Review and Reflection from the week…

Rebecca –

Wow, the week has flown by. I’m amazed at how much we have been able to accomplish and I’m very thankful that all has run smoothly so far! We worked through the goals for the week in about 3 1/2 days, meaning we are slightly ahead of schedule and can use this Friday to organize and prepare ourselves for when Aubrey and I take our vacation weeks.

I’ve learned how to create and edit a website, digitize photos (still learning about the editing!), and navigate the many resource platforms for this job. I’m surprised at how quickly we can catalog the art, as I was sure the numbering, logging, photographing, uploading, and editing would use up our time. However, Aubrey and I devised an efficient system to streamline the process where one of us labels as the other catalogs. Also, as we go through the week, I’m realizing that our idea to have these interviews is not as feasible as we thought. Because the students are not on campus, they are difficult to contact and meet, so our idea of posting audio to the website needs to change. Carol suggested sending out a survey (I think we should just email-blast it because we need a lot of people to respond) so we can get answers faster. We also realize that if other students continue this project in the future, we need to ask Dr. G to put some additional requirements for the extra credit. Some suggestions would be a) name b) year taking the class c) title of work d) system it represents.

Today we met Celia Martone, another SCARP student researcher, who is working on creating a virtual reality tour for the North Museum. Because some of the anatomy art is on display there, we want to collaborate with her to feature her on the website! This collaboration between the Education, Digital Humanities, and Biology department is so exciting to see. Celia is also working on creating some lesson plans related to STEM education which we will upload to the website as well. We are also going to learn how to make gifs (thank you, Moh!) to display the rotating pictures of the 3D artwork!

Aubrey –

This week has been insane! (In a good way though). If anyone had told me that we would have gotten as much done as we did in 5 days I would have laughed in their face. But, somehow we did. I owe a lot of our progress to Wix’s accessibility along with mine and Rebecca’s willingness to collaborate. Had she solely focused on the research and I the digital aspect this project would probably take much longer, as well as have an awkward flow through the entire project.

The past two days for me have been completely taken up by taking, uploading, and editing photos. To save time Rebecca suggested that once I complete the editing for a batch of photos, upload them into media storage and she can upload them and the descriptions onto the site while I start editing the next batch. It seems to be working well and it saves both of us time. With editing I love that even if the lighting isn’t perfect, it can be edited to avoid taking photos until it’s perfect. Plus cropping images makes everything look so much cleaner.

As Rebecca touched on above, we decided to send a survey to the prospective interviewees which was a nice thing to get out of the way first thing in the morning! We also met with Celia, another education major who is working with Dr. Peter Licona this summer. I agree with Rebecca that it would be really exciting to feature her work on the site and potentially have a virtual tour of some of the collection currently housed in the North Museum in Lancaster.

It’s been such a fun week getting to learn and create, and we are both really proud of how much we’ve accomplished already. I’ll be gone next week, so check back next time for the:

Week of Rebecca!!

-Aubrey Mitchell, signing off

Etown 2020