After presenting our Assignment 4 and getting feedback, our group decided that we wanted to continue expanding our project, sticking with the same content idea but moving it into new territories. We decided the main way in which we will do so is expand the project to include user-generated content.
At the start of this week, I was the only one in class so I did a basic expansion of this idea after Hannah ran through the assignment parameters. A new requirement of the project is that it includes at least two media types- i.e. video and text, image and text, image and video, and so on. While also thinking about user-contribution, this reminded me of the twitter feeds from the Are You Happy project- and gave me the idea for our project of including social media text contributions. In a perfect world, this would be automated, but more realistically will involve us entering the tweets/text into the project manually. Nonetheless, this adds another dimension to the project, and also would encourage more submissions (if people can’t record their voice, they can easily write it down!)
Making the Biggest/Big/Small chart, I settled on a short summary of our project: an online, interactive project that explores the theme of bad (or unlucky) travel experiences. It will have the characteristics of modularity, interactivity, variability, multi-linearity, and user-generated content. The scale will be as large as possible.
While researching similar projects and academic writings to influence our project, the next few questions directly relating to our project were what software is accessible to use and appropriate for this project, and how can we get people to submit content? We are yet to work out an answer to the latter question (and it is not yet a priority), but made some significant progress in the software question in Thursday’s class.
The class began with a discussion about the importance of interface in our projects. Hannah reminded us that unlike traditional linear film, the media elements that make up our project are presented in an interface which is equally important as the elements, and has significant gravitas on the user experience. There should be meaning and significance in the interface that relates to the content. The Quipu Project is a great example of how the interface has been designed incredibly well to add meaning and depth to the project, and the media elements within. The interface relates, calls upon and engages with deep historical and cultural traditions of the Peruvian people that the project focuses on. At this point, we were unsure of what our interface would be but knew we would be moving away from Kosakow. In our pitch in week 8, Steph mentioned different software that allowed the author to place videos or media content on a map, creating the interface of a map with clickable content.
The aforementioned importance of the interface supports our decision to create a map-based interface. The map adds another dimension to this project- a new way to think about the content, in a world-wide sense, where bad luck can strike anywhere. We decided to explore this map-based interface possibility. After a lot of frustrating searching, we found that while we had a great idea of what the project could look like, there probably wasn’t an easily accessible software available to do what we wanted. Ideally, we could have both the map system and key word tagging (allowing multiple ways for the user to explore the content), with some kind of automated twitter feed too. We soon realised that any of these elements on their own are hard to find in software, so they would be even harder to find together. Software either required payment, the ability to write code, didn’t offer anything we wanted or were just generally confusing. It was a frustrating process but just as we started to have the feedback session, Antonia found Google My Maps, software that allows people to create customised maps with layers, markers, lines, and embedded media (attached to the markers). The markers can even have different icons- allowing some kind
We soon realised that it was definetely the best option we’d found so far. It works through uploading videos to YouTube and then embedding the video into the software. While it can potentially be editable by anyone (as it is part of the Google suite), we don’t want to open up the backend of the project to the world, and consequently will use a different submitting system.
We received really positive feedback from everyone we talked to, everyone was supportive of the map interface.