Tim Owens posted a great year in review. Being short on imagination, I decided to mercilessly copy him. Thanks, Tim! Realistically, though, I don’t have the tech know how to make a gorgeous layout like his. What I can do is track a couple projects as they have come to fruition, if nothing else to show the process to get things done.
About a year ago now, I first met with Martha Burtis to discuss the surveying the ‘burg interface. What followed were months of meeting for coffee and talking out what the site should do. In June, six months after our first meeting, Martha showed me the first draft of the site, complete with the magical plugin she wrote herself. It still needed a bunch of fine-tuning, which we both did before the start of classes. Even then, the process wasn’t over. Martha came to my class in September to explain the process to students. Once they started surveying, they asked for a few changes (like adding more answer options for some questions). Martha also resolved some last minute problems, such as changing the login options for comments, and adding pages when the posts became too big to load all at once. Once the surveying was over, the students kept using the site until the end of the semester, which happened last week, to get information they needed for the properties. And they also gave me a dozen good ideas for improving the site. So in the next few weeks, I’ll be knocking on Martha’s door again asking for her expertise once again.
The survey site process is really far from over. I feel confident resting on my laurels for a couple minutes, but really (a) these are not my laurels to rest on – they’re Martha’s – and (b) there’s much more to do. For one, fixing the ongoing issues of the survey will have to be tackled. As more cohorts add data, managing the thousands of properties will also become more challenging. Most of all, for me, the data set is eventually going to become usable for research. Certainly, this will take at least another couple years, but then the REAL hard work will start. What can be done with these data? I honestly don’t know yet, but I look forward to finding out.
Another project that took place this year was the elaboration of the image library. Unlike the survey site, it was not a clearly needed project. Instead, the library evolved out of a few discontinuous things that all got braided together.
In no particular order, these things happened:
– my department figured we really needed to look anew at HISP101 and its requirements, since the course has been taught for 30 years with little to no change. With the help of surveymonkey, I asked students what they thought of specific aspects of the course. Over 100 current and past students responded. This then informed a focus group which delved deeper on specific issues. All this resulted in a series of recommendations to change the syllabus and assignments.
– since the new honors program has taken off, departments have been asked to develop honors courses. HISP101 seemed like a good bet to us: it has high enrollment, there are a few different sections, and it’s taught every year. Since I had an open slot this fall, I volunteered to develop and teach our first honors HISP101.
– as I was participating in umwdomains, I had a conversation with Tim Owens about installs other than WordPress. I’m not sure what brought about the conversation, but he mentioned Zenphoto and I subsequently played around with it, trying to figure out what its capacities are.
– since I got to UMW in 2008, I’ve built up my image library of architectural and planning features. I use iPhoto – not by choice but rather because I haven’t found anything better – and have slowly added keywords to make searching easier. As of now, I have a little over 5500 images. It’s a great resource, but it’s not really shareable.
These disparate items all came together last spring as I was working on honors hisp101. From student comments, it was clear that a searchable image database would be useful for all HISP101 iterations. It seemed like something I could develop and then share with all faculty who teach the course, and then keep the resource available for everyone. So I took my iPhoto library, culled out the stuff that wasn’t relevant, and gave this library to a student aide who uploaded it to a Zenphoto install.
Zenphoto proved to be pretty good with this. In particular, it allows for metadata to stay with photos, which was crucial in this case: the keywords were the whole point! Zenphoto also has a few layout templates available, including one that’s perfect for viewing on mobile devices.
So after a few months of unrelated projects and ideas, everything came together to form the library. Students, alums, and anyone else can find architectural elements with easy searching, and with much more reliability than just googling. Unlike the survey site, it’s not really a major achievement, only an additional tool in the arsenal, but I’m still happy with it.
I’m not sure this post has a point. Do year in reviews have a point? If there’s something to learn, it’s that projects are never done. Or maybe that everything takes longer than you think it will. Or that even random supporting projects are useful. Or something.
The point is exactly what you’ve done here: To reflect on what you’ve done, pluses and minuses. Otherwise, it’s too easy to forget. I’m glad to see your post and look forward to hearing more in the future.