Student Life Project Update

Megan Gleason
Fri, 27 Feb 2015 03:34:02 +0000
Student Life... in their own words, Adron Mason, ArcGIS, Brennan Kuo, Carleton, history, Maureen Kalkowski-Farrand, oral histories, SketchUp, student life

So far, our group has listened to and partly transcribed the (few) recorded oral histories given by alumni prior to the class of 1917, gathering details about four individuals’ lives at Carleton. While talking about our findings it’s fun to think about how much has changed and what seems to have remained the same, and hearing these stories reminds us of the importance of recognizing different experiences across time.

We found out some really interesting information about where and how people spent their time, such as societies in which they were involved, where they gathered with friends, and how campus policies affected their lives and leisure time. We plan on including these specific details as part of location descriptions in the map we will create of Carleton’s campus in ArcGIS. Incorporating audio clips, photos, and articles into our map will put these details in context. We will construct the buildings in SketchUp and use photos of buildings from the Carleton Archives.

During the exercise about Network Analysis with class and society members from the Algol yearbook, a few group members discovered some overlap between the oral history recordings and documented information. We plan on looking into these overlaps more as we gather materials based on information given in the recordings. As suggested in our original project proposal, we specified our strategy of storing information and (meta)data, utilizing Google Drive to share sheets and documents among group members.

Some of the issues we’ve run into so far:

Transcribing takes forever, so we had to put that part of the project on the back burner to focus on the actual content of the recordings.

The alumni authoring these recordings were not necessarily at Carleton at the same time. We have to try to address the problem of having a less-than-linear narrative for our project.

We’ve had a bit of trouble throughout the process conceptualizing our project and moving forward with technologies we don’t have much experience with.

Although frustrating at times, these issues haven’t really compelled us to change our plan so much as made us narrow our scope and focus. We are going to stick to the oral history aspect of our project and expand on/visualize the stories in the recordings rather than construct a large data set of less specific information. Going forward we might need help with specific problems related to integrating our data into ArcGIS. As for the problem regarding alumni not being at Carleton at the same time, adding the time element in ArcGIS could show interesting physical changes on campus (like the chapel being built) to correspond to our students’ different experiences. We’re also considering includong text that introduces the individuals that gave the oral histories to give more background to the project.

Updated timeline:

This (8th) weekend:

explore possibility of shared ArcGIS file, look into how program can represent our information

individually investigate buildings and people based on our Carls; dig into photos, yearbooks, Carletonian

get started on new SketchUp buildings/look at buildings already assigned to classmates for our particular stories

Next week:

incorporate photos, buildings we/others made in SketchUp, and other info we find in publications into ArcGIS

work with bringing audio into ArcGIS and play with time element

work on introducing our Carls to give the map more meaning