This week was a big milestone for us. We agreed that April 15 was our deadline to finish our research. When we set this deadline it felt like we had all the time in the world to leisurely research our locations. Now that we’ve reached it, it doesn’t feel like it was enough time. Regardless, it seems like the correct deadline given the tight timeline. We’re all feeling a bit concerned we haven’t done enough research, but we’re also feeling great about what we’ve learned and the ways our research puts our locations in dialogue with one another.

And it marked a very exciting turn in our meetings. Nadia has been doing amazing work writing code and building our GitHub site. She’s been working hard on a hover feature for our horizontal timeline and a filter feature for our vertical timeline. And she built out our location pages in a way that ties it in aesthetically with the timeline page (organized in boxes). The box design is also making our research feel more manageable–encouraging brevity and showcasing the varied visual assets we’ve found and created. And it’s helping us think more in terms of web text rather than research paper text. When Bret joined our group breakout room, he echoed this. And this week we got to talk about ways we can make the site even better. We talked fonts and colors–and how we can use design across the GitHub and Commons sites to create an even more cohesive user experience.

We also started brainstorming about our logo. We’d talked about logos before, but we mostly wanted to wait until we understood our locations and project better. I’m thinking we may have something to debut as soon as our next project update. Stay tuned!

Thanks to Asma, we also have prompts and recording dates set for our three-episode limited audio series (plus a fourth bonus episode). We’re doing a mix of synchronous and asynchronous recording sessions, all of which Asma will edit and produce with a partner. Especially for our asynchronous recordings, she has us embracing the noises we capture in our background environment as part of our data (rather than something to be edited out). You can listen to our episodes via SoundCloud. We’ll post here when new episodes are ready.

[This entry was originally posted to DHUM 70002 Digital Humanities: Methods and Practices (Spring 2021) in Group Project Updates and tagged mapping cemeteries on April 17, 2021 by Brianna Caszatt.]

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