Reflect in a blog post in your portfolio site on your project work so far, and on your plans for the rest of the semester after Fall Break (at least 300 words). What have you accomplished? What are your next steps? What issues or obstacles have you encountered that you have resolved or that you are still thinking through? What lingering questions do you have about the project or about your next steps?

Over the past seven weeks, I’ve acquainted myself with various digital tools and the Women’s Studies Worldwide project. Dr. Clara Montague, my project lead, has done extensive work on this already (writing the dissertation, maintaining the data sets, some mapping work, etc.), and I’m coming in at a point where we’re trying to figure out the best way to represent her research. In particular, this project requires us to use ESRI’s ArcGIS to spatially and temporally represent the transnational history of academic feminism. At this point, I’ve developed a foundational understanding of this project, learned ArcGIS, and suggested ways to visualize the data. We’ve decided to make three maps: women’s studies programs, consortia, and discontinuations (we still haven’t landed on a perfect name). I have made two maps for the consortia map and made edits to a program map that Clara made with the help of Tierney and Libby.

Though I’ve had the opportunity to interact with ArcGIS a fair bit, I still feel somewhat unfamiliar with it. Two weeks ago, my lead and I met with Tierney and Libby to better understand how to best maintain our data for the ArcGIS system. They also took us through the process of making a first draft of the time-enabled program map, as mentioned before. This meeting was very helpful for the both of us. In making the consortia map, something I’ve felt more comfortable doing thanks to the support I’ve received, I’ve had trouble dealing with how to represent some of the consortia data. In particular, some institutions are part of multiple consortiums, which is difficult to represent as one dot. ArcGIS seems to want to only visually associate these institutions with a single consortium or no consortium at all. Though I haven’t figured out the answer, I’ve been trying to troubleshoot this issue by representing the consortia data as one column versus three columns.

As we continue this project for the rest of the semester, I’m excited to make and fine-tune more maps. I especially want to reach the point where we have the three basic maps down, so we can then revise them. I wonder about the best, most visually appealing ways to represent this data.