The group’s focus this week was threefold. We had finished, for the most part, putting together our sound word corpus. With that done, all members of the group began to learn how to use text scraping scripts to help streamline gathering the data and ensure that it is “clean” and accessible as possible.  The second facet of the group’s effort centered on outreach and establishing a public presence; one group member set up a Git Hub and Twitter account for the group. She also began to explore which web platforms would best serve to present our work and share it. Third, the group continued to study and research the battle itself through reading accounts of the battle, from both secondary and primary sources.

Finally, the group began to put together the project update presentation, creating and including a work plan, basic test data, and a concept for the project.

Civil War Sound Group

In the past week, we got a nice sized task out of the way. We took 9 popular fashion publications and recorded (in a shared spreadsheet) every major fashion designer that they covered/reviewed on their sites. Then, we’ll take the ten that were the most covered across the board and that’s how we’ll determine the ten that will be featured in our project. Next, we’re going to get the model rosters from those 10 shows, which will probably available to us on Models.com.

I’m really glad we got to meet with Ms. Tang last week because she really helped us narrow down a lot of the things we were up in the air about. Hopefully we’ll be able to correspond with her through our journey, as she seemed really interested in the project.

As we discussed last week, main goal this week was to focus on the collection of data. We work together to be effective, so I started to get in touch with Fashion Spot, to get information about some graphs they were showing, with percentages for fashion diversities during NYFW16.

It’s going to be manual but from what I was able to understand, agencies guarantee the access to their data in some situations, for articles and information online, so we could have the chance to ask to people with already prepared sheets.

I’m trying to design the logo for our website, since the issue we are presenting has the right characteristic to be something very socially interesting. Nothing decided yet because this week, for the data collection, we needed to analyze Editorial and Magazines online to select the 10 designers that will be shown in the project. I worked on T Magazine, V magazine and Vogue.
I’m still following online classes and tutorials for D3.

During last Week 4’s class session, our group presented to the class our project’s premise, team, and tentative project phases. We are grateful to have met with GC Digital Fellow Jennifer Tang during class, whose questions and observations regarding our project presentation helped us begin to establish more deliberate steps in collecting initial data and better articulate our project’s critical direction.

Before we can begin to analyze model data, we had to create a strategy for selecting the designers who employed these models according to how often a designer was covered during the most recent New York Fashion Week that occurred between February 11 – 18, 2016, by fashion magazines carrying weight in the industry. Between the three of us, we split up nine fashion magazines and created a To-do list on Basecamp to verify our progress. Designers covered have been collected on a Google spreadsheet inside of a shared Google folder on Google Drive.

Shoutout to Nico for making contact with a primary source for past NYFW data and to Scarlett for organizing a meeting with a group member from the New York City Fashion Index (NYCFI).

– Alison Boldero

The group focused on searching out aides for creating and curating our project’s dataset. My part in this task was two-fold. One was to seek out a “corpus” of sound words which would help flesh out our keyword searches in the American Civil War: Letters and Diaries database. So far, no luck finding previously established bodies of words. This led us to trying to find tools to help us build a  sound corpus for our use and the use of other possible projects in the future. What I found were online dictionaries and thesauruses as well as searching through the sources themselves to look for the words that people in the 19th century used. My second task was to learn how to leverage the database to get us the most precise results possible and cut down on the work we need to do to generate our dataset.

-David Campmier

This is a complex project with the potential to go in several different directions.  At this point, we are still in the process of defining project goals, given these choices. To a large extent, what we do will depend on the site we choose (but establishing that partnership will depend on what we describe doing) so it’s a bit of a catch-22.

We expect to make contact with the congregations/organizations that manage the prospective sites this coming week. In the mean time, our team has been communicating on Basecamp about what we’d like to achieve, and providing reference material to each other, to better articulate what we imagine creating.  Everyone has been extremely thoughtful and detailed in their responses to my initial questions about how they see the project in relation to the original proposal. I’ve set a deadline, with tasks, for identifying and establishing a site partnership with a local cemetery: March 6. Between then and now, I think we will need to discuss in more detail our personal wishes for this project, and see where they overlap, in order to develop a clear goal we can all begin working toward. (Understanding, of course, that the project will probably end up looking different from even the hybridized version.)

At this point, I am acting as the PM, Conn is doing outreach, and Davide and Taylor are beginning to develop a theoretical structure that goes beyond “purpose.”  (Conn and I are throwing in our two cents on this as well.) For the time being  we will keep to this arrangement, and revisit it once we are deeper into the project’s development.

Ta-da!  Here is the link to my data set project website!  Please enjoy the read 🙂