Ob&Up: Outreach Plan

>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.

 

More Than Surviving — Week 6

This week has been very fruitful. We’ve been settling more framework questions, but also starting to move into the actual gathering, and creating that will get us to the final expression of the project.

Ramona Peters joined our last team meeting. Ramona, who has graciously agreed to collaborate with us on the project, is a Mashpee Wampanoag tribal member who served as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer and now focuses on the work of the Native Land Conservancy, an organization she founded 10 years ago focused on putting as much Wampanoag land in trust. Ramona is considered a Firekeeper—a keeper of traditions within the tribe and also has extensive experience managing the complicated relationship between scholarship, institutional frameworks, and Indigenous world views. Her initial feedback on our project framework and wireframes included an important reminder that our language must be as accessible as possible to truly make the project successful. Overall, her encouragement and excitement about the work served as an important reminder that this project will be of longer term use and service. 

For my part, I worked to fine tune some aspects of the project flow in Click Up that the team created together, created templates to guide research capture, wrote a budget to account for the $200 available via CUNY, gathered design inspiration to inform Estefany’s work on the visual identity, and started researching our activists. While visiting the National Park Service’s outpost in New Bedford on Sunday, I, by chance, encountered a mention of Mary J. “Polly” Johnson’s heritage as mixed Native and Black. Based on her place of birth and maiden name I feel confident she is Wampanoag, but will need to do a little digging to verify this. Besides being well respected abolitionists and confectioners (!), she and her husband hosted Frederick Douglas when he first captured his freedom. This discovery amplified my excitement about what else may be brought into the light through the work we are doing.  

Regarding data management, I am thankful for Zelda’s expertise and longview. Their design has captured some of the key questions we have: who has access, how do we ensure perpetual availability and usability of the data, and what tools in particular are needed to make that happen. Data management conversations are the most likely to remind you of the precarious legs that DH projects can stand on, and to be honest, I have been considering in what ways to bring these stories, this data, into the real world to make it perhaps more accessible for some but also tied to a lived experience.

Bio about Nuraly Soltonbekov

Nuraly Soltonbekov is a Political Economist with a minor in Computer Science and a graduate of Kingsborough Community College, and Columbia University. He is also currently enrolled at NYU for masters in History. He is fond of research and the big questions that involve processes in historical narratives. He is also former service member of US armed forces, and does speak Russian, and Turkish dialects which helped a lot in his military career. He was part of HUMINT team, meaning human intelligence gathering at Fort. Carson, CO. His language skills were essential in research and gathering of information for the Department of Defense and helped to create manuals in disinformation. His coding skills are intermediate and he has not coded in a long time but it is still his passion as is history and economics. His most proud work of research had to deal with disinformation in Soviet Union and he will always talk about it when given a chance. He is an introvert, and that is why he chose his subject that are more conducive to introvert people.

 

Feminist Markup Project: Data Management Plan – Group Project Update

Hi Class,

Here you’ll find our Data Management Plan (DMP). We kept it high-level as things might evolve through the implementation phase. It is in PDF, so hopefully there will be no compatibility issues with any of your devices.

Data Management Plan

Kindly be aware that we are currently working on the re-branding of the name of our project and we will provide an update tomorrow night.

Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

The Feminist Markup Project Team

 

Miaoling Bio

Miaoling Xue is a junior scholar whose research focuses on Japanese women’s/gender history, women in literary narratives, multilingual Digital Humanities, and digital tools for premodern studies. She has studied and taught in China, Japan, Canada, and the United States, and her background shaped her awareness and appreciation of cross-cultural understanding and knowledge-sharing. During the rapid shift to remote research and collaboration in the past three years, Miaoling had the opportunity to acquire new digital competencies while managing many collaborative public-facing initiatives. She led a team launching an educational video project (Exploring Premodern Japan) that guides the audience through the world of premodern Japan; she conducted a pilot study on a seventeenth-century Japanese travel account to test how to harness the power of ArcGIS StoryMaps in understanding travel writing and poetry. These attempts show her passion for dedicating greater effort to acknowledging and utilizing digital spaces and tools in order to improve pedagogical practice and connect expert knowledge in Asian Studies/Digital Humanities to the public.

Miaoling serves as the project manager of the Feminist Markup project. She is responsible for coordinating all aspects of the project, from the initial TEI/XML training to the final delivery of customized tagsets and XML models with searchable features. Specifically, she is working with the team to define the overall goals in this phase (spring semester), allocate technical and content resources, and develop plans to mitigate potential risks generated during the experimental process.