Hey Fans of ReadingRebus: Did you do Saturday’s Crossword in the Times?  Check out 26 Down!

ReadingRebus met once, rather than twice, over Spring “break” and didn’t post on social media during the vacay: that constituted relaxation for us.  With May in sight, Project Manager Bianca’s watchword is “Organization”!  The group is refining its categories for the rebuses we will be posting on the site; rethinking the group writing tasks for the remainder of the semester; and testing beta versions of cataloging templates and tagging, to see what will best communicate to and involve our users in the fascinating play of rebuses.

Patricia has been hard at work on gorgeous v.3.0 (to which only the team has access–for now).  She has designed the site navigation and laid out all the pages. She also has coded the interactive functions for the rebuses and started us off with a set of categories (beta—mentioned above) that may change as we start adding the examples. She’s currently working on adding metadata to the rebus examples and a tagging system, along with design improvements.

Rachel is wrapping up her French rebus research and translation (Merci, Rachel’s maman!) and starting writing up her priority essays. She’s discovered some extraordinary Mexican-American sewn rebuses that are expanding our notions of how community and media intersect in transmitting rebus puzzles

Bianca has finished her PWP and verbal rebus research and is writing that up this week.  She is expanding her Anglo-American and early modern material history essay to the French publishers and designers that Rachel has uncovered.  She is also proofreading v.3.0 as it emerges.

Matt is selecting a microcollection of heraldic rebuses and posting them, as well as expanding his primary and secondary heraldry bibliography for his essay on heraldry and rebuses.

Ostap as head archivist will be reflecting on Patricia’s cataloguing template and providing the final version in the next few days (Tuesday) so that we can begin to establish our anti-penultimate archive of rebuses.  Stay tuned for his Group Blog next week and for our next social media posts on Twitter and Instagram (@readingrebus) coming soon!