- Deliverable: reflect in a blog post in your portfolio site on your project work so far, and on your plans for the rest of the semester after Fall Break (at least 300 words). What have you accomplished? What are your next steps? What issues or obstacles have you encountered that you have resolved or that you are still thinking through? What lingering questions do you have about the project or about your next steps?
From the beginning of project work in early September, I made significant progress on the first goal of the project “to collect, document, and compile TitHead movie files from 1980s to present”. This had been a somewhat time-consuming, yet crucial step to lead me and the project lead to the rest of the project work.
My main accomplishments so far include identifying the location of and creating copies of the archived TitHead movie files. I am grateful for the help from the Archives librarians and technicians at the Grinnell College Library for sharing their expertise with me as we decided on how to store large movie files. Instead of using an online cloud like Microsoft OneDrive, we are now using the locally hosted server to share and store files safely and securely. This taught me the importance of examining the file storage conventions and location based on context and requirements. This helped me to build and add an Excel database of metadata for each TitHead movie shown in previous events. I was surprised by how time-consuming this process was, as it required me to locate. watch, and note details about each film. This will be an ongoing process throughout the progression of the project.
Besides the collection and storage of data, I created a design for the website to present the database and other relevant information related to TitHead. With help from the Digital Liberal Arts Collective, I have successfully set up a domain to build, edit, and eventually publish the database. The recent conversation with the Vivero Co-Leads suggested possibilities of using both WordPress and OmekaS for the website to serve as a general, public website with an embedded, database-focused institutional page.
The next steps are to experiment with the WordPress and OmekaS features to design the page that would work best for this project. In the meantime, I will prioritize database documentation of movies that will most likely be used for the DAR’s virtual event and the website. Deciding on priorities would be very important moving forward, as both myself and my project leads would be working on some different parts of this extensive project. I will make sure to maintain in good communication with my project leads, and practice a long-term planning mindset to make further progress on the project.