lane – research update, logo ideas, and limited podcast series

This week has been eventful! Our deadline for research was Thursday, so I spent some time finishing my final reflection for my cemetery. While I got the bulk of my research transferred into our data management sheet, I plan to spend a little time going over my work again to correct any potential grammatical errors, poor structure and etc. Additionally, I’ll be adding my citations and resources to our team’s Zotero account (I’m grateful that we’re using this tool as it will make the process of organizing our citations much easier).

Now that we have finished our research for the most part, we can focus more on visual aspects of our sites, which I am looking forward to. In the past couple days, I have played around with logo ideas keeping in mind our team’s unanimous decision on font styles and overall themes that we want our logo to convey. In previous meetings we discussed our inclination toward including intersecting lines in our overall theme due to this visual aligning with some of the topics our project explores.

Last night we recorded the first episode of our limited podcast series and it was so much fun. Asma has done an amazing job planning and executing this. I was slightly nervous prior to recording due to having never done anything like this before as well as my tendency to get all anxious and word jumbly (I don’t know if that even makes sense!) whenever I’m speaking on Zoom. But, overall it was such a cool experience, and I’m beyond excited to record the next episodes. Also, I revisited the African Burial Ground cemetery this week to capture some sounds for an upcoming podcast episode; I’m eager to see how these recordings play into the episode!

 

 

Weekly update

Spring break seems to have accelerated us headlong towards the end of the semester and preparing for our mini-presentation on Thursday has provided a useful moment to summarize where we are, how we got here, and what’s next. That’s the frame we’ll use for our presentation on Thursday. A few reflections in the meantime:

  • every single group meeting we have had has been hyper productive – this is no small thing and warrants continued acknowledgement, I believe
  • Amanda is right that shifting to something other than email as a primary communication channel 100% makes clear sense for the next phase
  • I feel more confident than ever that there will be a next phase – the group’s confidence in that is something I deeply appreciate
  • It is an amazing feeling when a new submission comes in
  • Over the last few days, we did at last get our instagram up and running. And we have 3 international submissions (our first) from a school in Peru.
  • negotiating the politics of outreach in personal networks on a project with such emotional vulnerability involved has been a big learning experience – to put it lightly
  • speed and haste have had surprising benefits in certain ways with this project but they are difficult for kids, teachers, and parents right now in this particular year and at this particular time of the school year – I hear a lot of chatter about everyone being done, beyond the point of tired, and this weighs on certain outreach efforts

We currently have ~30 submissions total. Some come through and are essentially ready to go right on the site. Others won’t necessarily work in the model of the site we’ve currently imagined but we will figure out how to include and honor all of the submissions while curating them appropriately – it’s one of the primary tasks we’ll have to figure out in the next few weeks. The students Vallerie has connected us to have been generous, gracious, and in many ways profound. They continue to affirm the real “why?'” behind our project – while also surprising in the most meaningful of ways too.

 

Personal Blog #8: Curation and Gratitude

This week was about preparing for our presentation and also curating rebuses. Our group (thanks to PM Bianca) has come up with a rating system so that we can easily decide what gets added to the website and what gets cut. This will help us narrow down our selections and also think carefully about the criteria for selecting rebuses. We’ve expanded our scope to include more non-British and American selections. It’s so exciting to see Japanese and Chinese rebus artifacts represented! I only wish I was familiar with these languages to offer some scholarly interpretations. Not only is this a team curation effort, it’s also a process of curating and editing myself. I’ve collected so many links and resources since the beginning that I’ve had to carefully select what I put forth for the group to vote. Some of the rebuses that I found ‘way-back-when’ suddenly don’t seem so interesting compared to more recent finds. Ideally, we would include everything but the clock is ticking… And with most things, I find choosing quality over quantity is the best path forward.

As I was putting together the slides for the presentation and looking at the sources of our rebuses, I found myself being so grateful that there are publicly and digitally accessible archives for us to use, no questions asked, no fees requested. Library of Congress, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, NYPL, Smithsonian, DPLA, and more – what absolutely awesome resources we have available to us! It’s safe to say our project could not be done without these institutions, especially in a time of a pandemic when their physical doors are shut but the digital doors are open 24/7. That’s not to say that archives are perfect and without problems. But, in general, they have enabled us to create this project that we’re excited to reveal.

Personal Blog: Mapping Cemeteries Rising

This month has been particularly hectic in my personal life as we’ve been moving to a new apartment. We’re saying goodbye to our studio of 13 years (our first–and until very recently only–home in New York City). So this past week I’ve been feeling extra concerned I’m not delivering enough toward the project. I keep catching myself thinking the semester is basically over and how can I possibly finish everything I want to.

And that is only somewhat true. Yes, the end of the semester is near, but there is still time to make meaningful contributions to the project. I’ve been struggling to put my research into words, and worrying about the multiple presentations that are coming up. How can I present Mapping Cemeteries when it feels like we only just started making it, and we’re still exploring what it is?

But tonight I want to give a huge shout-out to Asma, who has planned out our audio episodes. We recorded the first episode tonight in our group meeting. I’ve never been involved in a podcast before (and I admit I don’t even listen to them much), and I was so nervous. But Asma included this in a list of tips to help us all prepare for tonight’s recording: “You’re the expert of your work in MC, tell imposter syndrome to exit the stage.”

And that’s what it is, imposter syndrome, striking me at almost every step of the process. I saved writing my post until after we recorded tonight, and I’m so glad that I did. When Asma started recording, we all were more than ready. We responded to prompts with care and consideration, and we built meaningful discourse about Mapping Cemeteries. (Everyone in the group has done such great research, and I learned so much about the project even since our last meeting.)

And we built up our little community. Just like we’ve been doing in all of our team meetings. There was a moment when everyone talked about what led them to the project, and that was particularly heart-felt and just a really great reminder of the hard work we are doing even under these prolonged and challenging circumstances we find ourselves in. Thank you so much Asma, lane, Lisa, and Nadia! This project would not be the delicious sourdough bread it is without you (h/t Lisa for that metaphor).

Bowl of Rising Dough

Bowl of rising dough gif (source: https://funnyjunk.com/perfect+gifs+part+1/funny-gifs/5308094/)

Week 12: Honoring the Specific Student Stories

Another productive week for the Coronal Chronicles group. The team has processed and posted SIX new submissions over the past week, and it’s really exciting to see the gallery homepage grow. I’m in awe of the creativity and dedication of these students.

In last Thursday’s class we worked out each step of the submission intake process so that everyone was on the same page. I’ve drawn this out in the flow chart below. It took us a couple of tries, but I think we’ve settled nicely into this rhythm that works for everyone. Most of our communication has shifted to email, which works for us, but definitely can be hard to track down the latest information. For the project’s next phase, I’d recommend using Slack or a dedicated Discord channel instead to send file transfer notifications to teammates. This would probably be less cumbersome to manage and provides more visibility.

 

We’re also excited to share that we’re sponsoring a pizza party this Friday for a group of students who have been participating in our project thanks to Vallerie’s network! Huge thank you to the DH department for providing the budget for this to happen. While I think the whole group wishes we could give something to every single student contributor, it feels good knowing this group will be compensated for the work they’ve put in for us. For everyone else, we’re working on drafting that certificate of recognition…

Finally in our group meeting on Sunday, we had a really great conversation around how much curating we should do to the student submissions. As admins, it’s our responsibility to share these student stories and to make the site look the best it possibly can. We’ve been frequently comparing the site to a museum which is carefully curated, but leaves room for viewer interpretation. For our project, the students are being specific with what they’re sharing and we need to honor that, rather than let the audience interpret the meaning behind the pieces. To solve this, we landed on including the original prompt the student answered on their individual gallery page. I think providing this in addition to their written description provides the best context for someone who’s trying to understand the message being conveyed.

Looking forward to seeing the rest of the group updates on Thursday.

Topic Modeling – part 2

Here’s Part 2 of my walkthrough of the topic modeling process that makes up one part of the Freedom of Speech* project. (Part 1 here.) I’ll cover how I improved the topic model after showing the initial results to my group members.

At this point, I’ve run three topic models with the goal of increasing the clarity and specificity of results each time. The number of topics seems about right, and my main focus was on removing words that didn’t contribute to the topics as knowledge-producing documents. For example, here are the topics from the first model:

Topics from the 1st model

It was an exciting start, particularly since topics like 1, 10, and 11 immediately speak to (un)protected speech themes we’ve been talking about for weeks: broadcasting/advertising, obscenity, and communism/McCarthyism. Another part of the fun is also seeing words that expand or clarify our understanding of a topic. It’s not surprising that the words “foreign” and “control” are in the communism topic, or that the sexual/obscenity topic includes the word “children.” It does, however, help to solidify our understanding of the motivations of these battlegrounds: communism in speech matters because the U.S. government cares about the impacts of foreign influence; obscenity in speech matters because the U.S. government cares about protecting the rights (and souls) of children.

On the other hand, topics like 7 and 14 are essentially useless for telling us about themes in the cases, since for the most part they just include high incidence court-related words (“plaintiff”, “justice”, “court”, “district”, etc)  that aren’t on a general purpose stop word list. Topic 15 also includes several Justice’s names: Blackmun, Brennan, and Rehnquist. I took these words out and ran the model again:

Topic results for the 2nd model.

These results were better, particularly since every “unhelpful” word we remove from the model makes room for a more interesting one. For a perfect example, I took out the word “statute” and it’s replaced in the obscenity topic (now called V18) with the word “minors,” a much more descriptive word for that topic. Topic 10 distills a clearer picture of the topic about broadcasting regulations, compared to its corresponding Topic 1 in the first model.

New topics also appear: Topic 16 shows a new topic about fraud/soliciting/telemarketing. Topic 17 brings together the words “flag”, “symbol”, “peace” and “group.”

BUT, another limitation of the first and second models arises: Joanne pointed out that Topic 14 contains court-specific language that makes an interesting group of “court verbs” but doesn’t help us with thematic topics. So, one more time! Here are the topics in the third model:

3rd set of topics

Topic 11 shows us a “libel” topic, an important battleground of free speech that was missing from earlier models. Topic 13 also brings out a new thread with “university”, “students”, “message”, and “viewpoint”.

There are some more words that could be taken out (“John” and “jr”, and what is “FALSE”??), but for now, this is the dataset! Each topic is represented in some percentage (often 0) in every case, so the dataset we’ll use for describing whether a case is about obscenity includes that information. We’ll have to see what the threshold is, i.e., if a case is 30% obscenity topic, does that make it an obscenity case? What about 50%? That’s a task for this week, and one I’m excited to share with our group as well. (Subtext: there is also a boatload of web development work to do and I’m grateful we can share the load of this data work yayyyy)

Elena’s Journal (Week 12) – An Abundance Mindset

Now that we are approaching the final stretch of our project, I noticed myself feeling anxious.

Are we going to have enough contributions?
How many contributions are enough?
What if nobody answers?
Are people going to trust us with their memories?
Does this project make any sense at all?

I need to make peace with the fact that I don’t have control over a lot of these things – that’s the downside of working with the public, it’s quite unpredictable. At the end of last week though, when I went to our Omeka site and saw that all the fridges had been entered, I had a realization: our Archive already exists!

My team worked really hard to build this solid structure not only based on the affordances of Omeka, but also on our ethical principles, the feedback we received from the fridge organizers we talked to, and the feminist practice of care that we agreed on since the beginning. We made it. We have a structure, which has all the fundamental affordances that we had envisioned: the possibility to share materials and to do so without having to disclose one’s identity.

We have a functioning “fridge”, we are just waiting for people to put stuff in it. And actually, someone already did! Over the weekend, we received our first contribution: a photo of the Chelsea Community Fridge that someone uploaded. When I saw it, I got really excited. I imagine that’s what startup people feel when their project starts gaining traction and all the hours spent coding in their mom’s basement start to make sense. I guess.

I just want to encourage my team – and everyone else in the class to have an Abundance Mindset. I am usually very skeptical of these self-help terms, but this one has been very helpful to deal with my stress and anxiety. In a Scarcity Mindset, people think of the world as a limited pool of resources, where everyone has to fight for their slice of the pie, and it generally translates to short-term thinking because one is always in a hurry to solve a perceived emergency. The Abundance Mindset is the opposite paradigm, where there are enough resources for everybody. When I get stressed out about the contributions we don’t have yet, I try to bring myself back to the consideration that we have already achieved our goal: we built a real archive, that real people can use to tell their story in the most ethical way we could provide. We are good. Everything else we achieve from now on is the cherry on top!

 

Reading Rebuses—project update

(Apologies for posting this late.)

At this point, it is fair to say that our group is working steadily and takes good care of assignments on different fronts. We were able to clarify our goals and make sure we are able to meet our deadlines.

I personally have been dealing, among other things, with archives and special collections—conducting research, communicating with institutions, requesting materials. This didn’t go as I planned initially—our current situation is an answer to this question. I certainly predicted archives and special collections are not working as they used to in the past and don’t provide services they typically would but didn’t realize that would be such a case. That being said, I was still able to locate a number of materials online—using various institutions whose collections are digitized and available online in part.

In regard to other members of my group: Bianca was not able to meet her personal milestones as those, she stated, were unrealistic. For example, she anticipated to learn developing and designing a WordPress site by the end of the semester. Despite that, Bianca managed to have acquired something different, also valuable and new: more specifically—how to conceive of the design and content of a website in contrast to an academic publication. Other skills included how to plan and scale goals as a group and how to collaborate by expanding existing strengths.

In terms of the website, Patricia has been meeting her goals. The website works and looks the way she envisioned it (although it is not filled with content yet). Regarding her research, she is a little behind—she had thought she would be further along and able to locate more examples of rebuses). She’s presently thinking about an essay on the connection between rebuses and technology like alt-tags.

Rachel, too, has been meeting, in general, her personal milestones—largely because she was able to have been adapting to changes as they come along. Being into research, she finds it rewarding as a method of discovery and as a way to plan the future path forward. Rachel was able to find way more rebuses thanks to open access but contributed thus far less content. Also, this week’s administration and organization is a place where she can excel because she’s been craving some repetitive work to soothe her brain during chaotic times.

 

Mapping Cemeteries: Research Deadline

This week was a big milestone for us. We agreed that April 15 was our deadline to finish our research. When we set this deadline it felt like we had all the time in the world to leisurely research our locations. Now that we’ve reached it, it doesn’t feel like it was enough time. Regardless, it seems like the correct deadline given the tight timeline. We’re all feeling a bit concerned we haven’t done enough research, but we’re also feeling great about what we’ve learned and the ways our research puts our locations in dialogue with one another.

And it marked a very exciting turn in our meetings. Nadia has been doing amazing work writing code and building our GitHub site. She’s been working hard on a hover feature for our horizontal timeline and a filter feature for our vertical timeline. And she built out our location pages in a way that ties it in aesthetically with the timeline page (organized in boxes). The box design is also making our research feel more manageable–encouraging brevity and showcasing the varied visual assets we’ve found and created. And it’s helping us think more in terms of web text rather than research paper text. When Bret joined our group breakout room, he echoed this. And this week we got to talk about ways we can make the site even better. We talked fonts and colors–and how we can use design across the GitHub and Commons sites to create an even more cohesive user experience.

We also started brainstorming about our logo. We’d talked about logos before, but we mostly wanted to wait until we understood our locations and project better. I’m thinking we may have something to debut as soon as our next project update. Stay tuned!

Thanks to Asma, we also have prompts and recording dates set for our three-episode limited audio series (plus a fourth bonus episode). We’re doing a mix of synchronous and asynchronous recording sessions, all of which Asma will edit and produce with a partner. Especially for our asynchronous recordings, she has us embracing the noises we capture in our background environment as part of our data (rather than something to be edited out). You can listen to our episodes via SoundCloud. We’ll post here when new episodes are ready.

Corona Chronicles: Update on Where We Are and Changes We’ve Made

We’ve come to the point in our project where a lot of the heavy decision making is done, and we’re shifting our focus to processing our student submissions and making the final tweaks to our site. (It’s looking really great, BTW: https://corona-chronicles.world/)

On Thursday we walked through our submission intake process to clear up confusion and ensure everyone is on the same page. When students upload their submission with parent/guardian supervision, it has to make its way through a few steps before ending up in the public gallery space. We think the process should now be smoother and speedier as we all support each other in getting edited submissions up on the site. It’ll be all hands on deck as we’ll probably be ambushed with many new pieces soon—certainly not a terrible problem. But we want to be respectful of how the work responsibilities fall.

Generally, the team is feeling excited about the submissions we’ve received so far. Anytime a new, creative piece is shared in our group meetings we all get big grins on our faces. There’s a real sense of honor I think we all share that these students are willing to share their honest experiences with us and the world.

In our breakout room, Bret reminded us of all the tough obstacles we’ve had to work through this semester: legal documentation, student and parent/guardian consent, working with student consultants, design aesthetics, and ethics of care. Not to mention working through differences in opinion and bandwidth. And along the way, we’ve made many changes to our original project scope, including but not limited to the following:

  • Changing our name from an archive to a collection
  • Not using social media for recruitment
  • Color palette and site design
  • Coming up with a student compensation plan

We’ve been thinking about the $200 stipend, and we all agree that the best use of it will be to reimburse one of the groups of students we’ve been working closely with. We plan to treat them to a pizza party celebration as a thank you for the time and effort they put into the project for us. We also want to give back to the school staff member who offered to translate our student submission form into Spanish. Both myself and other teammates have mentioned in previous posts that over the past couple of weeks we focused a lot on ethics of care and the importance of recognizing the hard work these students are putting in to this. While we of course want students to jump at the chance to create and share with us through their submissions, we know they’re juggling school work and other interests. Elise, our wonderful student consultant, was messaging with Karyn on Thursday evening because she’s been helping us with our logo. She asked if it was OK to get back to us after she wrapped up some homework. We of course would never push back and interfere with that, but it was just a funny moment that continues to make us think about the full context of working with students.

All that to say, I think the team feels comfortable with the milestones we’ve hit, but we know we still have a lot to do to intake the rest of the submissions we have in the queue for publishing. Over the next week you’ll be seeing a handful of new student submissions coming to the site, joining the 3 currently posted ones. Watch this space… we’ve settled into our groove and are making meaningful progress.