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?

Joining the Haitian Art Digital Crossroads (HADC), led by Dr. Petrouchka Moïse, has definitely been a learning curve for me. This semester, I’m working on building a Kreyol Thesaurus that people who can read English, French, and/or Kreyol can access to help build a multilingual vocabulary for discussing Haitian art. Right now, there will be two parts: a functional search and reference thesaurus & an interactive game to learn these words. I’ve been very much in the learning, planning, discussing, and researching process. I’ve consulted Tierney and Libby for references and done my independent research how to build a functional search and interactive word games.

My previous Vivero project, Women’s Studies Worldwide (WSW), with Dr. Clara Montague built off of her dissertation work, and we were learning how to use ArcGIS together. HADC, however, has much more student workers and is years into its establishment. Where I was just working with one individual most of the time in WSW, my work is now in more direct conversation with other workers’s work. Oddly, this project feels more difficult to do compared to WSW, though I have more familiarity with the digital tools. This planning and thinking has been where I’ve been stuck on for a while because Dr. Moïse made it clear to me that we were going to discover the right tool, or tools, to use together. This project is trilingual, rather than bilingual, which also requires another layer to this thinking and researching process. It has been exciting to be able to that doesn’t map perfectly onto one tool, but it has definitely slowed down being able to see a product come to life. But my project lead often talks about emphasizing process, and I think there’s value in that.

As for next steps, it’s implementation time! First, I have to compile a master spreadsheet with all the words, definitions, and pictures. I will be testing out ways on WordPress to display them and make them most easily searchable. Following (or possibly in tandem with) the functional reference thesaurus, I will move onto the interactive word games. I imagine familiarity with the words and how they feel best organized will lend itself to making the interactive games.