Week 10 DirectHERS Group Update

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!!