Team Wayback members: Chisom, Kavon, Gabby, Sean, Alyssa
Progress: We have collected our data from the WayBack site and made a collective google drive folder with screenshots and links to the screen-capture we are using from each year. Using this collected data, we made an average website design in Photoshop, and have begun to analyze trends in color, and image placement. We are also researching the current trends and technological capabilities between 1996-2020 so that we can see if Carleton’s website followed the current trends in website design/new technology, or if they made their own design. For text analysis, we have used Voyant to analyze the frequency of words and have taken screenshots of the data visualizations. We are not sure if we can download the saved data as html, but we plan to figure that out soon.
Problems: Initially, we had some trouble choosing which online tools we will use for our analyses. We were recommended to use Serendip, but that proved to be a bit more difficult than we expected, so we decided that Voyant would be the best option.
Applications: We are using the screen-captures of carleton.edu on the Wayback Machine as our data, Photoshop for our visual analysis, and Voyant for our text analysis.
Deliverables:
- By end of Tuesday class (3/2): have all analysis completed
- By beginning of Thursday class (3/4): have data visualizations completed
- In-class Thursday (3/4): make WordPress website and get it ready for presentation, write-up our thoughts/analysis on our data results
Team Wayback,
You all have made good progress and figured out some things that won’t work and some promising avenues that will. The basic data collection seems to have gone well, and it sounds like data viz is working, but not all of that work is in the google drive so I can’t say more at the moment.
As the pieces start to come together, make sure you are thinking through what it all means. What stories emerge about how Carleton presented itself to the world through its website? What does this say about this institution has changed over the years, and potentially about small liberal arts colleges more broadly? Have websites gained more prominence as marketing material? Does that reflect broader culture change?
Make sure your discussion engages both the history of web design and the specific history of Carleton’s front page.