Blog post 8: curation team processing

 Sophia: 

The processing for the print team is going well as we have been able to collectively file articles from student, local, and large news outlets that matched the subcategories/tags such as victims, memorials, community response, gun legislation, and breaking news reports. Individually, I have been focusing on gathering articles from student publications related to the shootings. At the beginning of the print team’s process we split off into our publication type categories and gathered as many articles as possible in an hour and a half timeframe. We then started the next phase of our process: filing. While quantity is important, we understand that there are only so many pieces we can collect in our limited time frame. Therefore we are putting great focus and effort into converting what we currently have into pdfs, filing them on the spreadsheet and tagging them appropriately. We have been very meticulous in our filing process. Right now our project looks like a bunch of information and links on a Google spreadsheet. The amount of data we collect and effectively tag is important to the memorialization and impact of the Maine Mill’s Lewiston project. A concept of digital humanities we have applied in our project is multimodal and performative. Together, we have gathered information related to the shootings across multiple formats. Our social media team has collected photo, video, and online posts related to the shootings in addition to the print articles we have gathered. In its final presentation I expect this digital memorial to be a well organized, permanent space for visitors to reflect on and grieve the events that happened during and in the aftermath of the shootings. If I were to carry this work forward I would be sure to instill the DH value of collaboration and distribution. Having a memorial that allows for others to add to, and more to see, is important in ensuring its permanence and visibility. The collection and processing of digital content such as articles and social media posts will contribute to the foundation of the Maine Mill’s memorial collection. 

Cate:

To tackle article collection, we have split into three groups: student, local, and big news articles. I have focused on the local level of article collection, primarily sifting through entries in the Lewiston Sun Journal. We then tagged articles into subgroups, such as community response, victim, memorial, etc. Right now, our focus has been on converting articles/images into PDFs; and uploading them to our Google sheet. In the creation of our memorial; we are putting emphasis on setting a framework for expansion rather than completing the project. We are encouraging this idea by making sure we complete filing for each article we touch rather than partially filing articles. I feel this process has been going well; our procedure for collecting and filing articles has been effective. I find dividing and conquering in my group a good strategy for gathering variety in our articles. We applied the Digital Humanities concepts of database design; we sifted through many sources, and our now converting our findings into a different applicable file type. 

Lindsay:

For the media group, we have been compiling different posts found on instagram and converting them into PDF’s to then put onto the media excel file. We have been collecting posts from all different sources and viewpoints such as colleges, community victims, and supporting communities and people who are spreading awareness about this devastating event. This week, I have found around 7 different posts on Instagram to contribute to the Maine Mill website and I am in the process of converting them into PDFs to put on the excel file. Before I started searching for these posts, my plan was to find community posts as well as posts from higher legislators such as governors and higher officials who may have shared their prayers towards Lewiston. As I was searching for these posts I did find multiple responses from the mayor, governor, and president. As I was searching for these posts, I moved my focus from the greater community posts to just the government posts from this event. The reason I did this was because I thought the people of Lewiston who visited this website would want to see the responses of the familiar leaders of their town and that they showed their support and are there for resources and greater help as well. So far we have applied the DH concepts of materials, processing, and soon presentation. For our presentation, we are planning on discussing the entire process of the work we did and discussing how we organized and found our materials, and also how we are planning on applying these to the Maine Mill website. I believe that the work we are doing is going to greatly contribute to the digital memorial because this gives the community of Lewiston a place where they can remember and honor those who were affected by this tragedy in a digital form that will last forever. 

Averie: 

In the print group we separated into three subgroups, local articles, student articles, and breaking news/big news articles. Brady and I are working on the breaking news/big news articles, and it is going pretty successful so far. At first the organization was quite confusing, but as I spent more time with it it is now very efficient. We are now in the processing stages of the project. We had gathered all of the links to the articles we wanted to use and now we are onto converting them into PDFs and filing them into the spreadsheet with keywords, descriptions, etc. The media group and the print group has been pretty separated and I know that they are busy collecting videos and images from numerous different places, but we haven’t gotten the chance to come together and all discuss what we have done. I think we are all still pretty deep in our findings. Overall, I think the more time I spend on this, the easier it gets.  

Pat Pasong:

In the media group, we mainly focused on collecting social media posts. Most of which were from Instagram. I looked at #LewistonStrong and #OneLewiston. I also collected posts from Twitter. Many of the tweets were made by members of the community. A lot of the posts that were collected were made shortly after the shooting with some being a month after. I think we still need to grab videos and make transcripts.

Isabelle:

Processing for the social media team is going well because we were able to divide up the work between our group members. Each group member has a role in screenshotting social media posts from around the time of the event. I am collecting posts made by large colleges in Maine such as the University of Maine and the University of New England, as well as Bates College in Lewiston. My team members are gathering posts centered around community response, looking at the hashtags “lewistonstrong” and  “onelewiston.” What we planned is coming to fruition because we have been able to screenshot and input images into the PDF alongside descriptive information that categorizes the posts. Nothing has really changed from what we planned so far. Our project is smaller than I thought it would be in the beginning, but I think that as we collect more posts our list of data will expand. We are applying the concept of metadata because we are working to classify, organize, and describe digital assets. We are creating descriptive metadata because our work specifically pertains to the classification of knowledge. 

In the final memorial, I hope to see our work become part of a virtual exhibit that displays the assets we collected in the context of the greater picture. I imagine users being able to click on a college name, for example, to expand information about the college’s response. We will continue to apply the concept of metadata as we move forward in collecting and describing information.