This week put somewhat of a stall on the project. I was going to go look through box 61 of the TAAP files on Friday, but then Maya informed me that she had already looked through the box and it didn’t contain any pertinent artist information. Emily told Maya that she will contact Nathan to see if there are any other boxes we can look through. I did see some boxes labeled Rural Libraries and other TAAP boxes in the inventory. Perhaps we should look through those? In the meantime, Maya and I will be meeting next Monday to discuss what questions we have and how we should move forward from here. We will all be meeting at OFN Mon. Feb 4th to talk with Emily about those questions and present our first drafts of postcards. Next week I will be working on creating a draft of my first postcard based on the artists Maya and I have identified.
Since, I couldn’t do anymore research into possible artists, I decided to take an in-depth look into the Rural Arts & Culture Map in order to get a better idea of what information I should be gathering for our postcards. However, since the content on the map is so varied, I’m still not sure what our postcards should look like. I know we want to have photos, but what about videos? There may be some videos available for the more recent artists. Also, are we describing the art the artist makes or the background of the artist? We could just replicate the format of the TAAP application forms and talk about the art traditions they practice, where they learned them from and the importance of these traditions. Although not all of the TAAP applications has all this information. The current TAAP artists listed on the OFN website also have varying information. I would like to look at their actual TAAP application to see if there is more info not represented on the website. Also, while looking over the Rural Arts & Culture Map, I noticed some functional problems that will need to be addressed. A lot of the postings have a short blurb about an artist and then link to a site for more information. I’m not sure where we will link to for more information about the older artists we found in the archives. Lastly, there are two ways to see information on the map: stories and folks. It seems the folks tab is used for creating profiles for people posting to the map. You can click on their profile and then see all the stories they have posted. Perhaps we should create a profile for OFN and then link our stories from there? The only problem with this, is that not all of the stories I found through this method showed up on the overall map. I’m not sure why, but I want to make sure our stories are visible.