I'm working currently in the "critique" section (up around G-ish in fiction reviews).

I have done the interpretations, children's book reviews, and am now working on fiction reviews. I don't plan to write up instructions; I'll just do them all ASAP. Of course, if I go into labor tomorrow, this turns out to be a bad strategy. But there are so many oddities about the critiques, I thought this would be easier.

It'd be great to hear an update about what everyone else has done, esp. so there's no overlapping.

These instructions are slightly updated; however, they have been tainted by my PC. You can also find the instructions in the /VG for CLA Redesign/ folder on the Mac desktop.
Download file

Please read through these instructions; let me know if any of it doesn't make sense. They're my version of the CLA-OIT instructions (most of it's been approved by Programmer Dan over there).

*I'm taking A-F to begin with (although I've only gotten through about 12 in the As so far).
*Adam and Brianna are taking T-Z.
*Please suggest below what letters you might take, clarifications needed in the instructions, etc. Thanks!

VideoAnt

An example of sharing a VideoAnt with others for editing

An example of sharing a VideoAnt in a view only format

One site that can help with converting video to usable format

More to come soon!

The Good: The technical stuff will be handled by capable web designers and developers whose job it is to make websites in CLA. They know a lot about web design and web architecture. And, they can implement a site that is sustainable whether we have four RAs working or just one humble volunteer. Here's a list of recent work they've done (I particularly like elements of Asian L & L and PoliSci). They've done a number of department websites, so in some ways we present a new challenge for them since our site is a different species.

Asian Languages and Literatures
CLA
Geography
Political Science

The Bad:

First of all, CLA can't begin working on the site until May. What we can do in the meantime is get all the content in updated and ready. (Marcia has made a wonderful tutorial on how to format the content for Microsoft Word according to the web team's standards).

Secondly, by going with CLA, we move from off-the-radar to on-the-radar in terms of being an 'official' U site. On the plus side, that means our website will meet the best accessibility standards so that visitors with special needs or visitors with slower internet connections will still be able to interact with our site. BUT, this also means we have to have the U's "universal header" in maroon and gold at the top of our page. Asian L&L snuck in one of the last integrated headers, but from now on the header has to be like it is on the English mainpage.

Marcia and I have worked up a basic draft of the navigational hierarchy, which I will bring to the meeting on Wed.

I also met with Emily Paulson about the giving content. I'll talk about that on Wed. There are some ways we might improve the language of the giving content, which is another thing we can discuss on Wed.

In other news, we have had 10,000 visitors in the last 3 days! Zora Neale Hurston is our most viewed writer this the week.

Look around the site I link to above to get more information on transcription and recording tools and how they might be useful to us.

*Potential UROP students were introduced, Lauren and Valerie. Lauren discussed what she might be interested in, was “pretty open.”

DHANA-MARIE

*13 Minutes left in transcription
*Aleta talked about VideoAnt (can it do audio?) and would look into transcription software
*Moodle set up: File drawers or for “cleaning up the mess”—Marcia and Dhana-Marie to talk about
*Up through P in cleaning up bios
*Went to meeting with undergrads, working on presentation for classrooms (test presentation in Dhana-Marie’s class

D-M NEXT:
*Interested in interviewing local writers
*Continuing above

MARCIA

*Down through M in cleaning up bios
*Style sheet
*Take off “new” label from non-new bios
*Children’s books—compile info about children’s authors on site
*Did the “edited to be coded” bios; will help D-M with some coding issues
*Also going through critiques for dead links
*Emails from instructors interested in using site in their class; other emails

MLQ NEXT:
*Will work on information-architecture issues w/Adam
*Will work on ways to involve students w/D-M and Kim
*Continuing above

MARIA

*Submitted grant app for $20K
*Feasibility of $250K grant?
*Should VG stay in English?
*We want to interview

MARIA NEXT
*Will work on guest speaker for spring event
*Will look into VG class for fall—what happened? Can we still have it?
*Continuing above

KIM

*Class presentations—D-M reminds that we need to focus on the “what’s in it for me” angle
*Student organization
*Spring event (Lind 150, budget, small open mic and featured readers—Maria will look into this if Kim emails her reminder)
*General “marketing stuff”

KIM NEXT
*Will start student organization
*Will send out boilerplate email and start classroom presentations

ADAM

*Dreamweaver (server situation)
*Mockups/redesign
*Google Analytics report

ADAM NEXT
*Will port to Dreamweaver
*Will look into updating Dreamweaver
*Will begin on redesign
*Will add “donate” button

REDESIGN ISSUES

*What should we push?
*Maria: Interviews
*Marcia: More interactive content—blogs in book reviews, guest blogs, other forms of networking/interaction?
*Donate button (Adam)
*Multiple “axes” of affiliation (or, as Aleta says, tags)

GRANT ISSUES, ORPHANS

*Soros Foundation—who was going to look into this?

Also i'm interested in bringing poet Hermine Pinson to campus for a reading. She had some medical thing happen (a stroke or something) that made her speech and language thing really interesting, and she wrote a book about it. My friends at Rain Taxi saw her give a reading and they sd it was really great.

Spent some time with Aleta yesterday catching up with the Moodle. It
will take a few days for the system to send us an email saying we have
an account. In the meantime, I'm doing a demo to get more familiar
with how our Moodle might be managed. If anyone has ideas about how
to best organize the files, send a message otherwise I'll just look at
what we want filed virtually and make up some categories. Since the
Moodle is a kind of test file that we may discard later, I won't worry
so much about specifics.

What other kinds of the Current News and Events idea, might we want to
post in that area? Are there other people going to conferences/events
that could send us information that we could quickly glean and post on
the site? AP-style news bits are super easy to write, they're just
names, dates and information and can be gleaned from just about
anywhere. In a world where people are constantly piped electronic
news, updates about artists generally come secondhand or by word of
mouth. Maybe this is another direction in which the site could go to
attract new audiences and sources of funding.

dhana

Do you think our undergraduate volunteer would want to serve as an officer?

Should we make a ruling? I know, nit-picky, but...

Whereas we want people to come here: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/index.html, no?

I can't work on this until Friday so if someone's in earlier this week maybe you can add this to your task list. Plus, I'm not sure on protocol for updating bio content.

I did a preliminary response email so Deia knows that we got her message.