The last week was a crunch, and I guess the goal of this class is to be not afraid of things that you have not done before. I would guess that the comfort zone of many students in this class was stretched to its limit. Some people prefer working alone, some are introverted, some are extroverted, some are good with technologies while others are good with writing, etc. The aggregate skill of the class is as varied as the backgrounds of its students, A diverse student group that is responsible for the project that is tangible and unique in a sense. It is a great feeling when the thing that you do think of works but it takes immense amount of tries to get it right, to feel that it is right, and create the working product that you are proud of even it is just for class. Sometimes things need to be trimmed and sometimes things need to be scoped up, and it is the journey that counts, and I would guess that many people would agree with me.

The last few weeks have been a crunch, but also an incredible experience. Hopefully it doesn’t make me sound like a slouch to say that I’ve learned more in the last few weeks of the class than I did in most of the time before. A big part of this is the ambition of the project and my teammates — early on when we were conceptualizing the site, Zelda set an example for all of us by saying “yes” to our vision of what the project could be. With a complex, custom built site and only two developers (and that’s being generous to myself — if there are two of us total, Zelda is one and a half), the work I did had to be useful.

I can’t overstate how intimidating this was at first. When I read Gemma’s post the other day, I found so much to relate to — even with the abundance of documentation, including a developer guide Zelda wrote for me, Github still feels like a funhouse maze, or maybe a club that’s technically open to the public, but which requires complex, arcane rituals. Committing my changes, at least, always feels like an incantation that, when I say it, can lead to unexpected results, like creating a hundred extra files that I then have to delete one by one. Which makes me realize the analogy I’m looking for is this:

there was originally an embed of an official clip of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” from Fantasia here – I guess even the officially sanctioned Disney videos don’t play nice with WordPress, which checks out. If you’ve never seen it and want to get the reference, you can watch it here. A tl;dr – Mickey is the apprentice of a very stern sorcerer with great powers; while the sorcerer casts very cool spells, Mickey is stuck hauling buckets of water up and down stairs. When the sorcerer clocks out for the day, Mickey decides to use his magic hat to enchant a broom to carry the water for him — with disastrous consequences. The enchanted broom quickly floods the sorcerer’s dungeon, and everything Mickey does to try to stop the chaos makes it worse. As a very anxious kid, this sequence from the movie always haunted me!

Except, of course, Zelda is a much kinder, more encouraging sorcerer than poor Mickey’s boss; instead of fixing my errors for me, they’ve helped me figure out how to fix them myself and cheered me on when I (finally!) get it right. I know from experience that that often takes more time and patience, and I’m grateful for it.

And now that we’re close to the end, we have a whole website, rather than a big mess of broomsticks and buckets, and I can see how my work has helped make that possible. It’s rewarding to see how my contributions have aligned with and supported Zelda’s wizardry, Estefany’s designs, and Majel’s immense passion and knowledge.

One thing that’s been true all semester is how lucky I feel to have gotten to work on this project and to help shine a light on the history of Wampanoag activism while learning about it myself.  My feeling of gratitude has only deepened. As a (very) new mother, this semester was always going to be tough for me, but my teammates have shown me so much grace and care, from their patience when I’ve arrived late to our Saturday calls, to their ability to hear what I’m trying to express, even when I’ve been too tired or scattered to find the right words. In ideal circumstances, I wouldn’t have to write code with my baby strapped to me, or bounce him on my lap while trying to discuss database structure or 19th century history — but Estefany, Majel, and Zelda celebrated the fact that I was a new mother and a student, rather than letting me feel guilty or less than for having to balance both at once. For that reason (and so many others!) I’ll always be grateful for the time we spent working together.

For my last personal journal entry, I’d like to give a huge shout-out to Maria Baker, our project manager!

Maria has been driving our project since day 1. She has been working so hard to make the OB&UP vision materialize. While Teddy, Nuraly, and I are working on the individual contributor work on our own schedule, Maria coordinated all our work to make sure we meet our milestones, kept our work organized, scoped our weekly deliverables, wrote all our content + updates, and prepped for the presentation. She also did all of it while also diving into much of the technical work herself (data cleaning & analysis). She has also been connecting with all of us (setting additional Zoom meetings outside of class), and with Bret (around our crazy schedules).

It’s been a really fun project for me, where I also get to learn WordPress. So again, I want to thank Maria for pitching her project, having us on her team, and making this a fun and rewarding project!

This week we faced a couple of unforeseeable stumbling blocks. Nuraly has been working on the Bingo game, and just as he had been getting ready to test it, he wasn’t able to actually plug it into the site. For inexplicable reasons, the professional plan for our WordPress site had lapsed. So Ruby had to figure out why the plan had been terminated and then remedy the situation. Then she had to coordinate with Nuraly again, so he could finally test the plug-in. Now, this would not be a tragedy if we had more flexibility in our schedules. But the people in our group do not. So even a small snag like this can potentially cost days. [Can you tell the project manager is writing this post? The project manager periodically has nightmares about snags causing avalanche-sized delays.]

Finally, during class yesterday, we were able to look at the bingo plugin, and while the confetti and the general layout of the game are splendid, we haven’t been able to figure out how to reset the game or how to play it directly on the site (it currently shifts over to a separate window).  Nuraly had an emergency and couldn’t make it to class yesterday, so we weren’t able to address the snag in class (with others like Filipa around, we could have asked for help). We’ll solve it with delay.

Overall though, being in person again really helped us get on the same page. Teddy has begun to move deeper into text analysis, and we could talk through what we consider stop words and what conclusions we’re drawing. Maria is preparing to package our findings into a cohesive narrative, and Teddy will continue the analysis for a little longer. Maria will try to expand the narrative to incorporate additional findings until the last possible moment. Teddy and Maria be in contact via Slack over the next few days to query any urgent last-minute questions. Teddy will also make sure that the data is available on GitHub. Meanwhile, Maria will also finish preparing the presentation slides and coordinate with Ruby to accomplish implementing site content. 

While sitting together and casually talking about our findings and the pitfalls of our corpora, Ruby had the idea for what we ultimately termed a “judgment barometer.” It will be a visual that shows the spectrum of expressions on an axis from very negative -> negative -> neutral -> positive -> superlative. We’re planning on creating it. It begins with Maria passing a list of judgment expressions to Ruby. Let’s see if we can get it done! On & up-ward!!

^ the triple VERY would be on the superlative end of the barometer.

We’re almost there! It’s hard to believe. Seeing pieces of the project come together with visuals, text, and even some interactivity has been powerful. Estefany’s social media posts (more on that in a second!) and Majel’s new site copy have given us a way of seeing what the project will look like from the outside – valuable insight and encouragement as we power through what’s left.

OUTREACH

Outreach comes first this week because it’s exciting – Estefany launched our social accounts today! You can find us at more_than_surviving on Instagram or morethansurviving on Facebook. In preparation for the launch, Estefany and Majel created a beautiful set of story posts to explain the project and its focus. You can see a few of the slides below; I encourage everyone to check out the whole story on Instagram!

Estefany is continuing to create social content, and Elizabeth and Majel are revisiting their research to pull quotes that can be used in future posts.

TECH

We have some key tasks to complete before we can wrap up the tech side of our project, but we’re still on track to finish by our deadline. The focus this week is on front-end development and implementation. Elizabeth has finished building and styling the timeline, so she’ll be able to help Zelda implement the site styles. We’ve also created a tracker for our QA process, so as soon as a version of the site is live, we can start checking the navigation and functionality.

RESEARCH + COPYWRITING

The site copy has been drafted and is in final review with our cultural collaborators. We updated the format of our event data this week, lengthening the short description that will display on the timeline, and embarked on our “nice to have, but not necessary” research task – writing up short descriptions of state and national events to provide context for our Wampanoag events.