After laying the conceptual groundwork for the project, we are now in the midst of the text-preparation phase. Over the past weeks, we were able to find near-complete transcripts for two seasons of GBBS (Season 2 and Season 12). Ruby then pre-cleaned the transcripts with Python, and now Teddy and Maria are double-cleaning the files by re/watching the show and comparing the transcript to the broadcast (and making corrections when necessary).

Teddy recently finalized the corpus for season 12, exported it to a CSV file, and, until next week, is separating out the judging sections and readying the corpus for analysis. They will also create a GitHub repository for our data.

The comparison corpus (Season 2) still needs to be double-cleaned/compared to the broadcast. Maria will focus on that for the coming week.

Our goal to have preliminary findings by our March 29 midpoint meeting remains realistic. As noted in our planning post, the focus of the final month (April) will be heavily influenced by our discoveries ahead.

[Finding a third comparison corpus from an American baking show, is not a priority at this point. But it’s not off the table entirely. For now, it is something we might return to later in the semester. Largely this is contingent on finding an appropriate American show we have easy access to.]

Meanwhile, RC has been making great progress on our website. She has created a first functional version of the site and is refining the design and structure and continuing to figure out the possibilities of the WordPress platform.

Since the site will predominantly feature the game/s, the landing page currently shows placeholders. The placeholders will remain for the coming weeks while we focus on “behind the scenes” aspects of the site. This means RC will check in with Nuraly, who is working on the game component and investigating ways to incorporate interactive game versions.
Nuraly is considering two options: Option 1 is to code a Bingo and trivia game from scratch; option 2 is using pre-existing code via an existing platform and linking that to our WordPress site. There are quite a few sites that offer plug-ins, so pursuing option 2 might be advantageous. Nuraly’s research and experiments over the next week/s will determine the route we take.

Overall, this is a very practical & technical (as opposed to conceptual) phase of the project. Our heads are down; we’re focusing on the details of spreadsheets, platforms, and game codes and (whenever applicable) developing the skills associated with our tasks.

Group Project Update

Previous week’s work: the team has agreed to slightly change the work approach by breaking the team into two sub-teams, one focused on the encoding and the other dedicated to the development of the website. The PM, research lead, and outreach lead work in the first sub-team, and two developers/designers work in the second sub-team.
The former has been putting a lot of effort into the research phase and investigating potential issues that might arise in the longer term, such as citing and copyright problems.
The latter has been designing and building the website containing two sections, one dedicated to the project and its contents and the second centered around creating a search engine prototype.
The outreach planning also continues by creating materials for upcoming promotional campaigns, such as short symposium talks, social media, and on-campus outreach.
What has been achieved: basic XML training, data scraping model, logo, color palette, tag procedure, basic web structure, a shared account for GitHub and social media, and all work plan drafts.

Actions for the team for the next two weeks:
– For the research team: provide the web team with a short summary of the directors they are researching/encoding, plus usable pictures of them (due by March 22);
– For the research team: provide the web team with an XML sample (tentative samples due by March 22 and a pilot sample [one long XML file] of five directors due by March 29);
– For the research team: meet before class on March 22 to generate templates for the customized glossary and XML file. If necessary, meet again before class on March 29 to further polish the templates.
– For the web team: review the XML samples to find any potential errors and feed the information back to the research team. All error records will eventually be posted to the website under resource-the XML tutorial package.
– For the web team: elaborate on the way to replicate one of the suggested websites and prepare the script to host the contents;
– For everyone: explore potential solutions through technical and content perspectives for the fair use/copyright issue brought up by the PM. PM and outreach lead will meet Prof. Jill Cirasella this week to ask for advice.

The PM works with the web team in two weeks:
– Decide what contents will make it to the final cut and will be destined to be published on the website.

Home: Key feature info/headline introducing the website’s main purpose

About: Team and project introduction

Research (might need to be separated into different navigation bars, pending team decision): Lab notes/Error records/Tag search/pilot search functionality/useful materials

Inspiration (maybe Explore): connections/inspirations with other existing projects

Get in Touch: Contact info and a place for comment submission

The project has a number of moving parts — with a custom database being developed that will support a timeline, map and front end experience, there’s a lot to come together for the project to be public ready. The early stages of the project have been devoted to solidifying frameworks and processes to bring them to life, and at week 8 we have truly put our project plan in motion. Being able to learn from each other and engage with each person’s expertise (!) and curiosity has been a tremendously engaging and educational experience.  

DESIGN
Estefany is refining our project’s visual identity, pulling cultural references into the final expression. This includes drawing inspiration from the meaning of Wampanoag—People of the First Light. Generally referring to the Wampanoag’s location on the East coast where the sun first breaks on Turtle Island, Estefany has also drawn a message of hope and forward thinking, portrayed in a sunrise icon. She is also fine tuning the color palette and font hierarchy that will give our front end expression its unique character. Our intention is to be confident and rooted in positivity and hope. The purple central to her work is being tweaked to move it even closer to the shades that emerge in Wampum, a type of shell with ceremonial significance that was used as currency, adornment, and to capture and record treaties and emotional and spiritual intentions.

Next Steps:
Our intention is to have an agreed upon identity within the next week so we can begin putting it into action across social and to inform the front end design of the website. 

RESEARCH
This past week Elizabeth and Majel further ironed out the process for gathering research and transferring it into the database structure. In examining the various types of events and activists that will need to be accounted for, it became apparent that not all of the data could be treated the same in the research process. Decisions about how to group information for the fullest comprehension were taken with our primary audience in mind. It is very important that our visitors can feel the interconnectivity of the narratives that intersect on local, state, and national levels and that the context from which activism emerged is at the forefront. 

This week we’ve created a finite list of activists and selected a representational sampling of  their activities which we can account for in our database. A step-by-step process has been templated in ClickUp, enabling us to distribute the work beyond a single teammate. 

Next Steps
With the process in place we can now build on the existing work and start turning out bios and event write ups to populate the database. This is to be completed by the end of March.  

TECH
Elizabeth and Zelda have been very busy determining the appropriate platforms, software and framework for our interactive project features: the timeline and the map. Elizabeth, having built out wireframes to demonstrate the functionality of TimelineJS, shared the back end requirements with Zelda. Zelda has now taken these requirements and that of the database environment they are building and written the code that will integrate our local google sheets and the formal hosted database that will eventually sit behind our website. They have walked us through their decisions, and, with new information from the research side, have made adjustments to help properly reflect the stories we are telling. Key decision making on Zelda’s part was to give the local database (where researchers input data), the liaising code and commands with the formal database (housed in google collab), and the formal hosted database (to be developed once the local work is complete) each its own home to ensure there is distinction and clarity of use for future project participants. 

Next Steps
Zelda will be building out the framework for the front end of the site—setting up pages and architecture in preparation for the full build when the visual identity is finalized.  Once research is complete and input into the database we will begin testing the interactive features in earnest.

OUTREACH
With a work plan in place and a growing outreach list, Estefany is well situated to kick things off once we have our social channels and eventually the site up and running.

Next Steps
Estefany is meeting with her counterpart Maria from another team to exchange ideas and potential network connections. She’s also started to consider events and a social calendar, but this is secondary to completing the visual design which has a direct impact on our outreach efforts. 

MOVING FORWARD
Still on the docket is website copy, social media calendar and asset creation, and outreach. These items will kick off in earnest once the items above have been either completed or in a well developed state. By the end of the month it is our intention that our front end will start to take shape in earnest, and our focus will shift to content creation, outreach, and fine tuning tech as needed.  

During the last few days the team has been deployed on two different fronts, one is the ongoing encoding activity and the other is the construction of the website which will be the used to display some of our work.

Just a reminder, the outcome of the work we are doing is destined to sit “behind the scenes”, which means that the data we are creating will, hopefully, be part of, or contribute to, bigger and more established projects that would have a greater capacity to leverage existing, and already operational, search engines.

With this in mind, our website will be the testimony of our efforts in both learning, often creatively, how to research, review, catalogue and encode information that are not necessarily widely available nor particularly well indexed, and yes, we know that this might not be the most visually appealing outcome, BUT we are committed to do our best to make the design experience as pleasant as possible for our readers!

The palette of colours chosen is displayed below; these are also the wonderful colours of our logo!

Under review: the font, so far we have shortlisted a bunch, but we still need to agree on one; we have used GoogleFonts.com, mainly because it offers a wide variety of free options.

The idea is to have a navigation bar on top with a few tabs that will be used to move from one page to another. So far, we have included our bios, a short ‘about’ section, the project inspiration and the research part. In the pipeline: a space dedicated to tutorials and resources where to upload training material and encoding notes.  Yet to be added: our social, which will have a dedicated tab.

We are currently working on integrating a pseudo search engine which could be seen as a pilot version of what the product of our work could look like “from the stage” (just to carry on with the theatre metaphor!).

Tech note: the website is being constructed locally and a pilot version will be pushed to our GitHub repository later on this month. This means that the website is not yet available to be accessed by external users. On the search engine: the team is exploring 3 different avenues that could help upload a mini XML database and make it searchable.

Over the past few weeks, the More Than Surviving team has been focused on research and back-end development. However, early in the project, Majel developed the initial wireframes for the site pages, map, and timeline, and we’ve been working together to refine the features and develop the style. I took some time today to rework the wireframes in Sketch, which is free for students. Using Sketch will allow us to preview visual variants as we decide on colors and fonts (led by Estefany!). It also exports values that can be pasted straight into the site’s CSS — something that appeals to me as a slow coder.

With that background, here’s a preview of key pages from our site:

Querida clase,

Please find attached the Outreach & Social Media Plan for DirectHers: Groundbreaking Women (new project name).

Outreach & Social Media Plan_DirectHers

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments!

Thank you

>Audience

The target audience for this project is two-fold. Any (more than casual) fans of GBBS —e.g., people who have shared memes or caught themselves pronouncing a random piece of pastry “stodgy” in a perhaps fake British accent— should find Ob&Up intriguing, as should linguistics and other linguistically interested academics in media studies, literature, and beyond. 

These two groups are, of course, not mutually exclusive and are likely already involved in ongoing exchanges. Existing language-focused public engagement via word games and puzzles, language-usage quizzes, etc. shows that the channels of communication between the media-consuming public and language experts are naturally present. Ob&Up wants to consciously build on overlaps between playful engagement with language and academic research by reaching and connecting these two differently motivated curiosities with an analysis of GBBS judging language communicated, partially, in game form.

>Outreach Strategy, General 

There is a core group of these constituents that we aim to reach out to first for our project launch in May. Beyond May, the game component of the project (Bingo, trivia) can serve as the locus for expansion to a broader user base. Targeted outreach to more casual fans of the show should go hand-in-hand with the release of a new season of GBBS on Netflix (which will be available for streaming in late October 2023). When the show re-enters public discourse as part of its broadcasting/streaming cycle, intensified outreach at this time can expand the project’s audience and re-engage initial audiences.

>Social Media Strategy

The project team plans to establish a social media presence before the site’s initial launch. Broadly, our social media outreach will unfold in two stages. Stage 1 for the May launch and Stage 2 for a re/launch in the fall. 

For the May launch, the project team will reach out on a smaller scale. We will connect with GBBS fan communities, primarily via Reddit, where active discussion of the show continues to take place. According to our preliminary research, Reddit users will be an ideal first audience to test the project website and give feedback on games and other content. A user profile has already been created, and Nuraly has been following/observing relevant subreddits. By mid-April (once we can build on the initial findings of our corpus analysis), we may jump into conversations and insert teasers/previews of our language analysis. In conjunction with Reddit, for the May launch, Teddy will use his TikTok presence to inform followers,  which include linguists and linguistically interested people.

Based on initial responses and public feedback, a more extensive outreach strategy will be developed for the fall, Stage 2. Facebook and TikTok are platforms with generationally distinct GBBS fan communities; outreach via these platforms will be included in Phase 2. Simple games might also be adapted for cellphone usability. “Judge this Bake” Bingo, word-of-the-day judgment trivia, and statistical findings shared as various platforms could all incite and continue the dialogue around evaluative language and its role on social media. 

Geographically speaking, we will focus on GBBS communities, which are coded as US-based, although we continue to research differences in reach between GBBO (the British acronym) and GBBS-related hashtags and communities and can appeal to both.

>Website and Additional Communication 

Website

         The project will primarily exist as a website that consolidates the academic and entertainment components, i.e., the visualized corpora, the interactive game/s, and texts on the project’s aim and background. While the visualization of the corpora and the game/s will be the focus of the landing page, academic texts detailing methods and findings will be an essential part of the site as well. They will be available in specifically dedicated sections of the site, along with other ancillary material. 

Additional Communication

        Essays (or Op-Eds) that reflect and interpret the findings of our text analysis phase will be submitted to online publications like Eater and Vulture, which feature cultural criticism focusing on food and TV, respectively. The project team might also reach out to podcasts on linguistic phenomena, like Slate’s Spectacular Vernacular. Contacting GBBS directly and letting them know about the project is also potentially an option. 

A preliminary note on Accessibility (more on this next week)

The basic fundamental design of the website relies on a limited and high-contrast color palette and language rendered visually in readily readable fonts. The game designs will be minimalist. A visual simplicity will support the project’s focus on language and simultaneously lower access barriers.

Hello class,

This is the link to the Outreach and social media plans.  We look forward to speaking more about it in class.

best,

Estefany

Below is our Data Management Plan.

Ruby worked with the DMP template to make sure all aspects are considered, and Teddy supplied crucial answers.

DMP_Overbaked_and_Underproofed

Hi everyone,

I’m sharing the More Than Surviving Data Management Plan document, which answers questions from the checklist shared by Steve Zweibel last week.

If there are any questions, or if you want to discuss anything, feel free to reach out to any of us!

Zelda, on behalf of More Than Surviving