
The RAAD Project Omeka database

The RAAD Project annotated screen shot describing plug-ins

raadproject.org — we’re striving to present 50 records (from the 70,000 we obtained) to establish The RAAD Project Database
The RAAD Project Omeka database
The RAAD Project annotated screen shot describing plug-ins
raadproject.org — we’re striving to present 50 records (from the 70,000 we obtained) to establish The RAAD Project Database
The RAAD Project team has been making sound progress towards our more realistic goals:
Carolyn has taken charge of creating the “look and feel” for our public-facing sites, which include our site on the CUNY Academic Commons, and our Twitter and Instagram accounts, and is acting as the administrator and ‘editor’ for our content, ensuring that we have “one voice” and consistency across all touchpoints. She’s also putting the finishing touches on our SWAG.
Patty has completed mapping the Omeka data fields to our dataset, with Field Titles that will appear on The RAAD Project’s omeka site, with an attempt to conform to the Dublin Core Metadata standard. In addition to using the fields that we received from the museum, we were able to create additional fields that provide more information about each artifact. (For example, embedded in the item number is the date when the artifact was first catalogued, which roughly conforms to the date that the item was acquired. By culling this date, we were able to add a new field to each item entitled ‘date catalogued’.) We’ve also cleaned our beta dataset of 50 records, which are ready to be converted to a csv file and loaded on to Omeka.
Pam had a eureka! moment last week and figured out how to do the ‘hard coding’ required to customize the field names for our data. Stephen Klein provided the expertise that we needed to add additional fields to Omeka with a special PlugIn (we would never have found this without his help – thank you Stephen!) and generously offered to do the hard-coding. Pam thought she could figure this out based on his notes, and had her breakthrough last week! Once this is done, then she will load the data with the csv file input and then format our site.
Camilla had to return home to Norway unexpectedly (for a few weeks), so the team will be dividing her tasks among us. Next week we will further develop our Social Media and Outreach Plan. While Camilla is not with us physically, she is very much with us in spirit and continues to provide the inspiration for this project.
We appreciated the opportunity to present to Luke Walter and the class on Tuesday evening, and took note of their feedback and suggestions. We gave further thought to the perceived optics of our group composition and the subject that our project is addressing. In light of these considerations, we changed the first word in the name of our project to more accurately convey our project’s focus. Thus the “R” in RAAD is now for Revealing rather than the prior “Reclaiming”, as in Revealing African Art Diaspora.
The tech team, and the team as a whole, is working hard to get the website up and running. It’s not quite up yet, but it should be good and ready to roll any time now: https://projecttrike.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
As a non-tech person, it’s been rather astounding watching it all in action on the website and over on our slack channel. There are so many details it would have never occurred to me to consider, and it’s really impressive watching my teammates working through it smoothly and collaboratively. There’s been some really exciting back-and-forth that I mostly understand between Hannah on the design front and our CSS wrangler Rob. Everyone has been pitching in to get all the exhibits up, and Sabina had some really good ideas for making the website more navigable by content and tech interests. Everyone has been contributing promptly when needed.
We introduced a new meme into our twitter rotation this week, and I continue to giggle no matter how many times I post them. Tweeting out the memes manually rather than using a bot has brought up some ethical questions to my mind about frequency of posting and who to target, which has been interesting to sit with and work through.
I’m really excited about the exhibits that we have to share, and I can’t wait until they’re up so that you can all see them!
Hi all:
Please have a member of each group post a link to your public-facing site(s) in the comments below, both so that we all have quick access to them as more journals and updates come in, and so I can offer some content/user experience feedback in the coming weeks.
Hello all!
It’s Brittany, back again with the latest updates on the Freedom Dreaming project. Here’s where we’re at.
Thanks all!
Brittany
Hello fine professor and classmates,
Follow us on Twitter: @projectTRIKE
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I just realized I was supposed to post the group project update for last week (sorry team), so this is covering two weeks.
Things are going swimmingly on Data TRIKE. We are busy, busy, busy.
Last weekend Natasha, Nancy and I posted our narratives for the three initial data project exhibits that will be hosted on Data TRIKE, and we all plus Rob reviewed and gave feedback on each others’ work. There was an intense period of revisions and re-review. I think each piece is the stronger for it. Mine certainly is.
We’re in a big push to finish getting content up on our site. Sabina and Rob are working on embedding the more complex supporting visuals for Nancy and Natasha’s pieces. I put my own content up, under Sabina’s expert guidance, because my visuals are all static images at the moment. Natasha and I both have supporting visuals made in Tableau, but it seems the WordPress install on the Commons may not allow embedding Tableau, so we’re using screenshots for now as a workaround. Still a little digging going on about that.
We understand our website doesn’t have to be perfect before circulating the link, and it won’t be, but we need at least a first draft of content in there so that people have something meaningful to react to. We’re really excited to start sending it around and gathering feedback. Should be in that place by Tuesday.
Natasha has continued our social media teaser campaign on Twitter, posting our data memes in response to tweets that reference “raw data” or “clean data”.
It’s really amazing seeing all this hard work for the past 10(?) weeks coming together and our site getting built out.
Next up we’ll be working on outreach language, contacting people on our outreach list (which we already have together) to solicit feedback, and maybe doing more with our Twitter feed (tbd).
Hope everyone is enjoying the beautiful weather this Saturday.
After weeks of work on Omeka and a realistic assessment of our dataset, we have decided to narrow our scope. We had hoped to be able to use ten percent of the records that we obtained or about 7,000 records. We realized that the task of cleaning and translating even seven thousand records (they were in French) was herculean and one we couldn’t accomplish in the amount of time left. We have decided to work with a much smaller dataset of 50 records and have that data as pristine as possible. We also discovered that creating a database in Omeka was a more complex task than first believed given the number of fields in each record and the limits of Omeka. We decided that the scope of the project would be limited to the documenting of our work with Omeka, the process of cleaning the data, and our attempts to create a functional database instead of the original proposal of a finished database with data visualization.
We reassessed with the help of Andie Silva and Matt Gold. We decided that the entire process from the original scope to obtaining the records to the cleaning of the data to the reassessment should be documented for the benefit of others. If in the end, we only have a database (without the gallery portion) and a “white paper,” we have fulfilled the mission of the class as that is to work through the process of planning, designing, developing, and implementing a digital humanities project. In our limited scope, we will have completed those tasks to the degree which we were able. The project scope was large with seventy thousand records, an SQL backend, a gallery front-end, and a visualization of the data. We couldn’t account for the time that it took to develop the scope, get the data, learn Omeka (and Dublin Core), and Carto. All these aspects took longer than expected, and our estimates were off, but not for lack of trying. We ran out of time.
Is that disappointing? In a word, yes. We had hoped to have a small version of a finished product as stated in our original scope. However, we can also acknowledge that in adjusting our ambitions, we have matured as individuals and as a group. It has been a great learning experience and one that is not only valuable to ourselves, but we hope in our documenting the experience, will be valuable to others.
This week for Immigrant Newspapers, it’s all about the website building! Work is basically a continuation of last week, with significantly more progress.
We have created our first profile page for a newspaper and are halfway through the creation of the homepage. The map itself is nearly done, and when that is ready this weekend we will place the HTML into our homepage and test it. Copy should be finished by Saturday evening, and Sunday will be spent filling our site. We will be pulling stills from our website on Monday to use in our presentation.
Copy for the Homepage has developed nicely. We decided to include a small ‘navigation’ description directly under the map, which gives the user a 4-part breakdown of ways in which they can use the site. With the given limitations of our collection and browsing techniques, we thought it would be best to lay out ways that the user can, and cannot, use our site to avoid frustration.
After a few refusals, we also got ourselves a consultant: Dr. Annie Polland. She has a Phd in History from Columbia and is currently the Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society in NYC. She was chosen due to her time spent as Director and Curator of the Tenement Museum (under her leadership, visitation to the museum grew by a whopping 70%), and her obvious knowledge of immigrant groups and their experiences in our time period.
Dear all,
I’m attending a consultation and advising meeting with the RaadPoject group at 6:20pm today, so I won’t be in class on the first half hour or so. Please continue working on your projects as planned. This week, in addition to the benchmarks allocated in your Work Plan, please devise a short 5-minute presentation to share with the class next week. EDIT: Luke Waltzer will be in attendance on April 9 to offer some feedback from the perspective of someone who is not familiar with your project but invested in the work of Digital Humanities. If you want to watch some earlier Showcase presentations, they can be found here. In general, you should aim to introduce your project and its members, articulate its contribution to digital humanities, and provide a short overview of the prototype (live demo or screenshots, up to you). You can talk about the platforms used and the kinds of data the project offers, but avoid too much jargon. If time allows, you can also briefly list the future goals for the project. A 5-minute presentation is about 2 1/2 pages of double-spaced writing (though you are encouraged to present from slides with bullet points for reference–no need to read from a formal written document). Keep in mind that
More soon!
Final countdown
When we return:
Group Paper 15-20 pages (due 5/21)