While Baylee and I were so glad to hear that Karin Perry would do an interview with us over email, we are now experiencing the downside of not doing a face-to-face visit: she still hasn’t answered us. To compensate and use this found limbo time wisely, I’ve been messing with our WordPress site and attempting to better plan out the next few weeks.

Website Construction

Our website, finally, is no longer called “USAO Project Site,” though “Glass by Ellen Hopkins” isn’t much more interesting. I’m trying to come up with something clever but not too silly; I named the TimelineJS project “Shattered Glass,” but I’m not yet sure if I think that’s good enough. Plus, I think Baylee thinks it’s too punny. We’ll see.

I was finally able to fix the homepage header so that the site title isn’t pushed up against the left side of the screen, and it looks great now! I also did some rearranging of the parent sites on the site menu because I thought that we had too many “abouts” that could easily be consolidated. This arrangement still may change, but for now, I think it works.

I’ve also been using this time to work on my Historical Context section, where I now I have two subpages: Young Adult Censorship and Censorship in Oklahoma. I think these two sections help to really hone the huge body of censorship history research down to the two things that make the Ellen Hopkins case particularly exigent. The Oklahoma-specific section discusses some of the major censorship disputes that have similar themes to the Hopkins case and illustrate the kinds of things Oklahomans often take issue with. Knowing my problems being essayish, I’m trying to restrain myself from going into too much detail.

I’ve embedded our TimelineJS project into the “about the case” section of our site, and it runs smoothly. It shows up awkwardly large on the page, perhaps because there is no other content. I hope to resolve that issue soon. I’m very happy with how the timeline looks and how it describes the events of the case, and I think it will be an indispensable facet of our descriptive section.

Moving Forward

Because she is the primary contact with Karin Perry, Baylee will send our interviewee a follow-up email soon to try to hasten her response. Hopefully we will hear back this week so that we can start incorporating her answers and viewpoints into the site. We also plan to interview an English professor here at USAO, Dr. Shelley Rees, about censorship of young adult literature.

In terms of website pages, my primary focus this week will be to complete my historical context situation in a way that is as non-wordy and approachable as possible, as well as to begin writing an engaging description of the Hopkins case to accompany the timeline in the “About the Case” section. Additionally, I plan to start figuring out what media we need to obtain permissions for, as well as making our site look clean, readable, and professional.