VisualEyes/Somerville College project update


For my Somerville College project, I’ve begun constructing the project itself in VisualEyes and getting familiar with the platform. So far, I’m taking a “layered” approach to constructing my project: I’m using VisualEyes story feature to make one story per author as a find authors to include as a way to organize the data (basically, if I add a story for the individual it means they meet at least my minimum criteria to be included in my data set).

For the stories so far, I’m just included author name and birth/death years. Once I narrow down further to who is being included, I’ll go back and add the next layer: biographical info and writings and timelines. Then I’ll add yet another layer with the images.

It’s definitely an evolving project—similar to writing a paper, I’d say—in that I knew I needed to stop collecting data and start giving life to the data (and learn to use VisualEyes—one big difference from writing), but as I continue to dig deeper into the information and find more sources the story evolves a bit. For instance, I was planning to narrow my data set to the women who attended Somerville before they actually gave degrees, but there seem to be several really interesting authors/literary figures who were among the first class to receive degrees, so I definitely want to include them. So perhaps I’ll go back to my original timeline of 1900-1920 or 1910-1920.

I’m also realizing that even though VisualEyes is pretty user-friendly, the data entry (especially when you’re new to the technology) is time-consuming, so I may not be able to include as many authors as I would like for the scope of the project for this class. If I’m pleased with what I end up with this fall, though, I would love to build on it, but I know I have to be realistic about what I can accomplish in the first stage.

One dilemma I’m concerned about is getting images of the authors and book covers that are not copyrighted (or that I can get permission to use). I know we’ve discussed these kinds of issues some in class, but I need to look into it further for my particular situation.

I also still have to learn several aspects of VisualEyes—rather than try to learn it all at once, I’ve been learning it in stages. Thankfully the user guide Bill provides on the sight has very user-friendly step-by-step instructions. I’ve only encountered a couple instances of “Oh shoot, where did my data go?” or “how did I do that and how do I not do it again?” and each time I’ve managed to figure out what I did wrong with either Bill’s instructions or good old trial and error.


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