We’ve really gotten a lot done this week, and (as many others have commented in their blogs already) it’s really feeling real now. It was especially wonderful having so much of our class time devoted to group work this week.

Site Updates

We have a lot of great data already in our shared data management sheet, and Nadia will be working over the next week to get it up on our site so we can better see how our pages are working together.

And I’ve made our site on the Commons live and publicly available now too. Check us out at https://mappingcemeteries.commons.gc.cuny.edu/. Still a lot of work to be done here, but we’ve at least defined how each of our pages will be used and how they will serve our audiences, and we’re very excited to start building it out more.

We’re trying to stay focused on our research as much as possible until April 15, at which point we will focus our energies more on design and how we can use imagery and branding across our two sites, and our social media posts, to create a cohesive overall experience.

What’s Changed Along the Way?

We’re all trying to be mindful of our workloads and accepting that all of what we thought could be accomplished back in February is just not possible. And that’s OK! We’re taking the proverbial “less is more” approach. We initially envisioned each of us being responsible for researching a cemetery or memorial location, but Nadia is already tackling so much as our development lead, so we’ve moved that area of inquiry to our wish list. If we find time, great. But a proof of concept built around four locations will be just as great; maybe more so as we can spend more time on the site and user experience of it.

In my original proposal I was so focused on the spaces for the dead that had been obliterated that I never even stopped to think about the spaces for the dead that have never been officially recognized and respected as such to begin with. We’re all so grateful to Asma for helping us think about this and challenge our map to allow for what has previously been (and may continue to be) unmappable. And it also brings us very thoughtfully back to our original question: Who gets to be remembered?

[This entry was originally posted to DHUM 70002 Digital Humanities: Methods and Practices (Spring 2021) in Group Project Updates and tagged group project updates, mapping cemeteries on March 26, 2021 by Brianna Caszatt.]

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.