we were given the first pieces of content for our site. The amount of heart and realness in these young women (the first three students) when talking about their covid 19 pandemic experience. The pieces gave us insight about the isolation, and fustration many learners are feeling as we all adjust  to remote learning, quarentine, and our new relationship with the virtual world.

I’m proud of the progress  we have made and I can’t wait wait for everyone to see/hear the stories/voices of these young people, who are now given a platform to express themselves creatively as we archive, take a snapshot, for what time really felt like for the next generation.

Progress!

We had an exceptionally productive meeting this Sunday that felt as though it moved us forwards in significant ways. After that meeting and a few days of work, we have a new name for the project, a domain name and functional site, naming conventions for data management, social media accounts (though nothing on them), community programs and a network of potential contributors who have agreed to take part, thorough legal language for our consent form, and a roadmap for the coming weeks. I have felt a little disoriented to this point, uncertain of what scale and time frames would ultimately be feasible and how. I now have a much more confident read on what is possible, as well as the path required to get there. The details of data management and work flow also came into clearer resolution and are, not surprisingly, much more time intensive than they might first appear.  The time intensive nature of managing submissions in a coherent work flow is one defining question for future scalability.

One thing I keep realizing is this: our group is a really wonderful example of the simple but profound possibilities that come with collaboration – a word frequently thrown around in K-12 and probably most educational circles but I wonder how often it is actually experienced in inspiring ways. Sometimes, two or more people simply working on the same thing “counts” as collaboration. But in its truest form, it is a space of possibility in which the final product is truly greater than what any single person could ever have accomplished. This feels obvious at some level, but I think our group embodies this in real ways and the results each week continue to surprise and inspire me.

A final note: our team graciously welcomed three students to our team meeting and made them feel heard, respected, and valued.  Beyond my personal gratitude for the students expressing that it was a positive experience, as a parallel for what our project attempts to do, I think it is mission-consistent, important, and hopefully a sign that we are on the right track.

Perfection is Not the Goal Right Now

This was the week of decision making. We decided on how to move forward with our student consent/submission form, a media storage solution, a CMS, and our domain name. All of these things have been on our mind for weeks, but we hit the point where we needed to make a call on these things. I had to remind both myself and the group a few times that this is just a prototype and things can and will change. And that’s OK! Right now we’re focused on doing the best we possible can at this moment, while working towards our May deadline. Perfection is not the goal right now.

This past week I was excited to get a chance to brush off my Tableau skills and start putting together a map that displays where our entries are from. I only started working with the software last semester, but I really enjoy it. I have lots to learn still, including how to connect a google sheet to the Tableau server so that our entries will automatically update in the map as they come in.

Last week Karyn invited some students to our team meeting and it was wonderful to run ideas and questions by them. I was blown away by how thoughtful and intelligent they are, and I learned that I’m guilty of not giving young people enough credit. Immediately changing that about myself. I really appreciate their honesty and opinions on what we’ve come up with so far. The success of this project should absolutely be shared with them because being able to run these early ideas by them is invaluable to our work.

In addition to acting as consultants on the project, the 3 of them are also our first student submitters. We finally have entries to play with! It’s starting to feel very real seeing their submissions on our Adobe Portfolio prototype. We’re not sure exactly how many entries we’ll receive in time for the May presentation, but we all agreed that we’re probably underestimating ourselves. We have a goal of 10-20 total by May, but Vallerie already has around 10 verbal commitments from her student group! I can’t wait to see what creative expressions these students come up with for our Corona Chronicles.