Tag Archives: outreach plan

Reading Rebus: Outreach, Scholarly Communication, and Social Media Plan

  1. PROJECT:  An online collection of
    • rebus ephemera,
    • research into their history and cultural uses, and
    • an interactive, digital playground for translations and further exploration
  2. OUTREACH GOALS: Via our website,
    • to build and expand the community of people interested in rebuses, in their past, and in ‘solving’ them;
    • to educate the general public about what rebuses are and their different forms;
    • to get audiences excited about translating rebuses and researching them by using our resources–including examples, analyses, external links to extant collections, and bibliographies–as a starting point.
  3. AUDIENCES:
    • Etymologists and linguistic analysts.
    • Historians, anthropologists, and those interested in history and anthropology.
    • Puzzle and rebus enthusiasts, as well as newcomers to this form of puzzling.
    • Word and Image scholars, scholars of visual culture
    • Digital Humanities students, colleagues, and the NYDH community at large.
    • Wordsmiths and semioticians.
  4. SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS AND PRACTICES: Beginning weekly, and increasing as we identify and acquire content, we will post examples of rebuses, short remarks on interesting features of their development, and links to the website on
      • Twitter
      • Instagram
      • Tumblr and possibly Pinterest
    • The tone will be playful, educational, and suitable for a general audience.  All images will be provided with AltText for accessibility and as an opportunity to explore the scope and translation of rebuses into other media (thank you Micki).
  5. ADDITIONAL OUTREACH & COMMUNICATION: Individual team members will introduce and circulate the project to colleagues and peers among the above audiences, using e-mail and their own social media accounts.  For example,
    • Team member Rachel Dixon has enlisted the interest and support of former colleague Sam Ezersky, Associate Puzzles Editor, New York Times!
    • DHUM70002 classmate Martin Glick has put us in contact with Jane Solomon, Senior Emoji Lexicographer, Emojipedia. (Thank you, Martin!)
  6. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FOR REBUS AWARENESS on website and other platforms;
    • A shared Zotero library of bibliographic sources and links to other collections of rebuses;
    • An intro to rebuses page and a guide to deciphering rebuses and related phenomena.
    • Analytical long essays surveying common themes and backgrounds of rebus production and use.
    • GitHub uploads to document the process of production.

 

Freedom of Speech: Outreach and Social Media Plan

Audience:

Immediate term: Once we have something complete like a website and the beginnings of a visualization we can reach out to law students at CUNY. Down the line we could get in touch with law students at other institutions, but the CUNY connection means they would be obliged to help us. Later on we can reach out to activists and propose to them sharing the infographic elements of our project. Librarians in DH or Law might be interested in our project as well so that they can share with their Institutions. Submitting an abstract to upcoming conferences in DH would also allow us to receive critical feedback on the project and dive into the technical aspects with professionals in the field.

A few of the key outcomes we hope to accomplish are: create connections with those in the field to to offer insight when reaching an audience outside of the DJ/Law circles. We ultimately want to bring awareness to our topic to those who might not be immediately interested in 1st Amendment discussions but would definitely find it interesting.

We will possibly include an acknowledgements section of the website to give credit to those we spoke to during the creation phase.

 

Social media strategy:

Given that we want our project to be publicly relevant and accessible, and that contemporary discussions of freedom of speech center the Internet and social media, it makes sense for our outreach to lean on social media platforms to build awareness of our site and engage our audience with some of the delight we’ve already had in researching this project.

We’ll use Twitter for its importance in scholarly and political discourse, and for its “public green” vibe. We’ll also use Instagram for its relevance as an activist platform.

Both Twitter and Instagram will push our social media content towards the digestible and visually-oriented, which dovetails with our overall goals of making abstract legal language accessible in a relevant, digestible format.

Our ideal tone is educational, sassy, and irreverent, as we’ll try to present a combination of lurid/ridiculous free speech designations, straightforward educational content about the First Amendment, and user interactive content to test our audience’s knowledge of the true meaning of Freedom of Speech.

Our formats will include memes, “carousel posts” i.e. 10-slide square format decks for sharing educational content on social media, and straightforward informational content, in addition to promoting the launch and existence of the Freedom of Speech* website.

 

Communication and Website:

Since our final product will end up being a website, there isn’t really a need for a second promotional website—before developing and adjusting the vast majority of the content that will go into our project, we will be able to promote the project with a foundation that includes a completed basic landing page, about page, and teaser, including a plugin to allow users to subscribe to updates about the project. Once the site itself is done, we can send out a blast email that lets people know the site is complete.

In order to reach a wider audience, we will write a short recap of our process and publish it to sites like Medium or hackernoon.

We’ll post the finished project link and publicize its CUNY launch in the Data Visualization Society Slack channel, as well as submit it to the NYC Data Jobs & Events newsletter and others TBD. We will also post about our project on groups in the GC Commons.

 

Search Engine Optimization:

As basic SEO goes, when building our site, we will first build a sitemap and submit it to Google,  and we will also include keywords in the header in order to have other search engines more easily identify what our website does. In addition to that, we will be following the Google SEO Starter Guide.

 

Map of Lower Manhattan from 1797

Mapping Cemeteries: Outreach and Publicity Plan

Our team is prioritizing pedagogy and the overall reproducibility of Mapping Cemeteries in our Outreach and Publicity Plan. While several social media platforms and web tools provide wide opportunities for distribution, not all–or even most–are conducive to teaching the Digital Humanities (DH) skills and topic of Mapping Cemeteries. 

We understand that our primary and secondary audiences value research, user design, user experience, and project design according to our analysis of their DH backgrounds and interests.  Based on this, we determined a six-week campaign across Instagram, Facebook, SoundCloud, and TikTok were the best options for the priorities of our audience and reproducibility of Mapping Cemeteries following our review of popular and obscure digital platforms and tools. Outlined below are key areas of outreach that include milestones and protocols to be executed during our intended window of interaction with our audience.

Staff Responsible

lane v., Outreach Lead

Asma N., Audiovisual Modulation Lead, Outreach Support

Platforms

  • Instagram 
  • Facebook
  • SoundCloud
  • TikTok  

Timeline

Our Outreach team will run a six-week campaign on the reproducibility and awareness of Mapping Cemeteries’ humanistic investigations. The timeline for outreach was designed around the time constraints of the Spring 2021 semester and the time required to execute phase 1 during this 13-15 week window. The six-week window is imagined as an opportunity for a specific and targeted approach to our outreach milestones. 

Protocol

  • Accessibility: The entire time will have access to all platforms, although Asma will be taking the lead on SoundCloud and Facebook content. Both login and passwords for the accounts will be stored in a team document.
  • Responses: Anyone on the team can respond to comments or converse in comment sections, but lane will take primary responsibility for ensuring comments are responded to within 24 hours of the comment being posted. If a comment pertains to a subject that another team member has specific knowledge or insight in, they may be requested to aid in the response.  
  • Troll Comments: With any social media presence, there is always a chance of being targeted by trolls or bots. If an inappropriate comment that has no relevance to the project is left under one of our posts, it will be flagged and removed by one of the team members.  
  • Tone: To best appeal to our intended audience of classmates and fellow academics, our social media presence will take a pedagogical approach with its posts. We do want to keep in mind the seriousness of our project’s subject matter, so the overall tone of our social media presence will be an intentional balance of educational and levitous.

Instagram and Facebook

For Instagram and Facebook we are focused on six weeks of posts starting on Week 7 of class (Spring Break):

  • At least one Instagram post with photos and relevant information on each cemetery our project is focusing on:  
    • a historical cemetery that still exists as such 
    • a cemetery that was established/other 
    • a cemetery that was repurposed as a public park 
    • a cemetery that was repurposed and later rediscovered and exists again as such 
    • a war memorial 
  • At least one post advertising each of the three episodes of our project’s podcast 
  • Other posts may include TikTok videos, excerpts from articles, or other relevant information intended to encourage interaction or draw the attention of our audience.

Audio Roundtable, SoundCloud  

Mapping Cemeteries will produce a limited, three-part audio series on phase 1 of the project hosted on SoundCloud. The first episode will introduce the team of DHers working on Mapping Cemeteries; episode two will introduce each of the five necropolitical investigations of Mapping Cemeteries; and the final episode will bring the team and listeners to an audio roundtable to disseminate Mapping Cemeteries and its overall intervention. 

Mapping Cemeteries is built with accessibility in mind; we understand access is a broad category that centers ability and learning styles alike, among other important considerations. We care about this scope, especially as it concerns the twofold pedagogical and reproduction priority of our project. We recognize audio as an opportunity to address an area of design; or to capture and playback the bits–for example a DH tip for troubleshooting–that interest our audience in another useful format for learning. We also recognize audio as an opportunity to reach our audience with known and unknown visual impairments–and varying accesses to supportive resources–through our project’s outreach. 

SoundCloud was selected as a primary hub for storing and manipulating audio data, and disseminating Mapping Cemeteries due to its reputation in audio hosting (storage), Rich Site Syndication (RSS) feed module, and playback features that do not require credentials (user registration) for our audience without an account.

Though this limited audio series will capture fragments of our project, it provides sentimental and intellectual insights to our process and relationship to our humanistic topic that would not be otherwise known, or pertinent to the key user-facing aspects of Mapping Cemeteries. 

TikTok 

The team is extremely interested in utilizing TikTok to attract the attention of our audience. Surprisingly, there is a significant amount of TikTok videos about digital humanities–most of them are in German. Before final dissemination, the goal is to post at least one to two videos discussing Mapping Cemeteries and the DH skills we’re using to build the project.  

Expected Outcomes

Our primary goal is twofold: we want to prioritize the reproduction and pedagogical elements of Mapping Cemeteries for our audience. Our expectation is that they will be able to implement at least one key DH skill outlined in our outreach content; and to reproduce an element of Mapping Cemeteries that concerns user experience and/or project design. 

For example, embedding audio is a DH skill that encompasses user experience and design and audiovisual modulation considerations. Our campaign could feature a three-part TikTok video series to teach this DH skill, informed by our Audiovisual Modulation, and User Experience and Design Leads, respectively, on how to accomplish (or to otherwise think about) this task.

  • The first video can introduce the skill, its importance, and how it can be used for a key task of our project (to reproduce).
  • Our Audiovisual Modulation Lead, Asma N., can develop instructions on how to record, edit, export, and upload an audio file to an audio source to generate an embedded code for the second video.
  • Our User Experience and Design Leads, Lisa K. and Nadia E. can show how to embed the code on the backend of a website, or platform, relevant to Mapping Cemeteries to conclude the series.

Our Outreach Team and Lead, lane v., will ultimately review the content (with project management input) and modify the pedagogy for each task in an accessible and creative manner for our audience.

If our audience can learn one of our DH skills, the hope is for them to then implement it–or conceptualize how–to reproduce an element of our project in one of the aforementioned topic areas (user experience, project design, etc.). Get the skill, use it for a task.

Measure of Effectiveness

Our Leads, Asma N. and lane v. will develop a survey to measure the execution of our expected outcomes. We want to know if and how our audience’s interests were reflected in our overall project and how our choices facilitated our goals for expected outcomes. 

Analytics

In addition to a survey, most of our intended platforms allow for analytics, or have DH tools that compensate. For instance, Mapping Cemeteries will need to establish an Instagram/Facebook business account to access its analytic feature, Instagram Insights. An alternative is Iconosquare, a free analytics tool designed to capture engagement data from Instagram and its parent company, Facebook. This digital tool, which can be discerned as one for DH in the case of Mapping Cemeteries, offers machine-learned, generated tips on how to improve our engagement. This tool generates analytics every 30 days, which means we’ll have access to two sets of analytic data within our 6-week window, should we use it.

*Map of Manhattan from 1797; image from the New York Public Library digital archives.

*posted by lane, Asma, Nadia, Lisa, and Bri