Progress Update: Finishing Our First Interview and Starting Our Site

Interviews

In the past week, Avery and I have made some exciting progress on our website! On Thursday, I conducted our first interview with Dr. Lisa Eikholdt, a Georgia Gwinnett College professor and speaker on the county side of the Mallory case, through zoom. I was able to get a full audio and video recording of our session downloaded to my computer. This week, I plan to review the footage and compile a complete transcript of our conversation. Dr. Eikholdt’s responses to our questions were extremely helpful, and I am excited to incorporate the interview into our website. She described, for instance, the atmosphere surrounding the hearing, her specific involvement both in the Mallory case and in Gwinnett County as a community member and educator, and her use of the Harry Potter books in the classroom when she worked as a literacy specialist for elementary school students.

In addition to speaking with Dr. Eikholdt, I was also able to get in contact with one of my former Gwinnett County English teachers, Mr. Dana Kling. Mr. Kling has kindly agreed to answer some questions for us through email regarding his views on book censorship as a current GCPS educator. I am in the process of compiling a list of questions for him right now, and will hopefully have those sent out in the next few days.

Website Building

Along with adding to our interview material, we’ve finally begun adding content to our website! To help us get a sense of what needs to be done, as well as to visualize the overall format of our site, I have created blank pages for all of our topics and placed them in order of how we would want them to be viewed. I also organized our sub-categories into pages underneath our parent pages. I am hoping that having a general site format in place will make it easier for us to go in and add content later. As far as applied content goes right now, we are still in the beginning stages. I have completed my autobiographical section of the “About Us” page, and have embedded my personal storymap to add some visual interest. I’ have also written some background on Laura Mallory for her sub-category in our Case section. I would like to add some more information on Mallory, but have kept this section intentionally brief for now until I figure out which information regarding her need to go into other pages in our Case section. Once I have those pages drafted, I plan to go back and expand my Mallory section. I am also hoping we will be able to get in contact with Mallory and potentially get a statement for this page, but we unfortunately we have had some difficulty locating her. I also need to add an image of Mallory, and have been debating the best way of incorporating this photo. I would either like to add a link to her linkedin profile, so that visitors to the site can get additional information about her education and career that are interesting but not necessarily relevant to our project, or to add the photo of her on the Rock Ministries website. While this photo would be ideal, since it is a recent photo provided by her own organization, I am unsure of how to get permission from them to use it, especially since their provided contact information is fairly limited. Once I have decided which avenue to follow image-wise, I will add this to Mallory’s page. Since Avery is currently out of town for a conference, he will be working on his pages later this week.

We have also created a timeline of events using TimelineJS. While we may not use this particular version of the timeline on our site, I like the idea of using this tool to create a timeline of challenges to the series for our “National Reaction” page.

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