During the past two weeks, our team has achieved a big part of the functionality we hoped to get to with our timeline. The vertical and horizontal timelines are now interactively dependent, which is really nice to see, since we have only been talking about how we imagine it to be since the beginning. I have also created one of the individual cemetery pages as a way to show the team for our upcoming meeting and discuss layout and data presentation on the pages.

One thing I am looking forward to is our branding meeting which will be this week. We are finally getting to the fun part!!! Choosing color schemes, fonts, icons, a logo will reinforce our vision and make it come to life by applying to the website.

Other than working on the website development this week, I finally got to do some research on the New York Marble Cemetery. The cemetery is actually becoming a common place to organize weddings. It has also put its last two vaults  (supposedly the last two burial plots in Manhattan) for sale, each for 350,000$ in 2015. How crazy is that!!?? Clearly, this research is turning to be fascinating. It has been really cool to look at the history and progression of the two marble cemeteries, although my focus will be on the New York Marble Cemetery, not the New York City Marble Cemetery.

Finally, I wanted to express how happy I am about the ways which our team has found to document the process. I believe that the WordPress commons website works hand in hand with the project website hosted on Github to show process and product in harmony.

As mentioned in the group update on Friday, we finally made some big decisions and improvements to the site this week. Thanks to the hard work of the team and consulting with our student advisors, the prototype is starting to really come together. On Thursday we’re hoping to decide on our logo.

Over the weekend I’ve been working on putting together some documentation of the workflow and submission intake processes for the team to follow. The documentation isn’t the fun and glamorous side of the project, but it’s critical that we all have the same reference points to follow. A lot of the work that goes into our project is about careful intake and version control before submissions are posted to our online gallery. We need tight organization and naming conventions. The team was feeling some pain points over the past couple weeks by not having documented guidelines, so I’m hoping to improve that. Additionally, we’re all trying to make the project handoff as smooth as possible for its next phase after this semester and this work will help make that possible.

Another piece the group needs to work through is our social media plan. On Sunday we talked about how our collaboration with students and educators through the team’s networks makes up the majority of our outreach plan. While we initially thought Instagram and FB accounts might help us with submission recruitment, we’re brainstorming new ways for how to best use those spaces. In order to take better care of our student contributors, we need to keep our group small for now. We’re thinking of showcasing select submissions through Instagram so that students can be proud of their work and easily share with their friends. But we’re also unique in that the content isn’t completely ours to share. We need to be respectful of the privacy of the students and whether they would want personal submissions to be shared out to social media.

I’m really inspired by all of the thoughtful conversations the team has had over the past few weeks. We’re making great progress and learning so much as we go.

This past week has been productive and quite eventful. I took on the task of creating visual images of each team member’s definition of Mapping Cemeteries, which will be included on our Making Mapping Cemeteries site, social media, and potentially our final website. I had a lot of fun finding images, toying around with different visual effects, colors, and fonts (our group, particularly Asma can really appreciate a good font). I created similar visual images which include definitions of necropolitics and deathscapes — two key topics in our project that may be new to our audience.  

Our first social media posts have gone up on our Instagram and Facebook pages! While it may seem trivial, it was both exciting and gratifying to receive some positive feedback on the posts. Asma and I have been brainstorming our Outreach Plan for the past few weeks, meeting outside of class via Facetime or chatting over text. It’s been such a fun experience for myriad reasons, one being that Asma is an outstanding person to work with!  

The first post included the previously mentioned images of our team definitions along with a caption introducing the project in a little more detail. Our next post which will include the definitions of necropolitics and deathscapes will be going up on Friday! Another fun update is that we are planning on interviewing Asma’s professor for one of our Soundcloud episodes where we’ll explore the metaphysics of our project. Asma and I are still in the process of compiling ideas for post topics in our Work Plan System sheet, so look out for more fun posts on our Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, and Soundcloud accounts.  

This Thursday is our cutoff for research and data submission in our Data Management Sheet, so the next few days will consist of wrapping up research for the African Burial Ground National Monument. While I’ve enjoyed the research process, I’m looking forward to moving on to the visual aspects of our final site.  

l.v.