Hello hello and welcome to my Week 10 blog reporting live from quarantine.

So as you’re aware (clearly) no presentations took place this week, in all honesty, nothing took place this week. This week has been nothing but sitting at home looking at what needs to be done for school and life, getting set up on slack and just watching the news and twitter hoping this will all be over soon.

I have this blog post and an Audio project to finish up tonight before “Spring Break” starts even though we all now the break part won’t be anything but sitting at home and doing the same. Thankfully I have some online businesses to keep me occupied in the meantime.

As for contributions that took place this week, nothing, our group hasn’t been in too much contact this past week as we are all getting set up online. I’m sure as time passes we will reach out to figure out what we are going to do going forwards and you will be the first person to hear about it either through email or these blog posts.

I hope you’re staying safe and clean out there, hopefully this will all be over soon!

Well, it has been one horrible week so far. Last week, after the announcement of canceled classes, I was forced to pack up all of my possessions from my room and move back to NY for the next 5-6 months. I am nervous about the condition of the class as a whole as we are like deer in headlights, unsure of where to go next. My team members hopefully got to where they need to be safely and are awaiting what we need to do next. Since classes were canceled, there were no presentations done, so I cannot accurately critique what people presented. My bigger question is, how should my group proceed since this is technically the third time we are switching project topics. The first I easily own up to, I thought we could keep on working at the bar, but that did not happen as the owners completely stopped communicating with me. The hours my group and I could not fit in with their hours. Now that we have all left campus, it will be tough to work towards our goals and to work on our project. Especially with the amount of time we have left in the semester. I believe in us; we just need an excellent guide to help us out.

Hello hello! Welcome to my Week 9 blog at the end of Week 10.

I was out sick this week with a pretty nasty flu, thankfully I am feeling much better now, but it is a situation of too little too late it seems as things continue to fall apart with our world seemingly falling apart around us. I’m not sure if I will get credit for this one but I am rolling the dice!

Like I said I was out sick so I didn’t get to see any of the presentations but I am sure they were all great. Maybe a little repetitive considering it is kind of the name of the game with all of these but it’s fine.

My contribution for that week is about the same as my contribution will be for my week 10 blog, not a lot. It is a confusing time right now, and with these 2 weeks off before online stuff starts I would not be surprised if it got worse before it got better. Our group is trying to stay in contact the best we can but at this point who knows what will happen next.

This blog post is not like one we have written for this yet, considering all of the new changes that have occurred within the past week. Without class or interactive analysis presentations today, I can’t really complete the prompt for the week 10 blog. Because of this, I am just going to state some of my concerns for our upcoming project now that we have moved home and cannot work on our final project as a group during our designated class time.

The main thing I am concerned about with this project is getting enough media to fulfill the requirement. I have moved back to Omaha because my sorority house closed, and I am sure other group members are not in Lincoln anymore as well. This will make our project especially difficult because it is based off of coffee shops in close proximity to Lincoln and what they mean to college students. I also think it will be difficult for us all to find the motivation we need to complete the project, since we will not be meeting face to face. However, I know we will get it done. We are all committed to getting an A in this course and completing it successfully so we will do whatever it takes.

Obviously, due to the looming apocalypse that seems to be quickly in our midst, we didn’t have class. However of the many interactive analysis projects I have seen and blogged about, it seems to be a pattern that the most enjoyable ones utilize heavy visualization and little to no long written wordage. 

I think the real important concept that needs to be visited pertaining to our group and group project is the future logistics of our final group project. I really have no idea what this is going to look like now or how it is going to turn out but i do have faith in our collective desire to pass this class. 

I think that regardless of what happens and what the circumstances are we will put together a good and interesting project. Perhaps we will focus more on data or written accounts that we garnar through video chat, however this goes I really think that we will all be ok as far as this class and our final project. 

The first step for us is going to be to talk it out extensively within the next two weeks and figure out a game plan so that we can tackle this efficiently. Until then it is up in the air, but overall I am not incredibly worried for the future of our project and grade. 

As stated in my previously late blog post, due to the global pandemic and apparent apocalypse, I seemed to have temporarily lost all punctuality that I have gained over the last semester. For that, I apologize.

I did not get the chance to present an interactive analysis project this week however I did see some qualities in other people’s presentations that would be advantageous of the “sad journalism group” to emulate in our project. 

What I really noticed and appreciated was websites that utilized visualization and photography. Humans are such social creatures and, at the end of the day, we will pay attention to something that we think is aesthetically pleasing. The most engaging projects were ones that capitalized off of this. They provided concise written information and instead did the bulk of the communicating through visuals and short video. 

I hope that our group can take these examples and utilize these concepts within our project no matter how different it is from our original expectation. Even with the circumstances being what they are, I definitely think that we can still utilize visual storytelling in a way that is engaging and enjoyable to watch. 

First off I’d like to apologize for the tardiness of this blog post. This whole covid thing has thrown many many aspects of life off that involve me being on time for things. I promise that will change once these classes go officially online.

As for what I think is going well, I think our group is particularly equipped to create quality content, however due to the recent change in topics. I think many of us are unsure or unmotivated to set a new course of action.

That isn’t to throw any kind of shade because obviously I am part of that lot, but it is an observation that we will have to confront over the next few weeks, especially with the circumstances being what they are.

We have a topic that I think many of us are excited about. I think our biggest challenge at the moment is going to be figuring out the new logistics of our project and how we are going to structure it without being able to have access to as much media driven content.

I think within the next week we are going to be forced to reconvene and set out a new plan to get this project completed in an acceptable way by the time it’s due. Once we have a set plan, it should be marginally easy to follow through with it all.

I believe that the story websites were super exciting this week. One of the sites had a function that allowed the mouse to follow the birds around and move them around. It was a very tech-savvy website that fully developed the work of the coders that made it. I think the presentations from the group were outstanding, and I think they presented ideas that make my group want to try these techniques. The difficulty that my group has now come to is where to go with the class. Now that courses are online, we need to plan/coordinate what going on in the class. Then we need to see how we can proceed with finishing the project. We agreed that the project will definitely need to be about the Mill and other coffee houses and what the impact it would be on college kids. A great project with so many ideas for this it will be a perfect project for the campus culture. Our group will complete the project even if I go home to NY, I think that I can complete the video and graphic portion of the project. There won’t be any limit on what we could or could not achieve for this project, and I have faith that distance won’t stop us.

There were a few things that I saw in presentations this week that I thought would be useful for our project. The furniture website was interesting in how it matched the graphics it used to the themes of the different pages. I think this would be beneficial for our project as well. Our pages could have themes in general that not only graphics, but every piece of content match considerably well. I also liked the website that featured the story of the character escaping by boat. While this is not really relevant to our website set up, i do think we can thing of some of the aspects that were considered in the boat website. The extra little details that made the story better, like the shaking of the photos, the sound, and the graphics could all be relayed over to our website. After most of the presentations, its important that we make our final project engaging enough. Some of the presentations, while interactive, are not incredibly engaging. I think that we could really make the website fun to navigate and because it is not a serious topic, it can be more light hearted. This week we continued to plan out more of our new idea with the coffee shops. This consisted what the website would look like and what content would need to be gathered.

In the projects from this week, I saw different levels of interactivity. Some projects used mostly photos and videos to display the information while others were text heavy. In my opinion, I particularly liked the projects that had little text but were very interactive with visuals. If our project is too wordy, I believe many people will be turned away because they don’t want to read paragraphs. Because of this, we will utilize as many photos and videos as we can for our website. In these projects that were presented today, they all had external links that the user could click on and visit to learn more about the topic from another source. I liked this because it gave another perspective on the project topic that the website didn’t show. I was immediately drawn to the national park interactive website but was sad that the 360 videos were poor quality. For our project, we will avoid this by studying the equipment we will use to guarantee the highest quality possible.

This week, our group completed the preliminary submission document. We were challenged by finding enough media because we had to switch topics earlier that week. In the future, we will make sure to start our assignments earlier in the week so we aren’t scrambling last minute.