Overall, my project is moving along smoothly. There have been a few times when work slowed down due to issues arranging meetings with my project lead, but I’ve been able to keep things moving overall. The first few weeks involved a lot of planning and creating a vision for the semester. Because the project is so longstanding, figuring out what tasks would be the most impactful and how best to accomplish them took some time. I’ve settled on a dual track of content development for a unit on Taino history and the development of a glossary feature for the site, mostly utilizing definitions that a previous research assistant for the project compiled.
The content development segment is very familiar territory for me because I previously worked with Professor Michaels, my project lead as a research assistant doing developmental work on the unit I’m currently continuing the development of. Like a lot of work on large projects, a lot of my time has been brainstorming and drafting work that will be refined over time.
The glossary feature for the website has been somewhat more difficult because there aren’t many established tools for creating glossaries or indexes for websites on Omeka. I’ve been experimenting with the use of anchor tags on Omeka a little bit but will get to work with that more when I’m back on campus after break. I’m also working to fill in the gaps in the definitions of terms from lessons and clean up the data (definitions) that will be going into the glossary.