Final Project Proposal: Carleton’s Traditions over the Decades.

Members of the group: Maanya Goenka, Luisa Escosteguy, Kaylin Engerman, William Stepanski, Lewis Ching Zhi Yuan and Sophie Lefebvre.

For our project, we plan to create a timeline and StoryMap of notable Carleton traditions. We will synthesize work that has already been done (https://apps.carleton.edu/150/stories/traditions/) with location data and information about when traditions like Mai Fête started. Using sources such as the Carleton College achieves and the college’s website, we intend to create a timeline with the starting dates of important Carleton traditions and form a StoryMap that displays audio, video and pictures that accompany each tradition. By using all these forms of media, we hope to make an interesting and accessible model of past and present campus traditions. We based our project on two digital humanities projects: “150 years of Carleton” as a model for our Timeline JS, and the Squirrel Population Story Map as a good example of the story map that we hope to make. 

Proposed Methodology: 

For this project, we plan to use audio and visual data from the Carleton College Archives. We also will use the current Carleton College websites for a list of current traditions as a jumping off point (ex. https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/campact/traditions/) and depend on the timeline of Carleton events for some general information on starting dates (https://apps.carleton.edu/150/timeline/). We would like to analyze this data to find out when certain traditions began at Carleton and how they have been modified throughout the years. This might involve us transcribing a few of the audio recordings. We would need to group each tradition based on when it started as well in order to get an accurate sense of how to craft our timeline. 

To present on our data, we are going to use Timeline JS to show our results for the sequencing of traditions chronologically. ArcGis will be used to create an overlay map showing where the events on campus took place and visualize if any changes occurred in the location. We will use the StoryMap function in ArcGis to form an interactive timeline/visualization of the tradition themselves, that will include our ArcGis map. 

Suggested timeline of the project:

• Week 7: Project brainstorming and finalize the idea; Define tools and techniques. 
• Week 8:  Meeting with library staff for help navigating Carleton’s digital archives, finalize our list of traditions, gather all of our sources, pictures and videos for our two projects.
• Week 9: The creation of the timeline and story maps themselves.
• Week 10: Final touches, work on the Pecha Kucha presentation. Project should be published by Tuesday, March 9. The final version of the project will be available by March 15.