(Apologies for posting somewhat after midnight, I was having trouble logging into my gmail account.)
At the moment, progress remains steady, and in general, it seems as though we’re hitting our milestones. In terms of specifics, I (Matt) have had to expand on my original plan to document different types of symbolism and iconography in rebuses and heraldry and their meanings, turning my small-scale collection of footnotes into a more expansive, comprehensive guide to interpretation. The audit log I proposed is also seeing some more use, and I’m still gathering resources from Codex Seraphinianus and some other niche texts.
Patricia’s progress on the site is genuinely impressive; while I’m certainly not the expert on web design, even at a glance, the site looks great. The formatting is intuitive already, even in its in-progress state. Briana has been examining “verbal” rebuses in the form of poems and the exchange thereof. She’s made something of a breakthrough as she’s taken a look at a certain collection of 18th-19th century rebuses containing some of the first known ones from black women in the United States.
In the realm of our social media and outreach, Rachel may have made notable discovery: in her personal blog, she mentions that our group may not need NFTs “in order to digitize art for the internet++” era. To elaborate, this will greatly expand the amount of material we can use and upload, in part due to a large quantity of open-access resources that we now can potentially use. Ostap is working on an index/table of contents for the site, which should improve the user experience and make it easier to navigate. He has also been doing an excellent job the outreach front.
We plan on using break to catch up somewhat on work, although we plan on meeting only once this coming week, on Thursday when class is normally held. We decided that we may need to think harder about categorization, and we’ve decided to give Zotaro a try to help in that area. We’re also looking to schedule a meeting with Micki Kaufman at some point, ideally this week. Finally, we plan to write a short scholarly piece on some of our more general findings, which we will likely host on the site.
