Immigrant Newspapers

By SC Lucier (Luci) | Published: March 15, 2019

Immigrant  Newspapers

  • A clear deadline and plan for launching your public-facing site/social media accounts
    • Deadline for Social Media launch: March 30
      • List at least 5 post ideas with text by March 23 – planning of first few posts
      • Make a production and posting schedule for the account
      • Assign posting in partnership with schedule
    • Deadline for public-facing site launch: April 30
      • Download WordPress theme
      • Test interactive map on the theme
      • Transfer data and information onto website
      • Plan blog posts and features
      • Update project summaries, bios
  • Domain name
    • Immigrantnewspapers.org
  • Back-end
    • WordPress
  • Pages
    • Landing page (long, scrolling page) that includes:
      • Message at top: Database is not a comprehensive listing of all newspapers in the selected languages
      • Interactive map
      • Featured immigrant/newspaper stories
      • Blog posts
      • Image gallery, Instagram-style
    • Database
    • About, including methodology and bios
    • FAQ
    • Contact, including form for corrections, additions
    • Social media link/embed: Instagram
    • Sources/bibliography
  • User experience:
    • User will be able to click on the interactive map and “explore” the locations of the newspaper offices. Clicking on a pin in the map will bring up a small info box. Clicking on any information within that box will bring you to the full page of that entry. Alternatively, user is able to scroll down past the map where there are featured stories pinned to the site, as well as a blog post space. There is also an option to include a carousel in one section. Those who are coming to the site for more strictly-directed research locating will be able to click right to a database search page.
  • Color scheme, images, layout/fonts:
    • The “look” of the site should be congruent with the time period we are representing. We are hoping to have a map from the nineteenth century to use in our interactive pin mapping section, and will pull colors and textures from that map to incorporate into the rest of the site, making everything cohesive.
  • Wireframe or mock-up, screenshots:
    Map Screenshot
  • Your MVP (minimal viable product) for the showcase:
    • Interactive map with pins of newspapers which upon clickedn would bring up a pop-up tooltip or sidebar that includes: newspaper name, address, year founded/ceased, front page image if applicable, language(s), link to profile page
      • Address would ideally be the newspaper office but if not, then the location of the publisher
      • Profile page would include additional details and images (sometimes interesting articles, impressive illustrations, or advertisements!)
      • The goal is to get a “sampling” of each group we have researched, which will fully illustrate what potential the site has
    • To do ASAP: Decide what information in Airtable database will not be included in the final database
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This week and beyond

By Andie Silva (she/her) | Published: March 12, 2019

Here is a quick recap of what we’re aiming for with this week’s group posts:

  • A clear deadline and plan for launching your public-facing site/social media accounts
    • What content will you have on it? e.g. about, bios, blogs with regular updates…
    • What is your color scheme, what images are you using if any (with permissions if applicable), and (if applicable) what fonts
    • Consider drafting a statement of usage rights or taking a template from Creative Commons.
    • A wireframe or mock-up if you have one (screenshots)
    • Your MVP (minimal viable product) for the showcase
  • In the next couple of weeks, begin discussing logo design for swag. The logo should follow the same color and visual scheme as your site and be minimalist enough to be made into vector art.

Aim to have group posts ready before the end of the week.

As a reminder, I won’t be here next week but will be available via email and Twitter. If you have information to give me (domain names, consultants) email those to me right away. There is no formal assignment for what you will work on next week: look to your workplan to see what benchmarks your group outlined for Week 8. Agustin will be on hand if you need to consult or brainstorm.

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Project TRIKE Outreach and Social Media Plan

By Sabina Pringle (she/ella) | Published: March 11, 2019

Our outreach goals are to build awareness of our project so as to start conversations about best practices and methodologies for transforming data, to get feedback which will help us improve our work, to invite DH practitioners to fork and iterate our project, and to substantiate future grant, conference and award applications. We will achieve our outreach goals by means of a website, a GitHub repository, Twitter feeds, emails and other forms of digital messaging. We will also develop non-digital outreach and communication materials which we will disseminate shortly before and at the GC Digital Showcase on 5/14.

Web presence

Our website and GitHub repository will be live on 4/16.

Social media

We will  create a Twitter bot which will do the social media posting.

Audience

The audiences we have in mind as we build our project are

  • DH undergraduate and graduate students
  • DH undergraduate and graduate instructors
  • DH Faculty
  • DH community:
    • peers in GC DH MA
    • GC Digital Fellows
    • CUNY Academic Commons groups such as
      • MA in Digital Humanities
      • Digital Humanities Initiative
      • Data for Public Good
    • other DH groups such as
      • Group for Experimental Methods at Columbia/Studio@Butler
      • GO::DH
      • Library research groups at CUNY libraries

Platforms

The platforms we will use are

  • WordPress
  • GitHub
  • Twitter

Design and Accessibility

The current design plan is to use a minimalistic, black and white aesthetic for the web page. This will allow for the greatest level of accessibility, while still looking chic and cool. Our logo design will take this aesthetic principal into consideration as well.

We will use online tools for checking contrast compliance levels and non-ornate typefaces so as to be screen-reader friendly. We will include alternative text wherever possible and reach out for advice on accessibility.

Protocol

We will communicate in Slack and follow the general guidelines for project development established in the detailed work plan. In addition to these we note the following parameters:

  • Tone: the tone of our social media presence will be deliberately lighter and more glib than that of our direct communications. We see our social media presence as a tool to generate interest, excitement, and draw attention to some of our core beliefs. The tone of other forms of communication will adjust according to audience.
  • Responses: when someone replies or responds to content, any one of us may respond, but Sabina is in charge of making sure all responses to all emails sent to the email address listed on the website are responded to. Natasha is responsible for maintaining Twitter and tweeting regularly from 4/16 to 5/20. We all agree that retweeting or liking implies endorsement.
  • Passwords: all passwords to all accounts will be listed in a shared document accessible through our Slack site.

Copywriting for outreach

Natasha will write and revise a brief introduction to Project TRIKE for outreach and communication purposes.

Grants, awards, conferences, talks

We are considering applying for a series of grants, awards, conferences and talks.

*    *    *    *   *   *    *    *    *    *    *

Editorial calendar

Week 7 – 3/12

Project milestones: outreach and communication working plan in place.

Individual minimum deliverables:

  • publication of revised outreach and communication plan on MALS 75500 website (Sabina)

Week 8 – 3/19

Individual minimum deliverables:

  • brief description of project for outreach (Natasha)
  • expand the list of people and groups we want to interest as well as conferences, talks, awards and grants we should apply to (Nancy) (everyone else is invited to contribute)

Note: Sabina will be away from 3/14 to 3/19

Week 9 – 3/26

Project milestones: Website shell tested and ready to receive content; GitHub set up and ready to receive content

Individual minimum deliverables:

  • logo ideas (Rob, Hannah to advise on reproducability)
  • one slide for April GC DH MA lightning talk application (to be determined)
  • review outreach and communication materials (Natasha and Sabina)
  • apply for GC DH MA lightning talk on or before 3/20 (deadline is 3/22) (Sabina)
  • prototype of Twitter bot (Natasha)

Week 10 – 4/2

Individual minimum deliverables:

  • drafts of introductory emails and messages (Sabina)
  • test Twitter bot (Natasha)

Week 11 – 4/9

Project milestones: project site live and fully populated

Individual minimum deliverables:

  • final drafts of above-mentioned emails, messages and tweets (Natasha and Sabina)
  • list of recipient addresses (Sabina)
  • draft of NYCDH Student Award application (Sabina)

Agenda for in-class meeting: discuss non-digital outreach materials for pre-presentation buzz and presentation

Week 12 – 4/16

Project milestones: documentation posted to GitHub; data posted to GitHub

Individual minimum deliverables:

  • send introductory emails and messages (Sabina)
  • manage pre-presentation buzz and presentation non-digital outreach materials (Natasha and Sabina)

Note: Nancy is away 4/30 to 5/5

Week 13 – spring break  

Week 14 – 4/30

Project milestones: project site finalized and locked; GitHub content finalized and locked

Individual minimum deliverables:

  • manage outreach feedback collection (Sabina)
  • manage Twitter feed collection (Natasha)
  • manage pre-presentation buzz and presentation non-digital outreach materials (Natasha and Sabina)

Agenda for in-class meeting: workshop presentation draft

Week 15 – 5/7

Individual minimum deliverables:

  • manage communication pre-presentation buzz (Natasha)
  • manage outreach pre-presentation buzz (Sabina)

Agenda for in-class meeting: dress rehearsal

Week 16 – 5/14

Public project launch at the GC Digital Showcase

Week 17 – 5/21

Project milestones: project sunsetting activities

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Social Media Plan – Immigrant Newspapers

By SC Lucier (Luci) | Published: March 7, 2019

Our social media target audience is scholarly collaborators and the general public. We hope that having a social media presence will increase web traffic to our page, as well as present the potential for submitted materials and research by visitors.

The platform we have decided to use is Instagram. It seems that because we are an image-based project this would make the most sense. We thought that another advantage to using this platform is the collection of previous posts that can be easily accessed by new viewers. It’s just as strong of a collective presence as it is a recurring feed presence.

Our goal is to update this Instagram account at one-two times a week. We could highlight one particular paper we are including in our database or post images of our process. The Instagram bio will have a link to our webpage to help direct visitors. This link is always accessible in the Instagram format, which is helpful.

Antonios will be working on a graphic for our logo and branding, as soon as we have settled on a better name for our project. That logo will be used in multiple formats across our web presence.

We have reached out to the founder of Ephemeral New York, which is a blog that serves as an archive and database for the buildings and locations of New York City since its founding. There are a multitude of images contained on the blog, and the interaction that viewers have with this blog ranges from informative comments to submissions of family-owned images taken over the last century. The owner of this blog has also published a few books, the most recent one focuses on the City from 1870-1910. We believe this person would make an excellent ally and perhaps the right consultant for us, as they already have the experience of creating an interactive historical database similar to our proposed project and have extensive knowledge of our location and time period.

Consider the following questions:

  • What tone should be used in communications? How formal / casual? Is humor acceptable?
    • This is a formal database. Humor is always helpful to grab audience attention and encourage public dialogue, but should be kept high-brow.
  • When someone replies or responds to content, what team member is in charge of responding? Does the PI need to sign off on response? Should users be redirected to an email address or a contact form on your project website?
    • We plan on having our website in the Instagram bio, and will have a contact sheet on that website.
  • Who has the passwords to the account? Who has the password reset email?
    • We will all have access to the account as well as a shared email used solely for this project.
  • For social media platforms that encourage curated content (e.g. reblogging or retweeting), what is the ideal ratio of curated content to composed content?
    • 3:1 is a good ratio for us to start out with. Three posts of our own content to one post of external projects/collaborators/events/etc.
  • What people and organizations does your project support? What organizations does your project notwant to be associated with? Does retweeting or liking imply endorsement?
    • We support other collectors, researchers, historians, and scholars who are interested in preserving underserved groups in New York City.
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Lost Art Collective / Outreach and Social Media Plans

By Camilla Skoglie | Published: March 6, 2019

Lost Art Collective / Outreach and Social Media Plans

We have decided to use Instagram as our primary social media resource as it is a medium that supports visual content and would be ideal for sharing our visualizations. We will also create a website which will host out finish product.

Our primary audience:

  • Students: Africana Studies, Art History, Digital Humanities, Students of Law.
  • Scholars
  • Advocates / Advocate Groups and Organizations working towards Repatriations
  • African Cultural Institutions
  • African & Western Museums and boutique galleries with an African focus or collections
  • Consulates
  • Academic Institutions

Institutions and Initiatives to be contacted:

“Trafficking Culture” is a research consortium that produces evidence-based research into the contemporary global trade in looted cultural objects is a collaborative initiative between the University of Glasgow, Oxford University and the University of Victoria at Wellington.

https://traffickingculture.org

“Culture Crime” is a website which contains news articles and a database about looted art which is updated periodically.

https://news.culturecrime.org/

“Chasing Aphrodite” is a website spun from a book about looted art and functions as a consolidated site of information about looted art.

https://chasingaphrodite.com/

Locating the audience

Finding contact points for our target audience will be done through online research and contact will be made via email, follow ups phone calls and personal visits when possible.

Our goal is for a preliminary site to launch 3 weeks before the project is published. This preliminary site will include information about the project and contact information should users wish to get in touch. The full website, containing our finished product will be launched in full on the day the project is presented to the public. 3 weeks before the project launch, emails will be sent out to the target audience. Follow up emails will be sent out again one week before launch.

Future

LAC will use the Academic Commons as the back end for the project, giving the project a “house” for the future. That being said, a future goal for the project is for it to be picked up and continued by either students or scholars who wishes to continue the work of adding museum collections to the database and how this would be potentially organized is a topic which needs to be investigated further.

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Freedom Dreaming: Outreach and Social Media Plan

By Brittany Ann Hamilton | Published: March 6, 2019

We’ve been considering our outreach and social media plan since the beginning of this project, primarily because a social media campaign is crucial to our project’s success. This week, we had a candid discussion regarding our timeline and when to actually begin implementing our social media campaign. We want to begin our social media campaign and overall outreach efforts as soon as possible, but all feel that it is important to have a website up and running even if it’s in a rudimentary stage. Our current website plan is beautiful, custom and well-designed, however, it will not be ready for at least another month. Alas, we’ve had to move on to Plan B in order to help move the project along.

Plan B: We are creating a quick WordPress website (Phase 1 website) with the content that we’ve already written. It will not be as flashy or beautiful as we intend (Phase 2 website), but it’s a start. Our Phase 2 website will continue to be developed in hopes that we can reveal it at the final presentation. For this week, we all assigned tasks that were dedicated to our marketing/outreach/social media:

Brittany: Start the outreach content (deck, email copy), set up Hootsuite.

Kiana: Begin building the WordPress Phase 1 website.

Anthony: Check in with Matt on hashtag tracking, consider social media data collection strategies.

Andrea: Design logo and banner, keep pushing forward the Phase 2 website.

We have purchased a domain name and have also created a Gmail account ([email protected]) to support the project. The hashtag we are planning to use with the project is #freedomdreaming and our social media accounts on Twitter and Instagram are both @call_to_imagine.  As of now, we are planning to utilize Hootsuite to schedule our social media posts and content, and to manage all social media submissions (retweets and reposts). We haven’t decided on one specific person to do this task yet, so this will be decided soon. We currently all have the passwords and account information.

Prior to any outreach, we are planning to test the website and project with individuals from Kiana’s original Freedom Dreaming participants/group. Additionally, we are all planning to help with outreach since it is such a large portion of our project. We are each collecting email addresses, organizations to reach out to, Facebook Groups to post in, etc from our specific networks. Anthony is able to conduct some student outreach as a call for participation through the Humanities department at LaGuardia Community College. We also have some faculty who are willing and able to spread the word for participation around CUNY. Raven also has connections to scholars all over through the Future’s Initiative and HASTAC. These scholars can contribute to the project as well as expand our reach beyond New York City. Brittany, Andrea and Kiana have their own specific networks which they plan on reaching out to as well.

We have all expressed interest in continuing the project beyond the class. Ultimately, our goal would be to have the project go viral so that we receive a large data set to analyze.

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Project TRIKE Update: Week 6 of 17

By Nancy Foasberg | Published: March 6, 2019
(Group report covering 2/27 – 3/5)
Project TRIKE is on the move! This has been a busy week for us; we finished our Data Management Plan, started our Outreach and Communication Plan, and began putting together our datasets.
We’ve continued to communicate via Slack, with proposed documents shared in Google Docs or Google Sheets.
Rob drafted the data management plan and invited comments from the rest of the group. There was a lively and wide-ranging discussion there about our work with data via the comments. Rob led the discussion and integrated suggestions from the group before posting the plan on the blog. The plan is a living document and is sure to continue to change as we work wtih our datasets and learn more about them. However, it’s a very useful document to have in place. The work on the data management plan connected strongly with the need to continue thinking about technical solutions for our project, particularly where GitHub is involved. In Slack, Rob opened a channel about GitHub, where he posted several tutorials and a link to an extension called git-lfs (Large File Storage), which we’ll be using for any large files in our dataset.
In the meantime, we have also been finding/selecting/constructing our datasets. At this point, we have all created and/or identified datasets for our work. Since some of these projects are still subject to vary a little, I don’t want to go into too much detail about them here — but we are certainly looking at literary criticism in two different ways, as well as images, and quite likely sound files and numbers. Since some of our group members have greater resposibility for technical issues, it is optional for them to provide datasets; however, they both have datasets in mind that will be included if we have time. We have shared these projects with each other, mostly via Google Sheets, but will likely upload them to GitHub soon.
For each of these projects, we are thinking about the copyright implications and weighing what parts of our work we can make public under fair use. We are consulting with librarians on this question. We will make as much of our work public as we can, and we’ll license it as openly as we can. Part of the copyright conversation involves what can be done with the work we create; we are planing to assign open licenses to both the descriptions and the code, as well as whatever parts of the data we can.
On the tech side of things, Sabina and Rob have created a WordPress site for Project TRIKE.
We’re just beginning to think about outreach and Communication. Sabina created a document that walks through the major questions we need to talk about from both a philosophical and a practical point of view. We discussed these plans in class and have a lot of ideas that we’ll discuss further in the next report. For now I’ll just say that our Twitter presence may end up being both automated and unconventional.
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Social Media and Outreach

By Andie Silva (she/her) | Published: March 5, 2019

(Timed) 5-minute updates on data management:

  • What is your dataset?
    • What metadata standards are you using?
  • Where are you storing it? (multiple forms required)
  • How will the data be shared and preserved for future use?
    • Are you considering a Creative Commons License?
  • Documentation: how/where are you documenting your choices?

Next week: we will hear formal presentations from each group at the start of class updating us on the work assigned the previous week. Be prepared with short presentation and decide which team member is presenting each week.

Today’s Goals: Outreach and Social Media Plans

  • Outreach: consider your potential audiences

    • Where will you find them?
    • What is the best way to contact them?
    • Which member of the team is responsible for email blasts and/or personally contacting individuals?
      • Who will write the official copy that will go out to contacts?
    • Are there listservs, Commons/Facebook groups, similar projects whose developers you should contact?
    • Can you reach out to experts to request a formal or informal evaluation of your project?
      • Consultants can be paid honorariums, but if you are doing this, email me so I can start the process.
      • Consultants shouldn’t give tech support, or be contacted more than once a week
    • When is the best time to reach out? Do you need a list of deadlines?

  • Publicity and Web Presence

    • Do you want to design a logo and produce stickers to help promote the project?
      • A logo is important to ensure consistency across platforms. If no one in your team is particularly good with graphic design, consider reaching out to someone who is.
    • Even if there is nothing to put on it yet, public-facing pages and blogs help generate interest in the project and give users something to bookmark.
      • Where will the public-facing parts of your project live?
      • Do you need to purchase a domain?
        • Give me a domain name (i.e. yourproject.org)
        • Agree on a point person to manage the site (name and email)
        • We will support your domain for 2 years. The sustainability section of your data management plan should outline what happens next.
        • Consider whether it might make more sense to go with the Commons or other free options so as to maximize longevity
    • Who will be responsible for the visual design of the site?
      • Consider accessibility and responsiveness: site design should be friendly to color-blind and visually impaired users (image captions are key!) and themes should be responsive to mobile screens.
    • What information will you put on the landing page (e..g “about us” or “about the project” or a general, “welcome” page)? What other pages do you see yourself requiring?
      •  Consider publishing your documentation in full, both to help users understand how to read your data and to ensure potential replication
    • Do you need a social media presence?
      • Twitter makes it easy to connect with academics and identify potential audiences and similar projects
        • You can connect your site to a Twitter account to push updates
        • How often will you post from the account?
        • Who is responsible for monitoring the account?
          • “once you have begun a social media project, you must be able to sustain a consistent engagement. An ‘abandoned’ social media page will send the wrong message about your project” (DH@Berkeley)
          • Who has the passwords to the account? Who has the password reset email?
          • Are you just posting updates, or retweeting related items? (retweeting can help you gain followers and increase your visibility)
          • From DH@Berkeley:
            • AUTOMATION: If This Then That (IFTTT) is a free service that allows users to connect several ‘Channels’ (i.e. Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress) and use ‘Recipes’ created by the community to automate workflows.Examples:
              • Log all Tweets on a spreadsheet in Google Drive [recipe]
              • Automatically generate a Tweet when I publish a new blog post [recipe]
              • Collect the usernames of everyone who retweets my posts [recipe]
          • Can you design some scheduled tweets to ensure a regular presence?
        • Facebook pages can be more community-driven, allowing users to reach out and post comments about the project (ideal for projects aimed at a wider audience)

Due this week

Discuss and make outreach and publicity decisions; begin designing your website. If you’re using the Commons, you’ll be able to start right away. If you don’t have access to your domain yet, draft the pages and web design plans (consider using Moqups (free to try–save a screenshot of your work). or Adobe suite, if you’re familiar with it)

 

 

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Project TRIKE Data Management Plan

By Rob Garfield | Published: March 5, 2019

This is a living document.  You can access the Google Doc here.

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Reflections on the Data Management Plan

By Camilla Skoglie | Published: March 4, 2019

According to Stephen Zweibel’s presentation last class, data can be defined as “material or information on which an argument, theory, test or hypothesis, or another research output is based”. With the data set used by the Lost Art Collective, we are trying to highlight an historical injustice that is still ongoing today. Regardless of personal or political opinions about the repatriation of illegally removed art, the data set represents one country’s amount of artwork which previously resided within the African continent.

This particular data set was chosen because it carries some weight of legitimacy as to whether or not the art it discusses was in fact looted. The data set is derived from the French rapport “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Towards a New Relational Ethics” which contains a compilation of African art acquired by French institutions during colonialism, and postulates that the majority of the 90,000 objects of African origin contained within French museums and libraries should be restituted to their country of origin, should a claim of repatriation be put forth by respective countries. Our project will concentrate on the 70,000 objects held at the The Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. As such, the data set is great, as it supports the purpose of the prototype for this project.

However, working with this data set has not been without challenges. The data exists as both numeric and textual data, in addition to images. The textual data, which contains images of the artwork, has proven especially difficult to extract, as the entire file exist publicly as an image file. This has caused the OCR process to be both tricky and demanding and should we not be able to obtain the raw data, this information will have to be manually put in to the database we are creating for the project. The database will be created using google spreadsheets and Omeka, a software for creating catalogs from libraries and art institutions. Visualizations will also be made using Neatline, an Omeka GIS mapping tool.

One of the pillars of this project is to shed light on the amount of African artwork that resides in Western museums and because of this, the project is fundamentally dependent on either existing databases, or on original investigation, which we simply do not have the capacity for within the time frame of the project. So, acquiring the data and obtaining the permission to use the data has been of utmost importance for the project to move forward. Reflecting upon this, it has become very evident to me that thorough research into the areas of permission to use the data and how to obtain the raw data should be undertaken before starting any new project, in order to avoid bumps in the road. That being said, despite the steep learning curve, we are moving forward.

One of the purposes for the project is that students, scholars and interested members of the public can use the database to search for artwork from specific countries and artwork of specific materials. The data set would also be made available as open source so others can use the data for their own future projects.

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