As stated in my April 6th project update, releasing this project into the world has felt surreal. For so long in the semester, it was a purely conceptual project existing in our minds, and now the mural is proudly on the wall and the website looks professional and informative. Overall, my experience has been positive, and definitely my most meaningful at UMW. Every group member pulled their weight and delivered exactly what was expected of them. While battling WordPress and deadlines, we have managed to make a project that I believe we are all proud of, and excited to be a part of.
When looking back specifically at the contract portion of this class, I am sad to state that we were a little too optimistic. We dreamt really large when we created the contract, thinking that it would only take us until February 25th to finalize the website text and the website wrapped up on March 29th. We had neglected to consider how much work that each step would take (for example, we could not finalize the text for the website until we had access to the interviews, which took a significant amount of time by itself BEFORE the transcription process.) We also had created this contract without knowing things such as the quick turnaround of the mural text as well as the length of time that fact-checking would take. While we had the website text completed on March 8th, as expected in the contract, it was not yet fact checked and correctly cited. If we had anticipated the length of time that would have taken, we would have set more specific deadlines to break up the text deadline and the final text deadline. While I am proud of the finished product, and I loved being in this group, I definitely would have based the project on a more realistic contract and limited the expectations of the website from the start.
With that being said, many of our deadlines were still right on target. We had finalized the mural text in time for the mural deadline, and while our website finalization was much later than we had anticipated, we still had it completed in time. We had dreamt up some other aspects, such as a story map following the life of Venus Jones, however it was sacrificed due to time constraints. This story map idea was never on the contract, so we did not necessarily fail in that aspect.
While our contract was not a perfect display of our actual timeline, it did serve as a road map to give us both a sense of urgency and a comfort of being at a relatively set pace. I would definitely have changed it now, but I feel as though it has been achieved. Outside of just the contract, I feel as though I have a much stronger grasp on digital tools as a whole, and intend on using them much more than I previously had. Thank you everyone for your feedback, and for following along with our journey!
