Category Archives: Group Project Updates

Newbery Outreach Plan

    • We will create a website for our project in addition to an Instagram and Twitter account. The website will include some “traditional” academic writing to contextualize the findings and point toward further readings. It will also feature sections “for librarians,” “for prize committees,” and “for educators,” among others 
    • We will reach out to members of our target audience (Librarians, Educators, DH community), Advisors to the Project (Diverse Book Finder, ALA and their sub organizations like the ALSC), Publications like School Library Journal and LIS Programs. 
    • Twitter and Instagram are going to be the best way for us to share our work. 
      • Twitter: this is the best platform for having conversations with established figures in the field and for the website to get shared the most. We would get the most interacting and followers there. 
      • Instagram: we can do infographics that could be widely shared using the story mode especially if they are graphically compelling. 
      • Facebook is just so overrun these days… and also sharing websites on there is pretty seamless… like we can submit to pages that would have interest in our content rather than having our own page. 
    • We can immediately begin sharing the critical lenses we are using while developing the project and the “importance” of diversity and prizes (I think I put quote there because I mean relative importance… rather that we will be evaluating these claims)
  • Creating a schedule for posting is important, at least once a week in the beginning and then increasing posts once the site is active and we are closer to launching. Outreach main person to post, but team can suggest content.
  • Worth thinking about retweeting vs. posting original content. Maybe an equal amount of both in the beginning, building relationships through retweets and commenting on posts. Then increasing original content.
  • Should set up a gmail account for the project, and include it on the website. Also a contact form directing to the gmail. Important for people who are not on social media, have many questions, or organizations/institutions that would like to discuss collaborations.
  • Who will be in charge of handling questions and comments from email address and contact form? One person will filter the messages and forward to the appropriate person.
  • Outreach goals: 
    • Bring awareness to the research topic to our audience
    • Increase traffic to the website and our research
    • Establish connections with those in our field to help support/endorse our project and for potential collaboration
  • Resources to help bring awareness
    • DH Now: an experimental, edited publication that highlights and distributes informally published digital humanities scholarship and resources from the open web.
    • Dh+lib: aims to provide a communal space where librarians, archivists, LIS graduate students, and information specialists of all stripes can contribute to a conversation about digital humanities and libraries.

Newbery Data Management Plan

Data Management Plan Draft

Our data will be collected and stored in .csv files through web scraping programs we create in python. In addition, we will manually collect diversity data using Wikipedia and author pages. Our data is replicable, should it become lost or unusable. Our dataset is temporally restricted, from 1922 – 2020, with incremental changes made only once a year. So, the data we gather this spring will be to date until January of 2021. We will store the data on our laptops, publishing them to Asana, and expanding them via Google Sheets. We will analyze the data in Tableau, storing locally and on Tableau Public.

We will document our data collection procedures by having a document of data issues available to our group through google docs and our project management software, Asana. We will also share our python code, used for scraping data, so it is available to the public. We will state where we find our additional data not initially scraped. Specifically for information related to Wikipedia, we will include our research collection period. If any new sites are used, they will be added to this list of sources. We will ensure good project and data documentation by having a data document available for the group to reference. Kelly and Emily will be responsible for implementing our data management plan. We will use common sense when naming our files and we will conduct a heading review before bringing our data into Tableau. We will use community standards when defining race and ethnicity in our data. We will use the standard of entering data in lowercase characters to help keep the data readable and uniform. 

Our data, taken from already public sources, do not require any steps to ensure privacy or confidentiality. While we are required to share this data by virtue of our course, we also feel bound ethically to share our work with our audience, which we imagine will be librarians, educators, the American Library Association (who grants the Newbery Award), parents, and researchers like us interested in the diversity of the powerful honor. As a result, we will include a page on our site that openly shares our data in two formats: .csv to promote longevity and open-source access, and .xls to aid perhaps less tech-savvy constituents such as parents.

Our data will be permanently retained in an academic repository, the CUNY Academic Works. The data will be available in .csv. This format will be sustainably accessible because it is an open source format. We will also have the data in a .xls format for those unfamiliar with .csv. We understand that this format is proprietary and for that reason we have the .csv format available. The CUNY Academic Works will maintain our data long term. Our data is appropriate for the repository mentioned above. 

Newbery Work Plan

The goal of this project is to collect the biographical and subject matter of the Newbery Medal and Honor Books to determine if there is an accurate representation of diversity amongst the honorees. The project will consist of four stages: gathering the data, organizing the data into the pre-approved format, analyzing the data using the visualization software Tableau Public, and then disseminating the results by creating a website dedicated to displaying our research and findings. Gathering the data from the four hundred and fifteen Newbery books will take the longest and involve the entire team. With guidance from the project director, the team will organize the data into the following categories: Year; Winner/Honor; Title; Author; Author’s Gender, Race, and Ethnicity; Protagonist’s Gender, Race and Ethnicity; and Themes. The first four categories are available on the ALA’s Newbery site. The team will find the author’s gender, race, and ethnicity on the authors’ websites, publishers’ sites, or an internet search (author interviews, etc.). The books’ protagonists and themes will be found with the Library of Congress’ and New York Public Library’s bibliographic records. The programmer will expand her understanding of Python to scrape data where possible.

The team will then organize and input the data using a pre-approved format into an Excel spreadsheet. The third stage is to enter all data into Tableau Public and create visualizations and analyze the findings. The final stage will include the creation of a user-friendly website to display an interactive visualization for those who wish to explore, along with recommended readings to help users think more critically about the role of awards in children’s literature. In addition, the designer and outreach specialist will lead the team in creating a shareable graphic for teachers and librarians that capture the most provocative of their findings. The project team will also submit proposals to present their findings at the American Library Association’s Annual Conference and the Association for Library Service to Children’s Midwinter Meetings and National Institute.