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.

Personal Blog: Coming to Terms with Feasibility

The title of this post may seem somber, but in reality, this has been quite the week. During our group’s meeting after Thursday’s class, we discussed what was feasible at this stage, and what wasn’t, and I realized that tossing the entire collection of heraldry I had picked was never even in the cards. This week’s remaining work includes looking through a variety of rebuses we’ve narrowed down and collated from multiple origins and rating them on a scale based on quality and usability.

Some time ago I was talking about how I was going through Codex Seraphinianus in search of rebuses in the book’s own languages. For those unaware, the book is not in any known language, constructed or otherwise. At this point though, my time is probably better spent elsewhere (additionally, at second glance, it’s pretty clear that most of what I’ve dredged up from the book isn’t that usable).

As Bianca talks about in her post, we’ve decided to cut down on the length of the essays we will be writing for the project website.

Nadia’s weekly update

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.

Group project update 4/21

This week the theme of the FOS* group was concretization. Because our team works in Discord channels where everyone routinely posts their latest successes, it’s fun to see things come to realization step-by-step. For example, in order to make the Topics more consistent in the Topic Modeling scheme Eva took out justice names and other common stopwords. Joanne posted about how she was able to get a “protected speech” variable by splitting the data set, then shared what that logic looks like in code! The Figma software adopted by Kevin as the de-facto way to share design work has been a fantastic resource for seeing the evolution of the wireframes and how the comments we made have influenced the shape of the website. And I made stickers of our Project mascot 🙂

Eva and Joanne have been working on getting the Topic Models finalized, which involves running the syllabi to see if reliable categories emerge. Knowing how to “chunk” this information is part of the art + science of the methodology. Having “better” or “worse” topics relies a bit on subject area knowledge but also a general understanding of what kind of text can be grabbed for the software. 

Kevin took our comments on his whiteboard designs, and together we cemented the flow of the website. In tandem with Eva and Joanne, the code Scaffolding page is slowly being fleshed out with lines of code. It’s exciting to get a behind the scenes look at the machinery that will eventually drive the website. 

I will begin posting “educational” style social media posts, in addition to reaching out to law and meme accounts to see if they might potentially be able to start liking our posts. Eva has been sharing with us interesting papers and organizations with contacts we could potentially reach out to. I have begun doing that as well.

We routinely meet every weekend and at least once during the week as a group. Smaller co-working meetings are also held when 2 members have something to advise each other on.

Some things to work on include:

  • Qualitative research of topic models.
  • Creation of web copy including terminology like Precedent and Tests.
  • Formalize the Guided vs. Exploratory format of the website.

Personal Post: Impact

As I continue to edit incoming video pieces for the covid19 student archive, CoronaChronicles, I’m taking note of how impactful this archive could truly be. Karyn and Vallarie have done a great job at networking with students, educators, and afterschool programs to collaborate and provide us with creative and unique media pieces from students inside and outside the United States. Their drawing, photographs, poems, and creative short films will live as small but powerful snapshots of #pandemiclife!

This week I’ve been thinking about our working relationship with our young contributors and co-producers who have been taking the time to provide our team with valuable insight and creativity. I’m happy our team decided to reward all participants and create certificates acknowledging their achievement and contribution to this archive.

Bianca’s Personal Blog Post: Week 12 (?!)

Wow!  To quote Bret: “the wheels on the rebus go round and round . . . “; and the PM on the rebus says “Deadlines Loom!”

On Sunday we wrestled with our metadata management tools, retreating momentarily from our template to a spread sheet when we began to realize that we had more artifacts than we realized.  We will have well more than 100 to choose from!!

Simply cataloguing them consistently will be challenging; we also still have plans for short essays on various topics.  But, again, we made some hard choices about length and format to keep our ambitions achievable and user friendly.

Kudos in particular to Patricia who is able to turn around graphics with speed, grace, and talent.  I continue to be worried that she and Rachel are doing more than their share of work, but there is plenty ahead to do:

 

TO VOLUNTEER FOR EVERYTHING!!

On a smaller scale, we collected our expenses for Bret, began a spread sheet for social media outreach so that we can create an overarching narrative for what and when we will post, and finalized the template for information that we will (eventually) use for each artifact that makes the cut.

I’ve been learning a huge amount by eavesdropping on the development of organizational systems by the Corona Chronicles and Mapping Cemeteries crews, as well as following the helpful discussions of tweaking data and scarcity/abundancy from the Freedom of Speech* and Community Fridge Archive projects.  Thanks to you all!

Grateful to my group for putting up with some leaning over into the front seat of the Re-bus this week: the PM on the rebus also says (to self)—“Move on back!”

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week Twelve — Celebrating Collaboration

This last week has been focused on research.  Yes, I’m still learning about my subject.  It’s been challenging for me, putting my notes into a functional read.  However, we now have an agreed visual mechanism we refer to as a “card.”  Each card can support an image, several headers, and several paragraphs of copy.  Example below.  Knowing how the pages will visually organize themselves has given me what I need to organize the copy.  It’s exhilarating.

Site Example

Sample “card” from the City Hall cemetery page.

Yesterday, our weekly team meeting was devoted to recording our first podcast!  It was lovely.  Asma is our lead here and did a great job organizing it and facilitating the conversation. It was a review of our process to date, and she provided some excellent prompts several days before the event so that we could prepare ourselves.

Even though we are currently in the madness of creating, taking this time to reflect on why we chose this topic and what we’ve learned thus far had a calming effect for me.  It was great to hear Bri engaging with their memories about how this project has evolved since their initial proposal.  Asma shared a charming anecdote of how Bret acted as a kind of “sorting hat” to place her in our group when her browser stymied her ability to tap into that initial Zoom culling (and what a fortuitous choice it has turned out to be).  lane explained why he chose his Cemetary (the African burial ground) because he is new to NYC and did not know about it before research began.  Nadia was excited about the project when Bri first proposed it and was particularly inspired by the opportunity to craft a website from scratch.  All of us have grown in our understanding of what “mapping” means, moving from a strictly cartographic comprehension to a deeper appreciation of how sharing histories can change our engagement with “points on a map.”

We have more podcasts planned.  They will continue to document the work and do deeper dives into specific aspects of the project.  These podcasts, coupled with our Making Mapping Cemeteries website, will do a fine job documenting our process.  Given our core audience are scholars and students, mapping our process is as important as mapping our cemeteries.

We should start a podcast

The culture of emancipatory collaboration

With the widespread adoption of 24-bit true color graphics during the 1990s, graphic designers were handed thousands if not millions of colors to work with in the visual design of websites. Since then, the color palette of a website has become one of the most important visual communication elements, allowing for the construction, together with fonts and cascading stylesheet layouts, of a virtually limitless number of identities and online personalities. After having initially modeled Corona Chronicles on a website composed of bright red and dark grey for the main colors, members of team, including the team’s secondary school advisors and contributors, began to note how other colors might better reflect identities which secondary school students would identify with, including the suggestion that a gender neutral palette would be more representative. This led to a search for a new color palette. Through an open and democratically deliberative process, team members generated eight palette proposals using an online color generator and submitted them for deliberation. The deliberation on the eight color palettes provided the opportunity for the team to reach a consensus through a vote tally by three secondary school students and five post-secondary students, which was undertaken in the Zoom chat panel. This process stands out as perhaps one of the highlights of the project in that the end result was not just a better website, but also an example of a consensus based decision making process.

Perhaps the aspect of the consensus based decision making process that was most validating was the way in which the deliberation was driven by the observations of the secondary school students. The secondary school students became the leaders of the decision making process.   Their observations shaped the conversation and drove the deliberation.  Whereas perhaps other efforts dedicated to the well being of younger generations, including to some extent such efforts as UNICEF, employ top-down hierarchical and paternalistic internal processes, the internalization of the goal of empowerment into the decision making process offered a  potential for a more genuine transformation through emancipatory collaboration.

As Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “[a] real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust” (60). To what extent might this kind of rebalancing of power asymmetries, in its engagement with agency and history, constitute an authentically dialogical transformation of Freirian conscientização (emancipatory consciousness)?  Could the end result of emancipatory collaboration be the moment in which the roles we take on to actualize ourselves and our social collectives melt away, leaving us not knowing who is the student, who is the teacher, who is the leader, who is the follower, who are the organizers, or who are the organized?

The logical conclusions of dialogical institutional relations evoke the imaginaries of new institutional structures, including educational institutions designed by students and teachers and polities designed by the entire demos and not just those who confer upon themselves political and economic status. Looking back one wonders how the radical aspects of social movements of empowerment, such as the literacy campaigns in Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua, and China might have helped to usher in global anti-authoritarian consciousness evident not just in various regions of the global south but in countless communities throughout the global north.

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.