Month: April 2018

As edits have been made and we prepare for the final presentation of our website tomorrow, we can reflect on our goals laid out for the project earlier in the semester. Starting with the mission statement, we hoped “to demonstrate all sides of the case” before knowing exactly what perspectives we would be able to secure or even who challenged the book. Fortunately, I feel we reached this goal through interviews with Carly Maldonado, Trish Warren, and Alex Sanchez, and while Rev. Morse was not willing to interview, I feel we fairly represented his perspective through the church in Rochester he worked for and his Facebook page. Through all of these voices, and some of the information shared in our historical context page. I think the complexity of the case is well illustrated. In terms of our use of materials, expectations matched reality with the use of WordPress, Youtube, Coggle, Googledocs, Readability, and online newspaper resources, though we ended up not needing to use Audacity to edit the Trish Warren interview because it was clear and complete as initially recorded. Looking at the division of labor, while some of our expected project components proved unnecessary and others were added in, we closely followed our plan for the most part. Both Liz and I wrote content for the site, found images and edited for accuracy and appearance. Liz handled the unforeseen task of compiling and transcribing our newspaper articles so I took care of all of the historical context to help maintain a fair balance. We also decided against incorporating a specific cast of characters page because the various perspectives are clearly laid out on the side of the website, and an extra page seemed redundant. Another challenge we ran into was the debate over interviewing Devin Flaherty as initially established in the contract’s division of labor and milestones. We thought Devin might be a useful perspective because she challenged Trish Warren years later on the decision to omit Perks of Being a Wallflower from the school library. However, we eventually concluded that spending time and space detailing that conflict, we would be better off using it as just brief context to the Rainbow Boys case and not focusing on Trish’s comments on the subject or choosing to interview Devin separately. Knowing we already had a former Webster Thomas student passionate about uncensored access to books in Carly Maldonado made the decision to omit an interview with Devin more reasonable. Our interviews stayed on schedule as well as they could considering the need to be flexible with our interviewees, and while some of our proposed dates for having content uploaded were missed due to various “life happens” moments, we caught up before the deadline for the rough draft on April 9th.  

Overall, I thought having the project contract was most useful for establishing a division of labor that could keep Liz and I accountable and working equally to ensure the success of the project. We made adjustments as needed, trading off one task for another based on the contract which allowed me to always feel like Liz and I were contributing equally which I think is really valuable in such an extensive partner project. Additionally, the feedback from from our peers and Professors Dierking and Hajo kept us on track and helped us make changes as needed to end up with a project that I’m proud of and that also fits the goals we laid out for ourselves in the contract.  

 

This week, I had the opportunity to peer-edit Drexel and Price’s website on The Song of Solomon and then hear feedback from Cara and Karina on our own website. The task of looking at the St. Mary’s website was hopefully useful for its creators but it also definitely helped me to have the chance (incentive) to thoroughly look at another site and pick up some ideas for improving Behind the Rainbow. As a general trend, I noted some typos on the St. Mary’s site that I corrected on Hypothesis, and the favor was returned by those who looked at our site. Essentially, everyone in the class presumably understands the basic rules of grammar but with the flood of hastily added content on our sites, it may not appear that way. Additionally, with the St. Mary’s site, there were some pages of content that I felt lacked appropriate background information to piece the site together for a visitor who does not know how each participant’s story links together. Looking back at our site, the same can be said as pointed out by Cara and Karina; we would benefit from a little more general information on our home page to establish the basics of what happened outside of the timeline. Similarly, there was a question on the St. Mary’s site of which aspects of the “Opinions” drop down menu reveal content and which do not. On our own site, we overlooked that the “Home” tab and the “Timeline of Events” tab are literally the same page and that could be confusing to a viewer. Finally, on the St. Mary’s site, I felt there was a good balance of text and images and rarely a page where one seemed to be dominating the other. Reflecting on our site, we could benefit from some more images to break up long chunks of texts.

Looking at the extensive feedback from Cathy and Rebecca provided lots of improvements to make to the site but reaffirmed that overall we have strong information to carry the project. Something I had thought about but was not sure how to incorporate was my own perspective on the material. Our voice was recognizable at various points in the site, but I think we would benefit from a separate perspectives section like the St. Mary’s site had. That way, we can synthesize all of the reactions, connections, and conclusions that arose throughout the research process. Next, giving the text of the newspaper articles luckily will not be too difficult because they’ve already been typed on either Alex Sanchez’s website or newspapers.com. Though I think some organization of that material could be in order in terms of putting it in a separate and more visible tab. It’s nice to see the framework for “About Rainbow Boys” and “Historical Context” is on the right track, and we’ll just add some more examples and analysis for those pages to give a more complete perspective. Looking at the Trish Warren page, I’ve battled some criticism on it since it was first made, but I still feel putting the entire single-spaced 4-5 page transcript on the page would be too long and I think the summary is fair and encourages interested parties to read on via the attached transcript. Lastly, I appreciated Cara’s point that our hyperlinks should be better contrasted because we relay a lot of information through them and we certainly want visitors to notice they are there.

 

 

Today is certainly a day of accomplishment with the draft of our website being completed! Liz and I had a Behind the Rainbow bash on Sunday night, eating various desserts and filling in what was left of our site. Though last week had some disappointments such as Reverend Morse and Carole Barnabas not responding to us, we still feel the site is complete and fair. Even without Carole, we had interviews with two supporters of Rainbow Boys who were actively involved in handling the challenge with Trish Warren and Carly Maldonado. As for Reverend Morse, a personal response would definitely have been useful, we found lots of useful context on the Reverend’s Facebook page and the church website where he used to work. Through these pieces of evidence and Trish’s recount of Morse’s positions in the District meeting, we are able to get a pretty clear, though not certain, grasp of our challenger’s concerns. Personally, I had to look back at my Trish Warren page and take out some of my excess commentary that sparked some debate last week. I thought the details of her spat with student Devin seemed less important upon reflection, and that is also where I what could be interpreted as criticism of Trish’s decision. Thus, I decided to take out the dramatic details of the Perks of Being a Wallflower case, and just include Trish’s flexible position on weighing book’s themes against gratuitous content.

Liz and I were unsure how to approach historical context, but we found there has been a pretty noteworthy shift in perception of LGBT issues, especially gay marriage, since the early 2000s. Not only has the general population risen from 35%-62% support of gay marriage but evangelical white Protestants, holding beliefs that closely align to Morse’s, have seen support of gay marriage rise from 12% to 35% since 2006. So today, not only would the town’s general response have been different, but it’s more likely that even religious figures would not take issue with stories that promote acceptance of LGBT life. Along a similar note, I’m thinking maybe we could still add the District policy on LGBT students. I’m not certain, but I’d imagine in 2006 there probably was no official stance on protecting and helping LGBT students whereas now there is one. It’s hard to imagine any high ranking District official in 2018 doing what Agostenelli did and swiftly agreeing to ban a book on the basis of same-sex relationships.  

Looking forward, we’re certainly open to all criticism, but especially suggestions on the organization of content and having the appropriate balance of words, images etc. on each page of our site. We’ll also need to consider some final reflections for what our research has meant to us, what we’ve learned, and how we’ll move forward with it as to prepare for our presentation and maybe a page on our site as well.

This week Liz and I made our final efforts to recruit information for our project, with the deadline for doing so inevitably nearing as our projects are due next week. Liz scored some answers from Alex Sanchez and posted them on the website. Additionally, Liz and I were impressed with Cathy’s abilities to recruit information on Reverend Morse, and I took her leads and dug a bit further, confirming that Ron Morse’s daughter went to Webster schools and would have been the right age at the time of the challenge. Through Brittany (the daughter) on Facebook, I found Ron’s (Reverend Morse’s) Facebook. While we’re operating under the assumption this is the man who challenged Rainbow Boys, we cannot be certain. Though it was still very interesting to look around his Facebook: lots of preaching on what he thinks God wants in certain situations, a few posts bashing President Obama, and a bizarre amount of Facebook “fortune cookies” for a devout Christian. His Facebook also indicated he worked at the Victory Baptist Church in downtown Rochester after studying at Louisiana Baptist University. The Victory Church’s website is polished and straightforward but surely intense, stating its belief in “The literal existence of Satan, as an evil and powerful adversary, who acts as personal tempter and accuser.” Since Baptists don’t have a hierarchical structure to their denomination, the thoughts of Morse and other leaders of Victory Church are somewhat unfiltered in comparison to other churches. On his Facebook, Morse quipped, “My only problem with Christianity today is Christians. The desire for the church today is to present Jesus as a hip, loving, best-friend -you -could -ever – have, guy who took a bullet for you.” All this interesting information that I think could drive the challenger perspective of our site inspired me to reach out to Ron Morse through a Facebook message and ask him about the challenge to Rainbow Boys. I was careful to slightly alter my pitch from “a project on censorship” to “a project on what the right circumstances are for banning a book from schools.” While both are true, the latter, I hope, will be more appealing to Morse in terms of giving his honest impression of his issues with the book. I sent the message this morning (4/2) around 9am, and fingers crossed for a response. If he doesn’t respond, can we still craft some of our challenger’s perspective based on the strong probability that this man was the challenger, obviously being careful to indicate we are not entirely sure?

Looking forward, we can surely fill in our student perspective for Carly Maldonado, and I still need to look into separating some of the fact from analysis on the Trish Warren page, with the intention of building a seperate reflection page for all of research and interviews. Would such a page be done collectively or offer reflections from each students?