More on Inspiring Women in Jamaica

 

More on Inspiring Women in Jamaica 

    

Hello again readers, I hope that all is well with you all. Today I will be giving you more information about my DH Project Inspiring Women in Jamaica. I would like to give you guys a background on the project and the thought process of creating the project.

    I had to create my own Digital Humanities Project for my final grade and at first, I was worried about what topic I would focus on, what tools I would be using, how will I curate my project and what would be the purpose of my project, and how it would contribute to the humanities. After looking at some DH Projects that I thought were interesting to help me come up with some ideas, I was inspired by the projects Baldwin’s Paris and the New Haven Building Archive. These projects are both maps of specific geographical locations and this inspired me to do something of the same nature.

    At first, my idea was to create a map that pinpoints popular and unknown places in Jamaica that would be color-coded to signify whether the location would be known for its food, music, and/ or recreational spaces. After a while, the idea didn’t seem so exciting to me since I think that there must be tons of blogs, articles, and or projects that would speak on this topic. I wanted to bring something more innovative to the table plus I wanted my project to be more of an educational experience that provides information that isn’t known to many. I did some more brainstorming and soon enough I came up with the idea to highlight and recognize the influential women in Jamaica and what they have done. I wanted to showcase all of this on a mapping of Jamaica. To do this I would use the locations of either where these women were born or where they grew up and tag them. These tags would include their full names and also their pet names, their date of birth, and when necessary, the date they have passed. The tags also include a brief paragraph on the respective women identified in each tag, there are also pictures and some of the tags include videos on these women to give you more background on them and to help you get to know them and see them in action.

    This project will bring more awareness to these women which will contribute to the historical and geographical aspects of the humanities. For this project, I imagine just about anyone from the ages of twelve and up to utilize this project for their benefit and hopefully, they will learn something and become inspired. I must say that this project is open for more contributions to expand it since there are many more women that can be added to the list of women already on the project, and in addition to that it is limited information on some of these women.

    Almost all the women included in the project I have known about before and some of them I have met in person but some of them as I mentioned before there isn’t much information on them, especially information that I need to complete the map. For all these women, the first and most important information that I needed was where they were born, or where they grew up, or even where they currently live if they are alive or where they usually lived if they have already passed. This piece of information was very hard to find for some of these women and some of them I had to go about a different way of trying to find this information. Some of them I even had to go YouTube to find a location that was associated with them. The reason for their location being so important is that I need it to tag their location where all the other information about them would have been located, but some of the women that I had in mind didn’t have so much of a biography, so they got left out of the project. The fact that some of these women didn’t have a biography was very surprising since in Jamaica they are considered celebrities. As much I would love the collaboration to further expand this project, it would be great if my project could spark an interest to write biographies on some of these women, especially the ones that weren't included, like Dorraine Samuels who was a television news anchor on TVJ and radio host on RJR and Kerlyn Brown who is a television news anchor on CVMTV and a host for CVM’s Inspire Jamaica; and these are just some of the accomplishments of these two women. Yet apart from all of that, I realized that even though I am familiar with the women there were a lot of things that I didn’t know about them that I was shocked to find out.

    As for the digital tool used, which was My Google Maps, at first, I had no idea how to make the project into the idea that I had imagined but with practice over time, it wasn’t that hard however because I chose to use a map for my project, it did limit the amount of information I had planned to include. If I were to use another tool, I would most likely choose a timeline that would allow me to include more women but finding the date of birth of some of these women would be another issue, but a timeline would be very fitting. I know that you are wondering why I didn’t use the timeline in the first place, but I decided to use a map because I think it would make the project a bit more personal like how the viewers will get to see where these women are from. The timeline would include the same information as the map, but it would be structured in a chronological way depending on when these women were born.

    In the end, I am satisfied with how my project came out because I never thought that I would have been able to make my own DH project, especially one that I am so excited about. The part that I loved the most customizing the tags as best as possible to represent the women identified.

    This brings me to the end of this blog and I hope that you have gotten the chance to visit my project and if you haven’t you can access it here through this link, Inspiring Women In Jamaica.

    Until next time, stay safe.

    

~Bye~