During our group meeting, the team discussed how some areas of our project need attention. We realized that with the expansion of our project, we put some tasks on the back burner, and will use the next two weeks to work on them. One area we will work on is outreach, particularly our social media accounts. After seeing how effective Heritage Reconstructed was with their Twitter account, we realized that we were hesitating to fully dive in and limiting our reach. Although we are not yet ready to share our visualizations with the public, we do need to build an audience that knows what our project is about, and is eager to see our work. With that in mind, we will continue sharing content from authors, libraries and similar projects but will also work on engaging our audience with original content. We can have discussions about their children’s favorite books as well as theirs from when they were kids, or who is their favorite children’s author now. We will also blog about the project itself, our recommendations for diverse books, and special features.  

Since we expanded the project, we need to update our website to include the history of the Caldecott, and remember to create connected content on social media. During this week, we are collecting identity information on the 345 Caldecott books. Once this task is complete, Kelly will begin to work with the data on Tableau. In the meantime, Kelly is working with the Newbery visualizations and they will soon be sent out for initial feedback from our test audience: librarians, educators, and representatives from similar projects. We’ll take some of Micki’s suggestions too, to consider how to share the data through different racial and ethnic lenses other than the census categories, which may be (fingers crossed) doable through a few if-then statements in Tableau. As we play, we’ll keep our audience in mind, trying hard to make sure that the visualizations we ultimately still stay in service to our audience of librarians, educators, and parents.

Our plan for the next two weeks: 

Emily: This week I will continue to work on the Caldecott data, working on author/illustrator and then moving onto protagonists. I will also look into helping with social media, whether that be looking for content on Instagram/Twitter that we can then reshare. I will continue to make updates to the website. Throughout these next two weeks, I will check in with the team to see if anyone will need some extra help too!

Georgette: Continue working on the Caldecott data, as well as creating new content for Twitter as mentioned above. I will also reconnect with my contacts from the Diverse Book Finder and Cooperative Children’s Book Center and ask if they would consider being part of our test audience for the Newbery visualizations. 

Kelly: Updating and playing with the Newbery visualizations. Seeking feedback from parents, Steve Zweibel, and Meg’s contact at the NYPL. Meeting with whatever GCDI fellow responds to her request for a meeting about why the python scrapes have sometimes gone flawlessly and other times not.

Meg: I will write two 500 word blogs and post over the next two weeks. I will also work on learning social media and set up a schedule for posting content. 

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