This week we are working on some large items:

Our number one goal this week has been to get our search functionality up and running. Daria has been a coding machine, working on this non-stop. We’re nearly there. Some of things Daria has been grappling with are connecting to the DocumentCloud API using a REST API call function and trying to figure out what is the best taxonomy to be read by both PHP and JSON. The existing tutorials and scripts either explain using PHP to connect to a MySQL database, or use Python to connect to the DocumentCloud API, however, Google Developers has a tutorial on using PHP to connect to the Google Books and Google News APIs, which has proven a useful tool in working the PHP to DocumentCloud API situation. For a peek behind the scenes, check out some of Daria’s code here.

Juliana and Chris have been hitting Twitter hard, and our followers have doubled in the last week. Juliana created an NYC DH account and is exploring it as a place for potential groups and people who might be interested in our project. We continue to amass a list of historians and institutions that will be interested in Digital HUAC. All of this outreach is working toward our short-term goal of getting our project name out there, and also our long-term goal of finding an institution to partner with (which is one more step on the road to Digital HUAC world-domination).

Juliana and Chris have also begun to write up our overarching narrative (the theme: NO APOLOGIES!) as a way to create a story to pitch, but also looking toward the future beyond class. What direction to we want the project to go in, and how is the narrative helpful in this regard? Along these same lines, we’re simultaneously writing content for our site, since many of our current pages are just placeholders. We’re slowly but steadily working toward a functional, robust site.

We started with 5 testimonies, because that seemed like a manageable number when we had a lot of technological unknowns. Now that we’ve gotten over some of our biggest technology hurdles, we’re able to increase the size of our corpus with relative ease. I am adding new testimonies to our DocumentCloud group daily and the associated metadata will be added in the coming week as well. We don’t have an updated target number of testimonies, but would like to get as many in as possible. This process of adding testimonies will continue throughout the rest of the semester. The added testimonies will make search testing significantly more interesting, as well as showcasing more of what this project’s full potential is.

We’ve also been at work on some smaller items:

–Getting our contact form to send an email to us.
–Getting the browse functionality going, at least in very beta way. For now, this will just be an alphabetical list of names. Each name, when clicked upon, will provide a results page of all the documents that person is named in.
–We agreed upon a Creative Commons license and have added that to our site in place of the ©.
–We have a new week-by-week action plan that details what needs to get done to get us to a fully-functional MVP by May 19.

We’re presenting this week, so we don’t want to give away too much in this post. In short, however, this week was taxing, productive, gratifying, and exciting—in that order.

After deciding strong encouragement to use Document Cloud (DC) as our database and corpus warehouse, we spent the last few weeks working out how our site would talk to the DC API. No easy thing. What language would be used? How would the syntax work? Wrappers? Formatters? JSON? Above all, what are the relationships between the project’s front- and back-ends, and how does each programming decision/requirement bear these out? This involved much due diligence and scaling of learning curves. No matter: our team is made up of furious warriors, eager to storm the scene. We eat learning curves for breakfast and then throw the dishes out the damn window.

After being advised to lean on PHP (or, as we call it on conference calls, “Playas Hatin’ Python”) for our scripting needs, Daria spent the week shifting her programming language focus. This meant tying together guides and help from a number of sources—our professors, online learning hubs, GC Digital Fellows, outside gurus—drafting code, and testing it out with the rest of the group weighing in and helping troubleshoot. Our main focus this week was on connecting the search form that Juliana and Sarah put together earlier with our DC documents. We needed to be able to run a simple search—at the very least, to have a search form lead to a URL that would display the action that had just been carried out. This, we are happy to report, we have done.

Going back to the point about how the front- and back-ends interact, we also thought this week about what our search results pages would look like. This is of course important from a user experience aspect in terms of display and site navigability: indeed, part of the mission of the project is to organize scattered materials and make transparent an episode from American History shrouded in misinformation and melodrama. But there are just as many meaningful development calls as there are design decisions, and the further we get into the project, the better sense we’re getting for how these two are inextricably linked. We’ll talk more about this on Tuesday, but it’s nice to be at a point where we can think holistically about development and design. In a sense, this is where we started the project; the difference is that now we’re zeroing in on functionality, whereas at the beginning, we thought in terms of concepts.

Also, we received our Reclaim Hosting server space from Tim Owens and are now live on digitalhuac.com. We have yet to install Git on this server, so we are left to update our site like geezers: GitHub > Local Download > Filezilla. We hope to fix this soon and step up our command line game.