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: