Team HUAC

This week, team Digital HUAC worked on refining our project narrative. This work dovetails with both outreach and site content: we’ll use narrative material to pitch potential users and partners and beef up our site itself. Juliana developed a thorough “pitch kit” with relevant topics and questions, and in response we filled out sections such as: “Challenges with the Current State of HUAC Records,” and “Our Solution.” We feel that such an approach effectively communicates vital information to all parties. It also helps us think through issues concretely. Nothing forces you to articulate your project means and aims better than thinking about how strangers will interact with it all.

We also demoed a new MVP as a fallback plan. Given that we are gravitating towards fully leveraging Document Cloud’s search interface, we experimented with embedding the DC viewer and search mechanism in our site itself. This is less than ideal: for one thing, this only rendered string-search results that didn’t make use of the robust, standardized metadata that we took time to tag each transcript with. But it was helpful to think about recasting our MVP just in case, and we welcomed the chance to get under the hood of Document Cloud in more detail.