As our encoding expedition project comes to a close, we have done extensive research on 15 women directors and produced several pilot files to showcase the flexibility of XML.

Research:
Our team has successfully collected and annotated the careers and works of 15 pioneering women directors from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. By delving into their biographies, filmographies, and the themes they have tackled in and beyond their works, we’ve gained valuable insights into their feminist perspectives and impact on the film industry. We also learn about their struggles and failures, like funding or casting issues. The tag glossary is glowing while we annotate, but now we need to find where and when to stop to give a tentative range for our files and search engine.

Outreach:
Maria has produced tag network diagrams, and we will have an outreach video editing meeting to prepare short clips to showcase our work.

Technology:
The XML-XSLT-HTML mode runs lively, and each research team member will choose at least one director to play this model.
The search engine is under development. We discussed an option for a word cloud of our tags with clickable links, but we will see if we have enough time. Otherwise, a search box will do.
Our workflow will serve as a model for future projects aiming to build similar digital archives. We aim to show the workflow with screenshots and recordings to create a digital story.
The web dev work faced a challenge when GitHub pushed the page. Our tech team is working diligently to address this issue and restore the lost data. But since we kept our transferable XML files and written documents, we are also making a backup plan.

Thank everyone for their hard work and dedication!

STATUS & SCOPE

Someone (Paul Valery maybe) said: A poem is never finished, only abandoned. Ob&Up is the poem and will have to be (temporarily) abandoned soon — best to do it at a rewarding juncture. The point of temporary abandonment we aim for (i.e., our definition of “done”): a functional website with an operational Bingo game. The website also features content/narrative that details and contextualizes our findings, includes team info, and a link to an accessible corpus on Git Hub. 

The scope of the project is becoming more apparent. As expected, we are finding more questions to pursue in text analysis. The trajectory of text analysis has always been unpredictable. Based on previous experiences working on artistic and literary analysis projects, I know that once analysis begins, deeper layers of analysis present themselves. So at this stage it is less about scaling down an initially too-ambitious scope and more about tempering ever more burgeoning ideas for new queries. 

TEXT ANALYSIS

With that in mind, Teddy and Maria will use this week (until 4/26) to pursue a final round of additional text analysis. Teddy will predominantly work with the full corpora for both seasons. Maria will mostly work with the judging segments of our anchor corpus, season 12. We plan to document our findings with an eye on creating copy for the site and constructing our larger argument.

Next week (until 5/3): We will combine all final text analysis findings to finish the website copy, and Maria will also be revisiting the presentation slides. Teddy will focus on making the corpora available via Git Hub.

BINGO and WEBSITE

Nuraly has finished coding the bingo game’s “outline.”  Now we have to create custom tiles for the 25 fields of the game card. Each tile will feature one typical GBBS judging phrase. Maria has passed the chosen phrases on to RC, and this week, RC will create the tiles and pass them on to Nuraly, who will add them to the bingo game. Nuraly and RC will continue working together to ensure that the bingo plug-in functions as intended on the website. (The bingo’s functionality can and will be tested before the custom tiles are added.)Since we have decided to move the site off the limited Commons version and upgrade to a paid version, RC will continue to work on the site’s infrastructure. There are plenty of technical aspects associated with the upgrade for RC to wrangle, and she will continue to do that this week. 

Next week: RC and Maria will collaborate to implement narrative website content, and Nuraly will begin to reach out to the GBBS Redditors. We might ask them for feedback and input on the game as soon as we can.

Overall, it feels as though we have a grasp on what needs to be done before the launch, and the task list looks (a little) more achievable than daunting.

STATUS & SCOPE

Someone (Paul Valery maybe) said: A poem is never finished, only abandoned. Ob&Up is the poem and will have to be (temporarily) abandoned soon — best to do it at a rewarding juncture. The point of temporary abandonment we aim for (i.e., our definition of “done” ): a functional website with an operational Bingo game. The website also features content/narrative that details and contextualizes our findings, includes team info, and a link to an accessible corpus on Git Hub. 

The scope of the project is becoming more apparent. As expected, we are finding more questions to pursue in text analysis. The trajectory of text analysis has always been unpredictable. Based on previous experiences working on artistic and literary analysis projects, I know that once analysis begins, deeper layers of analysis keep presenting themselves. So at this stage it is less about scaling down an initially too-ambitious scope and more about tempering ever more burgeoning ideas for queries. 

TEXT ANALYSIS

With that in mind, Teddy and Maria will use this week (until 4/26) to pursue a final round of additional text analysis. Teddy will predominantly work with the full corpora for both seasons. Maria will mostly work with the judging segments of our anchor corpus, season 12. We plan to document our findings with an eye on creating copy for the site and constructing our larger argument.

Next week (until 5/3): We will combine all final text analysis findings to finish the website copy, and Maria will also be revisiting the presentation slides. Teddy will focus on making the corpora available via Git Hub.

BINGO and WEBSITE

Nuraly has finished coding the bingo game’s “outline.”  Now we have to create custom tiles for the 25 fields of the game card. Each tile will feature one typical GBBS judging phrase. Maria has passed the chosen phrases on to RC, and this week, RC will create the tiles and pass them on to Nuraly, who will add them to the bingo game. Nuraly and RC will continue working together to ensure that the bingo plug-in functions as intended on the website. (The bingo’s functionality can and will be tested before the custom tiles are added.)Since we have decided to move the site off the limited Commons version and upgrade to a paid version, RC will continue to work on the site’s infrastructure. There are plenty of technical aspects associated with the upgrade for RC to wrangle, and she will continue to do that this week. 

Next week: RC and Maria will collaborate to implement narrative website content, and Nuraly will begin to reach out to the GBBS Redditors. We might ask them for feedback and input on the game as soon as we can.

Overall, it feels as though we have a grasp on what needs to be done before the launch, and the task list looks (a little) more achievable than daunting. 

We are sprinting toward the final outcome. The research group aims to finish all XML files by following Monday with any DTD files associated with them. We are a bit delayed in making the XML files because some structure issues are pending solutions, which is essential to the search functionality. During the break, we finished the draft of our About page, and each member met with Gemma individually to discuss their personal page info. We decided to give up words like underrepresented, and marginalized and use groundbreaking. We wrote that the team explores the incredibly diverse, worldwide voices of women film directors and focuses light on their work in a digitally encoded collection.

“The fifteenth groundbreaking women directors we choose to work on, representing diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, have made significant contributions to cinema by shedding light on unique non-mainstream perspectives and critical social issues. There is a worldwide need to lessen discrimination and respect non-mainstream experiences, identities, and knowledge to broaden our societal goal of achieving fundamental human rights.”

Some of us are also interesting in drawing connections and visualizing the similitudes between the films and the careers of these women. For example, what does the cinema produced by Lulu Wang, Chinese American director, have to do with the cinema of Iranian filmmaker Rakhshān Banietemad? Portraying those connections could be another way to investigate and answer: Why/how is our project’s methodology feminist? But also, Are the works of each director contributing to a feminist cinema?

With those questions in mind, we figured we could include a Tag Network in our website visualizing each director’s structure. The Tag Network can help the user see the elements we used to encode and draw connections between their profiles, their films, interests and works. We’ve come up with a few mockups on how it could look like, which are included below. If you have time, we would appreciate any feedback or ideas on their design!

Finally, starting next week, the research team will move on to write their lab notes on tags and XML encoding. Maria and Miaoling will figure out a video plan to visually show our work in less than 1 minute. Gemma will move the tag glossary to the website into three columns that have been designed in our mockup.

Tag Networks:

We’ve streamlined, fine-tuned and realigned and we’re now a lean-mean-closing machine. We’ve cut back on unessential functionality and more expansive content, and have opted for a pared down but still highly engaging and impactful first iteration of the project. The project, via visual design and content curation, has a tight focus that drives home the key issue areas that concerned Wampanoag activists and how they fit into the larger landscape of activity during the era. Color coding and UX guidance to explanatory copy equips visitors with the context needed to walk away with, hopefully, a distance impression of our intentions.

DESIGN

Estefany is working on generating launch posts for our social channels based on templates that highlight key aspects of the project content. She is pulling copy from the research documents to account for captions and longer format expressions. 

Next steps:

• Design highlights

• Start posting 

TECH

Zelda is creating CSS stylesheets and front end layouts based on finalized wireframes. Elizabeth is styling the timeline and populating entries. Connections between the database and functional elements (map/timeline) are ongoing. Our goal is to be fine-tuning a fully functioning site by the end of next week.  

Next steps:

• Create up-to-date JSON with the live database

• Purchase platform space and activate freestanding database after troubleshooting local expression

OUTREACH

Estefany has already starting building our following (almost at 30 as of posting). She’s branded our social accounts and started following key accounts and spreading awareness by word of mouth. Some team members are planning on attending the Columbia University Powwow this weekend to enjoy the event and potentially make additional connections.

Next steps:

• Launch social next week

• Emails to key folks once the website is launched.

• Continued social audience building
  

RESEARCH + COPYWRITING

Research of the short list of core activists and events is entered into the database with relevant copy, images, and mapping coordinates. Time permitting we will add more—but the priority now is to get a functioning project that demonstrates our concept. 

Next steps:

• Majel and Elizabeth  to wrap up the remaining site copy (about us page, timeline specific blurbs) and assist with outreach. 

• Updates to the project presentation deck 

We’ve managed to make it to our midpoint meeting (yesterday)!

TEXT ANALYSIS & DATA

Corpus for Season 2 and Season 12 are cleaned, tended to, and ready to be used and analyzed (further). Teddy was able to start the analysis of Season 12, and Maria was able to do initial queries on Season 2. We found some fundamental confirmations of our suspicions. The vocabulary focuses on the appearance and flavor of the bakes. Smell and texture are far less frequently mentioned. We also noticed that the vocabulary truly is limited. “Lovely,” “nice,” delicious” feature heavily in both seasons of judging language. Another discovery was the super-usage of “very” in Season 2 as a sort of calibration word: See the use of “very good.” or “very, very, good” or even “very very very good” to create, um, nuance. The small words we might have glossed over are actually turning out to be the words that corroborate our thesis. There’s also an emerging new theory about the words and short phrases that have become emblematic of GBBS, like “overbaked”, “soggy bottom,” “stodgy” etc. Right now, the suspicion is that they appear in the show at a middle frequency; they stick out just enough to become signature words. These are words we also see most often as part of GBBS memes (which: selected memes to be added to future presentations for our audience’s pleasure). The next few weeks will be about following our hunches into a more detailed analysis. Perhaps, we’ll also collect some overall statistics describing the vocabulary size and the average length of judging sentences. 

Teddy and Maria haven’t yet been able to combine and compare their findings and run deliberate comparison queries. Achieving this is also on the agenda for the next corpus meeting on April 16th. Additionally, Teddy will ensure that the GitHub repository is ready to be linked to the site by late April.

As we pass the semester’s midpoint, a potential plan to include a third comparison corpus from a different show has been abandoned. We will have enough to do with looking into the details of S2 and S12, and there are many more paths to follow with these corpora than we might have initially predicted.

SITE & GAME

We’ve also decided to take one or two striking findings and render them visually in a way that can be easily distinguished from Voyant’s renderings and is more consistent with the style of our website. RC will spearhead this effort once we turn the necessary info over to her. Until then, RC continues to work with Nuraly to find a way to integrate plug-ins so the Bingo game will work. After discovering that CUNY’s version won’t suffice, RC has upgraded to a non-CUNY business version (a cheaper alternative is also still in consideration). Initial trials of plug-ins were promising—more tbd. 

RC will work on making a logo for Ob&Up and continue to develop the site. Maria will finalize the broader aspects of site content with RC (final tab-names, i.e., what will be included and what won’t be included) around by mid-April.

Nuraly will stay in contact with RC and continue to develop and test the Bingo game. Once Teddy and Maria have finished the text analysis, Nuraly will be able to populate the game squares with verbal content. He will also keep an eye on social media activity around GBBS/GBBO and share the finished Bingo game with the GBBS Subreddit.

OVERALL

Our various life circumstances and work obligations sometimes pose problems for communication and collaboration. Ideally, Teddy and Maria would have found more time to collaborate directly on text analysis, but since their schedules didn’t align, getting on the same page has been difficult. There also are recurring questions about when and how documents get shared and okayed by the group. Clarifying workflow, submission rhythms, and check-in modes might make sense for our first meeting post-break, especially as we head into the final frenzy.

But, overall, we’ve (mostly) met our milestones and are gearing up for a strong finish post-break.

The DirectHERS team has adjusted our member roles, project scope, and work distribution since mid-February. As a result, we reached several milestones, including completing the basic TEI/XML training, making a custom-designed XML glossary, and five pilot director XML files for testing the search functionality. But our scope is no longer limited to Japanese women directors. Instead, we create a list of non-western groundbreaking directors based on our competencies and backgrounds. We also decided to use more Hypothesis annotations in our encoding as “hyperlink pointers,” which was not our aim in the initial plan. We also need to work more on the glossary, primarily focusing on our customized tags and their definitions. The initial goal for the delivery is that we have 15 directors. The good news is we probably will have more than that number. From the project manager’s perspective, management apps like Asana are not working well for us. As a small team, emails, zoom meetings, and slack are efficient enough.

Gemma wrote the following update for the web dev team:

Dev Team is working on the website, which is starting to take a more defined shape; the idea is to display a selection of the directors’ bios and photos and find a home for some of the high-level information related to the project.
The tag glossary, or dictionary, is also in the process of being added to the website; however, as this is a live document, the final design is still in progress.
Zico is exploring one option for the search engine with Tableau, which will allow filtering and comparing features; nevertheless, other options might still be viable should Tableau fail to meet the team’s expectations. (Other options: Javascript and Ajax; basic search within GitHub pages)
For the two upcoming weeks, Gemma will have one-on-one meetings with all the other team members to go over the directors’ bios assigned to them, their XML contents, and their personal bios which will be crafted in an ad-hoc manner.
The final product is now composed of six main sections, which can be divided as follows: About, the Team, the Project, Research/Inspiration, Search, and Contact.

The research team will meet next Tuesday to finalize one pilot XML file and update the tag glossary. Miaoling will update the DTD file accordingly to validate all XML structures produced by the research team. During the break, the research team will also spend some time writing lab notes, video plans, personal reflections, about page info, and any research-related documents that will be later published on the website. After April 18, the research team will move its focus to writing and stop producing more XML files.

Maria and Miaoling will start drafting tweets and outreach emails next Tuesday and during the break.

The design keeps changing and evolving as more and more contents progressively become available; it’s undeniable that there is now general excitement about the final presentation and the potential of this project!!

This week, we took some time to reevaluate our project plan and workflow and verify that we’re on track to finish everything before the showcase. 

On Saturday, we met for a team retro, where we talked honestly about what’s been working and what could be better. In terms of what’s going well, everyone spoke positively about team communication and the way we’ve collaborated, shared the workload, and each brought our unique strengths and skills to the project. 

We all agreed on what could go better: none of us have found the project management tool, ClickUp, that useful. The tasks are too granular, and as more than one person put it, it feels like an extra task, especially as all of us are keeping track of the small details of our work on our own. Majel and I took some time early in the week to create the system we probably should have been using all along: a Google doc with lists of tasks.

This made it much easier to review our tasks to see if we’re on track to meet the milestones we agreed on earlier, including the project showcase in May. The good news: for the most part, we are. For milestones where we’re “behind,” we’re either very close (as with research), or we had previously reconceptualized the way certain project components would relate to each other and have been making progress toward slightly different milestones that will yield the same result in the end. (For instance, we’d initially counted “data entered into the timeline and map” as milestones to happen in April after initial working prototypes would be completed by the end of March, but we decided to focus on building the database early on, rather than refining a timeline and map with dummy data.) We’ve adjusted the milestones accordingly – see below for more detail – and plan to check in with each other in regular meetings during Spring Break.

DESIGN

We’ve been finalizing the design details, and it should be ready to be put into CSS stylesheets by the end of spring break. We’ve been using Sketch for our site mockups, so we already have the code written for those styles.

Next steps:

Hand off the site design to Zelda and Elizabeth for implementation.

RESEARCH

Our initial project plan had us completing the research by 3/29;  we’re nearly there, so we pushed the deadline to the end of this week. We have five events completely written up, and two in progress. Majel is also working on two bios, in addition to the four she’s already completed.

Next steps:

Finish the writing, then add images for each event and activist to the database.

TECH

Zelda has been continuing to work on the API, and also prepared a demo of Mapbox that used play data. Elizabeth has been reviewing the TimelineJS code to better understand the functionality in preparation for launching it with live data.

Next steps:

Create up-to-date JSON with the live database, add live data to a timeline prototype.

OUTREACH

Estefany and Majel have been creating a unified style/branding for the social media channels, which they shared with the group on Wednesday. The group gave feedback, but we all agreed it’s very close to being done.

Next steps:

Estefany will create social media assets with the new styles in preparation for launch.

This week we’ve continued to fine tune and lock in key elements of the project. As we see aspects of design and tech locked in, we are shifting into the next phases of some of our work. We’ll see outreach and front end design become more prominent, while research continues, soon to shift into website copywriting. 

DESIGN
We are on track to finalize design, having a logo, palette, typography treatment and high fidelity mockups in place. Estefany pushed the entire system forward—implementing treatments arrived at independently and in collaboration with Majel and Elizabeth.

Next Step:
A few minor adjustments are being made in response to team feedback. Next week our social channels will start being updated with the new look, and the front end of our site can start to be coded with CSS tying back to the branding.

RESEARCH
This past week Elizabeth and Majel continued capturing event and activist stories and entering them in the database. We currently have 4 activists entered, and 3 events. This part of the process has been slower going than anticipated, but it’s key that we pull in adequate resources, have a decent handle on the subject matter, and then take the time to offer it in a format and language that is easily accessible. Events have been evolving — as more moments reveal themselves during research. If possible we’ll continue to add more, time permitting, to help flesh out our map.

Next Step:
Our focus will be on entering more events—ideally with 2-3 more entered within the next week. 

TECH
Zelda has set up the foundations for our front end and walked the team through the files. At the moment, tech is contingent on the finalization of design and the continued development of research/data points. 

Next Step:
With design wrapping up, we hope to shift into skinning the front end of the pages in preparation for the database being plugged in. We’ll continue to refine and troubleshoot layouts to account for the nature of the data as much as we can, but recognize there’s a cut-off. 

OUTREACH:
Now that we have more research and write ups in place, we’ve started discussing pulling in expert eyes. This includes revisiting possible connections with professors we’ve identified with expertise in our subject area.  

Next Step:
With design wrapping up and the nature of our research/content becoming clearer, Estefany will be able to shift into developing detailed content calendars and getting our social channels looking in line with our project. 

This past week is the first week after our adjusted work distribution. The web team continues to provide us with exciting updates on the website design from scratch using HTML. Gemma designed navigation bars and each page structure. Now we have a basic idea of the site map. And Zico, as the search engine lead, gives us three options for the search functionality. The JavaScript and Ajax one looks amazing despite its limited capacity due to the budget issue.

The research team provides the web team with their bios, photos, and short bios/available images of their directors. Now we have a list of nine directors and aim for 10-15 for the final product. The research team made significant progress in making their first DTD (an agreement between members on using and defining tags and structures) and drafting three XML files on three directors. Maria and Miaoling had a constructive and fruitful conversation with Prof. Jill Cirasella regarding the copyright issue. They reported it to the team for the picture citation rules and the XML hyperlinks citation rules. We will use Hypothesis annotations a lot in our XML encoding.

Maria, JP, and Miaoling are also working on the tag glossary (or, you could say, a dictionary) for our customized tags, definitions, and comparison with the TEI/Orlando tags. Maria is leading the “social” section; JP and Miaoling are working on the “Production Information” section. We agreed to have a full list to record our working process but will only show a more concise version in the final delivery.

As the outreach lead, Maria designed great banners for our Twitter account and has already built one account. Please follow us! https://twitter.com/directHERS We will post updates shortly.

Tomorrow, Miaoling will briefly introduce our work-in-progress via zoom at a mini-symposium at the University of South Carolina.

More work this week, but looking forward to seeing all of our avatars on our website. We are members sharing the same vibes.