Group members: Melanie Xu and Shatian Wang
For the second half of this term, Shatian Wang and I have been working oon a project extrapolating upom my senior thesis examining queer women communities in contemporary urban China. From the ethnographic data at hand, we built a wordpress site comprising of visual representations of every narrator’s life framed through their migration (within and outside of China) patterns, educational and work paths as well as personal voices and experiences. For each interlocutor’s story, we have created a wordpress page accompanied by a arcGIS story map narrating their movements and desires. Above all, we created an “about” page as an introduction to who we are and what our project is about, at the end of which page introduces a story map containing all of our interviewees’ current location and information.
Our hope is to contextualize personal narratives in macro-level political, cultural, and economic changes and to archive important narratives often underrepresented in academic accounts. Our project can be found and explored here. We welcome any suggestions and comments.
http://lalaproject.melaniedmxu.com/
As a result of a series of unforeseen events, Melanie isn’t able to join the class on this upcoming Thursday–below is a video recording of our presentation. Thank you for watching this project unfold. We appreciate it.
I really like the humanities aspect of your project. I feel like much of the class approached this assignment by trying to fit humanities into a “digital” project. Yours feels the opposite, in a sense. It seems like a humanities project that you can provide with a uniquely engaging display and interface using the tools we’ve learned in this class.
Great job!
I think its really cool that your project uses field research collected by a member of your group. I also think its great to see the use of digital tools to extend any non-digital research project. While certain information may be lost in the digitization process, having a visual and interactive aspect to any project may engage a wider audience. I really enjoyed going through the arcGIS story map and reading about the lives of the women that you interviewed.
Great job!
I agree with David’s earlier comment and as such would like to know if you had considered any other project topics before deciding on this one and if so what were they?
The Video Presentation was a nice touch. I know that you probably only ended up doing it because Melanie wasn’t in town, however, It definitely had a polished air that far surpassed the in-class presentations. I would suggest to Austin that it be taken into advisement in the futre as a choice for all the teams. It would allow for experience with yet another digital medium through which to convey information.
Also, nice clean and simplistic website keeps the focus on the information your trying share.
Noted, maybe posting a polished and recorded Pecha Kucha by class time…
I’m glad you both were able to present your work in class, even though Melanie wasn’t able to be there in person. 🙂
I was wondering where you got the illustrations that are one each woman’s page? Did you do them yourself?
Wow, I’m so glad there was a team that actually had some fieldwork, the data collected is very unique in that you had personal connections with the people you interviewed.
Melanie and Shatian,
As others have commented, I really appreciate the fact that you had collected your own data for this project and told the histories of women you had personally interviewed in an engaging way through digital storytelling techniques. The content is fascinating, and your presentation of it is easy and informative to read.
My main critique concerns the use of the storymap template, which seems both underused and a bit overkill as employed here. You have six separate maps which each only contain two slides, and the text in the story maps repeats the text on the website. It would be much more effective to break this up and pan and zoom around the map in the templates as you tell each aspect of the story (see this tutorial).
That said, this was a great concept for a project and your illustration of the stories with the maps added a great digital presentation to an already very interesting project. Well done.