We have finally put together the Sky Team project and it is up and running on the website! The Sky Team will be meeting one last time with the professors before the presentations and before the website goes live to do one last check of subject matter and to prepare for the presentation. I feel confident that we are ready, though. The Sky Team definitely had some rough patches getting to this point, but we were able to push through and get everything done. It is such a relief to get to this point and be able to step back and just appreciate everything that the whole class has accomplished. It is so exciting to see a semester’s worth of hard work finally come to fruition. I love seeing our page within the context of the whole website and side-by-side with the work of the other three teams. I am so very proud of the whole class’s effort, flexibility, and hard work. Furthermore, I am eager to be able to spend time with the majority of these brilliant individuals on our trip to China in January.
The TAs, professors, and other course instructors are working hard behind the scenes to put together the logistics of the website. Shout out to our wonderful library friend Tierney, who has been helping the class and the TAs with the digital aspects technology stuff all semester, including getting the website in working order. With her guidance, the TAs have created our homepage map that will link to each team’s homepage. Additionally, the TAs have done a lot of editing and putting links within the website and things like that. Now, the teams have to worry about their presentations coming up very soon, and everybody else has to worry about perfecting the website for its official induction into the ever-growing field of Silk Road research! So, here we go!
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Category Archives: Silkworms
All of the blog posts for the Silkworms.
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
This week, the Silkworms have been working with Tierney to add the Google MyMap to the homepage and to proofread and perfect the rest of the site. I am enjoying this phase because I finally feel as if I am digging my hands into the actual project and contributing to its creation. It has been interesting for me to sit back and supervise throughout this process, and while I have enjoyed that dynamic and have felt that I have made a difference in that way, I am happy to be creating something concrete. I am enjoying focusing on the aesthetics of the website as well. Last week, I got to see Team Tongue’s project come together as a polished product. This week, I am getting to put the finishing touches on elements that connect the four projects into one cohesive, online academic tool. The Silkworms are the ones pulling this project together and I have appreciated being able to be a part of that element of our progress as a class.
At this point, it all feels sort of surreal. This project was ambitious; none of us have ever attempted something like this and it is a foreign concept to Guilford College. Although I came into the process later than many (I was asked to be a Silkworm late this past summer), I feel a deep attachment to this project and its success. It is very fulfilling to watch it coming together so beautifully. I am constantly thinking back to the stages of the project when the students asked us what was going on and we asked the professors and the professors stared back, just as confused as the rest of us. This project has been all about teamwork, from the teaching team to our project teams to our entire class as a team working towards this final project. Every person has had a distinct role in this project’s success and I believe that each of us feels like we own it.
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Backstage
On Tuesday, we finished the Storymap. Or at least, we thought we did. There is still a lot of work to be done and things to be fixed. It is mostly aesthetical, but it has added up to a lot to fit into the next few days. Just a little bit longer and then we are live!
At times like these, I am so grateful for both my teams. Throughout this project, I have developed not only close relationships with my classmates, but productive one’s, too. My teammates have my back, whether they are a part of the Silkworm family or a member of my Heart. I wish that I had the opportunity to engage with my peers on this level in my other courses. This was an unexpected outcome of this course. Yes, we had course objectives that targeted content/skill, but we did not even stop to think about the value of student collaboration. At least I didn’t.
As a silkworm, it has been amazing to see the ups as well as the downs through out this course. Every person I talk to is having a different experience. Everyone seems to have focused on one thing or another based on what suites their fancy. Although the content of this course still strikes me as not particularly cohesive, I do believe that every single person has gotten something out of it. It is impossible to look at these map’s and think otherwise.
To a degree, because I am a Silkworm, I feel like I’ve almost missed out on the satisfaction of generating a topic and becoming absolutely infatuated with. Yes, I get to learn totally awesome things from the hard work my classmates put in, but I do not actually have anything to contribute. It’s weird–although these last few weeks would have been far more stressful had I been writing up the project, it is projects like these that make me feel like I’ve accomplished something. It’s at the end of a big project that I realize (time after time) why I am in school, and I appreciate it.
That said, although we are so close to being done, the course does not feel complete yet. I’m missing something, still. Will I shake this feeling when the website goes live? Or perhaps when I go to China?
I’ll have to wait and see. But for now, I am so proud of us all. Now for the finishing touches…
This is one of my favorite clips from the movie The Illusionist, made by Sylvain Chomet. Perhaps seemingly irrelevant, but it struck a chord with me. This is what’s going on back stage; this is TRUE TEAMWORK.
All's Well that Ends Well
Over the past two and a half months, I have had the pleasure of directly supervising the Tongue Team project as a silkworm. Frankly, I feel like I got the best part of the deal—I got to be a part of two different teams: the teaching team and the student team. From the very beginning, before the students were even involved, the teaching team (made up of 2 professors, 3 library/tech specialists, and 4 TAs/silkworms) knew that we wanted the center of this course to be a research project on a student-generated topic completed as a group and presented online. We were not sure how to get to this end goal, but we knew that that was where we were aiming. I served as the middle-man between my group and our professors, an overseer of group dynamics and timely progress, a strict editor, and a morale-booster (hence my alias). At times, the only help I could provide was asking if they were being overly ambitious given, our time constraints. At others, my contribution was sitting at a round table in the library proof-reading for six hours straight. There were bumps along the way, as to be expected, but, standing here at the end, I am amazed at how magnificently this project came to embody our dream for the course. We hoped that students would find a topic they could really be excited about; we hoped they could create something that they could share with the world. I genuinely hope that they are as proud of themselves as I am of them. I anticipate that digital humanities will continue to gain momentum and evolve throughout my lifetime. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Almost to the Deadline!
Uyghur dancing, Urumqi, Xinjiang, Ludo Kuipers, 2014
So the Sky Team had our next to last meeting before the Story Map and accompanying introduction, conclusion, and bibliography pages are put onto the website and finished for Tuesday November 15. I had a bit of a panic moment because before this meeting, the Story Map was empty and the introduction and conclusion were barely started. However, the team worked hard to put up information the night before our weekly meeting. I think that they had mostly everything ready, and they just needed to input information into the Story Map. However, there is still a good bit of writing, editing, and perfecting that needs to happen before this coming Tuesday, including citations. The team plans to meet Monday morning to do any last edits and make sure everything is ready to be seen by the public.
After the teams post their information to the website, the TAs will then begin our part of the project of creating a front page interactive map that has all of the points from each of our teams, which will be linked to each team page, respectively. The TAs will also be involved in writing introduction information about the course and class content and goals overall, as well as making sure the overall look and feel of the website is intuitive and appealing. I think that the TAs’ job will be a good amount of work crammed into a week and a half, but not impossible. All of the TAs are planning to have a get-together where we will input information and have each other there if we have any questions about the technologies we will be using.
The website goes live right after we get back from Thanksgiving break, so it is ideal to have everything done before break, that way we do not have to worry about it. I am very apprehensive about putting all of the class’s work on a public platform where people will be able to read, see, and judge our writing, knowledge base, and technological skills. However, I think that the entire class has done a fantastic job at learning so many new technological skills in such a short time, while simultaneously balancing the readings, quizzes, research, and blog posts for this class (let alone balancing everything outside of this class). I am really very proud of everyone in the class, but I am especially proud of my team in particular. We had a few rough spots where we were frustrated that there was not enough communication, or that we were not moving fast enough with the project. I think in large the rough spots were due to different work habits, which could have been due to the difference in ages within the team. Our team was the only one with an age disparity like ours, with two high school aged students and one adult student in the same group. It made for interesting interactions and team dynamics. There definitely had to be a lot of negotiation and patience from everyone’s side. However, at least up until this point, with the deadline for the project within a few days, I think that the team is feeling more cohesive than ever and I know we can push through and make a great product for the website.
Experimental Room Recap
Today in class we were able to set a date of completion for our final project. This will be taking place on Thursday at around 9pm in the Hub. I am truly excited to be seeing our Team Earth page on that day. Of course, it will not be perfect, hence the earlier date than the actual deadline, but that’s what our group meeting will be considering. Numerous tweaks will be required such as the implementation of our story map and other coding to make the page be more visually appealing.
As a silkworm, I will be focusing on aiding the team in the visual aspects of page. Learning how to add things such as “jump links” that would take the reader to different sections of the page if they so wish to. Also, adding in autoplay codes that will play a specific youtube or soundcloud (for example) link when the reader goes into the page. So forth, these will be the things that I would wish to contribute in and hopefully be able to support the members of Team Earth.
Slipping Bye
Somehow it slipped by me to write my post last week–SO get ready for a double-whammy! I’m sure I’ll have lots to talk about, as we are getting ready for data input! Hopefully by Wednesday we will have all information/media gathered, written up, and ready to upload. Tierney will then help us actually upload it all.
Last week the Silk Worms met with Tierney and played around with Google My Maps. It was SO cool! Very straightforward and easy to use, and very perfect for this project. In fact, I kind of want to just make a Google My Maps for every trip I’ve ever taken. It’s that useful of a tool.
My desire to use this database operated by Google makes me think on how we can’t use Google in China What an enormous barrier! I don’t usually have to think about censoring or about what information is forbidden. It all started to seem really real during the break-out session for the abroad trip when we were discussing what reading we had to do while in the U.S. and how we should clean off the documents that we have been reading in class just in case they’re a red flag. I have so many documents on my computer that I love and cherish and look back on continuously. It’s like my own little library on here. I guess I’ll just have to back it up on a hard drive…
Last week was all about maps. Maps, maps, maps. I actually really enjoyed it. When I was younger, I didn’t even no where my own state was on a map, let alone Kuqa, China. I really had it in my head that geography was something that I could not do–that my brain was not fit for it. What I’m starting to see with these tests is that I am perfectly fit (then again, I haven’t actually gotten the test back…). The world actually makes sense! Borderlines are not arbitrary, they are built to fit the land. That is why, I am particularly pleased that this map actually involved us drawing the lines, not just marking a dot. That said, it was shockingly hard to do it. It was like learning how to draw cartoons–you learn how to draw 1000 perfect circles, and then you’ll know how to draw any cartoon in the world. But this was more like scribbling. And I still only know how to draw Central Asia.
Here’s a stupid youtube video of my surprisingly favorite cartoon character to draw–Tazmanian Devil. You better laugh.
Chugging Along
At this point, I am so proud of how my group is working. This week, members of my group actually stopped to ask our professor whether they could continue to add to the project after the due date just for fun because they are so interested in the topic. They are every TA’s dream. I feel really good about where they are in their individual research, their planning of the digital synthesizing of their ideas, and the personal dynamics between team members. I think that they have done a great job creating deadlines and sticking to them. I’ve also been very impressed at how well they’ve coordinated this one single topic to showcase each individual person’s strengths. I am honestly shocked at smoothly this process is going. If I worry about anything with my team, it is that I worry they are biting off more than they can chew (Tongue group…ha…ha…) with building the Tandoor oven, but they are planning to get the first round of cooking done this weekend after building it this weekend so I do think they can stay on track. I admire that they have been trying to go so above and beyond and have really embraced how much they care about this project. I have tried to push them to remember to start drawing the lines on what is going to be too much to cover and just focus on completing the tasks that they have already started.
The TAs started working with Tierney this week about creating our project in the Google MyMap section. I am a little nervous to see how my group’s project comes together to create my part, since my group has chosen to mostly abandon the StoryMap program and are focusing considerably more on tracing things through time, rather than a linear geographical narrative. I think it will definitely be doable to translate it into points that will work on our Google MyMap, but I think it will take a bit more digging and decoding for me to find the points—making sure that I pick out the locations within their narrative. I also think that I may have a lot more use of individual points with icons and without connections than other groups.
Below, I am attaching a view that explores the idea of digital humanities. We will be presenting the findings of our class at a faculty development program in the near future, so I have been thinking more and more about the concept of digital humanities and how that can be integrated into the future of education.
Traveling across the books of the silk road
Our group had a meeting at the Hub this evening, and it was very productive. The members of Team Earth were on track, creating a new deadline for all of our projects before the actual one. In the meeting we jotted down new ideas such as what to add into the earth group page. One of which included music from the silk road such as Mongolian Throat Music, playing automatically as the reader is scrolling through our page. This was very stressful and actually getting the codes to work for the automatic audio loop took around 30+ minutes. However, once executed properly, it was beautiful. We planned on creating a file that was invisible, hidden within the code, and would play as soon as the reader clicked on the earth page, playing, for example, Mongolian throat music and going on an audio loop (which you are listening to right now, and if you aren’t, turn that volume up!). Hopefully the reader does not become annoyed, but we doubt they would be on the page for numerous hours as well as not have a volume control button on their laptop/computer. However, there will be talks concerning how we will dead with audio playback, seeing if it really is necessary to prevent readers from turning it off on the youtube clip/soundcloud clip itself.
Further into the meeting one of the members, Austin, is bringing in a book concerning the travels of marco polo, called “marco polo: from venice to xanadu”. The great part about this novel is that it also includes a sort of commentary from a well-known author, Laurence Belgreen, whom in which will be explaining the travels more thoroughly. This would very much help Austin in his part on Marco Polo’s travels.
Also, Sam added valuable input such as a possible voice-over of the readings that would be on the earth page. And pertaining to what I mentioned earlier, concerning the automatic audio-loop, an automatic play of Sam’s voice narrating the story is also highly possible. On another note, his work is in track and has started to create a story map that will be based on his email so that they can contribute their works in that single file, due to sharing not being possible for story map.
Lastly, but important as well, Jake. He too is on track with the project. With his side project concerning the secret history of Mongolians, Jake has contributed a lot of great thoughts into the hub meeting and were all excited to see what the page will turn out to be in the end of our custom deadline (which is around november 9th).
Still Moving Forward
The Sky Team met this past week and we set down definite dates that the group will need to have certain things finished by in order to get the project done on time. Among other things, we set dates for having drafts completed, for setting outlines for the Story Maps, and for inputting information into the website and Story Map. However, I worry that the team is really behind overall. The research is not completely done yet, and we are still unsure how to construct a narrative. I believe that the team should have been more proactive about the project, and the team should have been meeting more often and talking much more often than what has been going on up until this point. We have until November 15 to get everything done by, which is rapidly approaching. My hope is that having set deadlines for each part of the project will get the group to turn it into high gear. At this point, the project will take dedicated time pretty much every day in order to have a finished project that is ready to be seen by the public eye. In order to be proactive and make sure we make the official deadline, we set a deadline for the whole project our on November 11. This will hopefully make sure we really have everything done and give us some elbowroom if something goes wrong and we need those extra three days to fix up the project.
Other Worries:
The biggest roadblock right now seems to be the language barrier. It is hard researching the fashion and beauty ideals of a culture that uses a language (or languages) that you do not understand. The team is using all of the resources that we have available, such as Google translations (which can be problematic) and one of our professors who is Chinese and can help us translate some of our artifacts.
Lastly, something that sort of bothers me as the deadline for the project approaches is that the team has not reached out to me for help. I know that they are having some difficulties, but if they do not come and talk to me, there is only so much that I can do in regards to leading them and nudging them along to get stuff done. I am doing the best I can when we meet as a team, but ultimately I cannot force them to do their research, or meet up more, or communicate more.