Week 7 Group Post: Maine MILL

 

For our project plan, we are still working out some parts of it but thus far we have made two different groups. One group is in charge of print articles (members: Sophia, Brady, Cate, and Averie). They are going to be looking at items like student articles, news articles, anything of that nature regarding the event that happened in Lewiston. The other group is in charge of media (members: Amanda, Bella, Pat, Lindsay, and Isabelle). They are going to be looking at items like videos, podcasts, and social media posts regarding the event that happened in Lewiston. Anna one of the women we are working with on this project helped us set up a google sheets document where we can organize or data in an orderly fashion. This document has two separate sheets one for the print group and one for the media group. Anna showed us how to navigate this document and name the files which is something we were interested in. Rachel, the other woman we are working with was explaining to us how we should center in on one specific subject that we can fully accomplish. The first step we need to take is probably accumulating our items individually so we can come together and break it down and work together to further explore these things. Rachel also highlighted that we should capture the community and world response to this event (Averie).

Averie: 

My individual role for this project is to compile different print articles, I think I may start with local articles and then gradually move on to student articles and then eventually national articles. I also think finding articles about victims or about people with relation to these victims could be beneficial to this project because I think Rachel and Anna did mention something of that matter. In this case, I think chapters 3 and 4 of The Digital Humanities Coursebook are helpful when curating this project because we are now getting a hands on look at digitizing documents and describing or titling said documents. In our google sheet document we are going to insert information and label it and use what we have learned from these two chapters to curate this project. We aren’t physically creating this website by ourselves but we are going to get a good look at the interworkings and beginning of this process.  

Amanda: 

I am a member of the media group. I have been looking at social media posts like instagram. There is a hashtag called #lewistonstrong on instagram that I have been looking at. There are some really great posts that people have made. I may also start to look at news reports and talk shows. I know there are some talk shows that have talked about it. As Averie said our first step is to do our own research and then come together to further explore our findings. This project is allowing us to get a hands-on look at digitizing documents and how we describe or title the documents. Which is what chapters 3 and 4 of The Digital Humanities Coursebook talks about. 

Lindsay:

My individual role for this project is to compile media and social posts. I believe for this I will start with looking into posts with the hashtag #lewistonstrong on instagram and go from there and see what I can find. I will also look into the governor and mayors social media accounts to see if they posted anything from that day or from recent weeks about the shooting. Anna and Rachael mentioned that media from the breaking news and the initial reactions are very important, so I will be looking into compiling data from this point as well. My goals are to find posts that can help to share what exactly went on in the first few days of this event, and also posts that show how this affected the community. This project relates to Chapters 3 and 4 of the Digital Humanities Coursebook because we are using digitization to convert pictures and texts we find into an online memorial. We are also using metadata because we are using records of this event to explain what happened and why this is important to the town of Lewiston. From the zoom call, we gathered that the purpose of this project is to capture community and world response to this event and to gather information to create an excel sheet that can be organized into an interactive memorial anyone can look into. 

Bella DeMarco- 

After my work with Our Marathon during our digital analysis unit I learned about digital memorialization and the process in which sites like these are created. This sparked my interest in the Maine Mill digital curation group. I knew I wanted to focus on the media, since that was the most interesting aspect of Our Marathon. I will be looking at instagram posts from locals, specific hashtags, local businesses, and schools. I will also be looking into talk shows, youtube videos, and instagrams reels that address the topic in order to gather a diverse amount of information. We will be utilizing massive amounts of metadata and structured data in order to compile our archival information. I am so excited to begin searching for media and this is truly a great local organization. 

Pat:

As a member of the media group, my individual role for this project is to help collect social media posts as well as videos. Instagram will be the main focus as I will be looking at posts from locals, using the hashtag #LewistonStrong. But I will be checking Twitter/X as well. I will also be looking at government media accounts to see what they have posted during the timeline of the shooting. We will be naming our files like M2023VID and M2023SOC which is a form of metadata. I am looking forward to learning more about digital curation and the ethics behind dealing with sensitive topics.

Sophia: 

I am part of the print article group. My role is to collect articles published by student publications in the New England region about breaking news, legislature, and victims’ stories created in the aftermath of the Lewiston Maine Shootings. The steps we need to take in tackling this project are categorizing ourselves into subgroups focusing on specific types of print organizations, timeframes, content tags, and regions. The materials we are working with are online print articles that we will convert into PDFs to preserve their longevity. My personal process will be compiling a list of college-student-run publications based at the major colleges and universities within the New England region, finding their corresponding websites, and searching keywords related to the Lewiston tragedy. My goal for this digital curation is to compile as many relevant and credible articles as possible to best assist Maine Mill in their permanent gun violence memorial. Our project relates to the preservation aspect of digital humanities we have learned in our course. From Anna and Rachel we learned how to categorize our articles, social media posts, and video as file names such as ‘M2023VID,’ ‘SOC,’ etc. For my first DH essay I analyzed The National Gun Violence Memorial Project (GVMP): an exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. The goal of the GVMP exhibition was to showcase the moments that survive; the objects from gun violence victims placed by their families. Similar to the GVMP, the significance of the Maine Mill curating various forms of media from an instance of gun violence that affected their town, is memorialization. The vast collection of various forms of media from the tragedy will prevent it from being buried or lost to time, or more tragedies that may eventually share the same fate. 

Cate: I'm part of the print article collection group. My role is to scavenge articles on a local and national level about the 2023 Lewiston, Maine Shootings. I plan to focus on local papers documenting the event's immediate aftermath and then expand my search toward national news outlets. My collection will include student articles among articles from major news outlets. I want to include articles about victims from The Lewiston Sun Journal and the event's logistics and community response. Rachel and Anna recommended that we thoroughly cover the news outlets we look at while gathering data from various places. Our focus is on building a framework that sets a foundation for expansion. 

Izzy:

I am on the social media team for our group, meaning I need to compile screenshots and videos that were posted following the event. I will source these artifacts from Instagram, focusing on online communities and entities such as the mayor's office, Bates College, USM, and different municipalities. My process involves screenshotting posts made by community/governmental groups following the shooting, including the image posted and the caption, and tagging these artifacts in a spreadsheet. My goal is to archive social media posts that will portray an accurate view of the response to this event. My audience is people who did not view the posts when they were first released. Our project specifically relates to the concept of descriptive metadata, as described in Chapter 4: “Metadata, markup and data description,” and I would categorize this project as such because it involves classification of knowledge. The overall purpose of this project is to preserve data that will one day be seen as historical artifacts. The audience of our showcase will be those interested in the history of the Lewiston Shooting, Maine residents, and donors to the Maine Mill Project, among others. The significance of our project is that we are preserving digital artifacts that hold a lot of meaning to the Lewiston community. These relics may otherwise be lost if we do not consciously save and organize them in an archive. Processing the materials of videos, screenshots, and images will involve inputting data into a spreadsheet with tags that categorizes them based on their content. These data will ultimately be presented on the Maine Mill website. The goal of our clients at Maine Mill is to archive data so that future generations can learn about the Lewiston Shootings. I learned how to tag and number files within a spreadsheet using labels such as “M2023SOC” or “M2023VID.” We will meet with our client at a later date to discuss ways we can improve the content of our archive.

Brady:

In my group, we collect the digital print materials that memorialize the Lewiston Shootings; our clients at the Maine MILL want these to come from the widest range of perspectives and Lewiston Shootings-adjacent topics like gun legislation or violence in Maine are also important to gather. Since my teammates want to focus on local articles, I will document the national and international publications. Our project has especially to do with metadata and data description, but I might like to use some data mining to aid in my collecting of articles, e.g., finding frequent words in articles to generate accurate keywords - optimizing for time. I think we need to spend more time thinking about how to build the presentation, but I sense it will be more straightforward than we expect, like how our responsibilities were clarified after talking with our clients. In response to our questions and outside of that, their guidance has allowed me to understand how much time this should actually take.