When first assigned this project, I was worried about crafting a quality website and mostly about designing an engagement strategy over such a short period time. Though, to my surprise the creation and outreach for this project has been a surprisingly easy and positive experience. Meghan and I worked together well because we had a common vision for the project and were willing to be flexible with the format and project plan. Overall, I believe this project formed itself organically. There were even some suggestions from outsiders that were adapted into the project that I believe have added a whole new element to the project. I think this willingness to change or be open to new ideas is what made the experience a success.
The example I refer to above is in regards to the identity quiz Meghan and I crafted. I wanted to have some way for visitors to not only engage with the content, but participate in the conversation. I also thought that we should include some additional element to further spark dialogue in a structured way. I had been thinking of a survey that could be demonstrated in a visual way when we discovered that we could make a fillable quiz on WordPress. We both decided to have people describe their identities in the quiz and it was Meghan’s idea to create a list of ways people could describe themselves such as by race, be gender or by personality. We brainstormed about 20 of these topics and said we could add more as we thought of them. It was this willingness to keep the form open that lead to an interesting development. I showed my friend the quiz and she told me I should add “by ability” and “by health” to the quiz. I told her that she could put those categories in the other section, but then I realized that her answers would not be reflected in the quiz. If the point of the quiz was to spark dialogue we needed to adjust the quiz based on responses. Thus, I added to the description of the quiz that anything someone puts in the other category would be added to the quiz. That’s how the list began to grow with options such as “By Musical Taste” or “By Vices”. I think this is a far more engaging process since it is kind of like crowdsourcing material. With each new person who adds his/her opinion, the quiz becomes more dynamic and representative to everyone. I believe this is a way to solve the problem of misrepresentation and lack intersectionality. And it’s all thanks to keeping the project fluid and open to suggestions.
However, there is one big problem with the site and quiz: what will happen after we stop monitoring it? We couldn’t figure out a way to have the results of the quiz display in an immediate and interesting visual manner, so we decided to create a Tagxedo word cloud. This solves the problem of representing the results in an engaging way, but it requires heavy moderation. We have to go into the results of the quiz and copy over the new information to make a new Tagxedo that we have to re-post. This has meant that the results are not immediately reflected in the word cloud and that we have to be continually checking in to see if there are new entries. I don’t know if this will continue after the class is over. Thus, the tag cloud and quiz will cease to change and the project will lose a large part of its engagement possibilities. This problem connects directly to many of the projects we’ve looked at and the discussion we’ve been having on the life cycle of a participatory media project. Perhaps Meghan and I will check in on our site once and a while, but unfortunately I don’t think it will be as dynamic as it once was.
Lastly, while I like how the project turned out, I don’t know if we really got people to watch the videos. We hoped that the videos would be a good foundation for our theme and help people reconsider their identities, but I think most people just took the quiz. This might be partly how we marketed it and also because of the low time commitment for the quiz. I figured that if someone is going to engage with anything, they would more likely to take a 1 minute quiz than watch a 5 minute video. Perhaps our quiz and description inspired some people to then watch the videos, but I doubt often. I think our project may have become something entirely different than what was first intended. However, I don’t know if I think that’s a bad thing. As one of my favorite poets once said, “A successful poem is one that changes your beliefs half-way through writing it” – Doc Luben. By those standards, we have been successful.