I can’t believe that next week is the last one. I think this semester was epic. I am so relieved  that I entirely finished heavy workloads including this project and MA thesis.

The last piece of puzzle is writing the final papers.

Overall, I learned a lot from this course. The group activities will be helpful for my future career. I also get to have a chance to build up my social skill by working with different people. First, I did not any clues how to start and function as a project manager. I eventually get used to it. I expect I will do better at my future job. At this stage, at least, I know what database and programming languages are. I realize before starting a long-term project, I should be well-educated and get to know people well.

I enjoyed exploring social media, Instagram. I got useful information. In Japan, Instagram is getting so popular and companies advertise their products though the social media. Recently, social media is a powerful tool to do business and lead sociocultural trends.

I think DH field will be well-known to future students. I hope this project will positively influence them. I firmly believe that DH is a pioneering fields in academia and can be incorporated with other academic fields such as humanities, social sciences, mathematics, business studies, and so on.

I used to be happy about submitting the thesis. Unfortunately, the joyful moment didn’t last long. I realized that I should be more calm and realistic because I have to complete mini tasks before the graduation. Luckily, the instructions were not really strict. I believe I can handle and finish it earlier.

On my individual essay, I will include the certain barriers I have faced. In the beginning, I was not fully educated in both programming languages and fashion studies. In general, I was interested in fashion trend as a consumer, but programming languages were hard to understand. As time went by, I have get used to the project. So I am relieved in that part.

By doing outreach activities, interaction with different users played a critical role. Through the social medias, I can explore new communities how they integrate with many people from different parts of the world. In this case, I also tried to interact with fashion communities from diverse places. I personally like Paris styles known as French chic. Paris, London, Milan, and NY are four major fashion cities. I think it will be great to interact with 3 different cities in the future.

After the graduation, I have to start looking for a job. This project helps discovering what I am good at and what I have to improve in relation to my career goal. I will write them more specifically in the essay. It is hard to believe I am almost done with the school. For 2 weeks, I will be enormously busy of working on the assignments.

So glad that we have got 28 followers so far. This is the highest number now.  Some of our classmates have begun following the account. Every presentation, I have mentioned the Instagram account related to the number of followers. I realized that the Twitter account was quiet compared to the Instagram one. Thus, I twitted articles and the progress. I have one barrier that I cannot actively use twitter. My smartphone is not good enough to bridge between Instagram and Twitter. Additionally, my phone has a storage issues. It has a limit to store applications. So I can’t use both applications on my phone. Anyway, I will actively update those two till the end.

I should start narrating the works during the semester. I can get ideas from the past presentations and the blog posts. Basically, I have learned a lot and found out the barriers and parts to improve. At this timing, I have considers how this project suggest a roadmap in the future. I hope we can bridge between DH and Fashion studies communities. I strongly agree that fashion field and DH can be incorporated. These days, many people rely on the social medias with aesthetic visualization and technologies.

Now I have to write the statement for theory section on the webpage. I will make a connection between fashion and socioeconomic climate.

I hope I, we can wrap up this well. This month is going to be incredibly busy.

I am so relieved that I have finally submitted the thesis. It was such a long and stressful journey. I fought against the anxiety. Now I can move on to the next step. For one month, I will do my best to do this project.

Our Instagram account has got 22 followers so far.  I mostly updated our progress done by the designer and the developer. I added hash tags in relation to DH and fashion studies. I am so glad that Parsons BFA 2015 has started following us. It is important to interact with users from specific communities such as fashion and DH. We are trying to filling the gap between those two different fields. Yale University’s Fashion Robot Vogue webpage showed a great model. Probably, I will cover it for the presentation upcoming week. I believe our project will make a contribution to future fashion studies and digital humanities students and scholars. We know that we are confronted with technological and time barriers. For few weeks, we have been changing the concept. I hope we can stick to one track. The developer is working hard on contacting to Lev and collecting Instagram images and scripts. We would better choose MVP now. Our MVP will be collecting 50 images including longitude, latitude, time info, and URL links. Also, we should work on data cleansing. When we finish the game, I will test it and also collect feedback from my acquaintances who have visited our website. Since it is almost end of the semester, I should consider more about the future aspects and humanistic viewpoints. I want to research the power of communication in relation to this project.

Since we are running out of time, I am confronted with technological and time-wise barriers to implement this project. If there is more time, we may go for the dynamic version. I think this project will be a remarkable experience before going back to my career life. If I don’t know something, It is better not to hesitate asking questions. I think I learn social skills.

For the group project, we will launch the game. If it is completed, I have to test it out whether it works well or not. At this point, our team is becoming experimental.

I am so glad that we got more Instagram followers. It has been 24 followers. Parsons 2015 BFA and one fashion blogger with 19k number of followers followed us. I tried to interact with more users who are fashion studies majors and DH majors. I clicked on #digitalhumanities, clicked some of like buttons.

Spring break went so fast. I feel like to travel outside of the city, but  I couldn’t due to the workloads such as finishing the MA thesis and this project.  I am so impressed that all of the members moved forward. We also faced to technological obstacles. It was way too difficult to find geospatial data/ hash tags. Ironically, we couldn’t find New York Fashion Week images with NYC hash tags. It is unbelievable.

During the break, I uploaded few pictures on our Instagram account. I think it is difficult to increase the number of followers. Since it is an only semester length project, there are several limitations. The largest hurdle is that we are running out of time so we should skip certain steps. Obviously, we are not technological experts and not familiar with advertising industry. I guess there should be something attractive to interest common social media users. Basically, our Instgram account mainly displays our procedure how far we are at now. Even if I gave up increasing the followers, I made an alternative plan that I decided to include more hash tags related to programming e.g.) apigee, cartoDB, coding, html, bootstrap, etc…

After attaching more hash tags, certain type of users clicked more “Like” buttons compared to the ones with fewer hash tags. The highest number was 12 likes and the next highest one got 11 likes.

I think our Instagram account will fit to the “smoke and mirrors.” Even if I followed several fashion community users, the number of follower has not increased over few weeks. Unfortunately, I forgot updating it. From this week, I try to be more responsible to manage the account. I found a tiny finding. When I upload image with attaching more hashtags, the number of “like” buttons has slightly gone up. Some people even left comments on the images. I am not going to focus on getting more followers. I will constantly uploading our procedures.  Maybe I should cover this part for the short presentation after the break.

Our team decided to skip using MySQL. Instead, we focus on the bootstrap version. This week, I made progress in terms of my role playing. Significantly, I tracked the collaborative works from the outreach and designer. I had chances to hear the explanation of the HTML files.

The current goal is to get some guidance from the Domain Expert whether or not make changes to the site, then combining the final data set from Lev’s collection of Instagram images or our own images via apigee.

This spring break sound so industrious. Other than the project, I should end up writing my graduate thesis. At any rate, I will look over some tutorials related to bootstrap, CratoDB, Apigee, etc. Even if I don ‘t need to get engaged in technological matters, I should know at least the basic concepts of the programs and applications which our group is mainly using. Then, I will prepare for the short presentation and shape our paper. I will work on introduction, my role playing, and conclusion. Probably, I will need some articles and list the references.

I could not make it to the class this week. I know I get more behind.

Since last week, I have been figuring out what exactly MySQL is. Yesterday I installed the database. I downloaded the community edition with the community server. At this stage, I am learning what is cmd so-called command-line interface. It is pretty tough. Learning a programming language is similar to learning a foreign language. I should figure out how to open the command-line interface. It looks like black-white screen, but I don’t know why it isn’t working on my PC even if I installed it. I am carefully following the Django Girls instruction.(Thanks, Amanda!)

I should definitely attend next week’s class and share some findings with my team members and professors.

I should read tutorial for other team members’ program e.g) mapping…

I am done with the first presentation, but I have more works to do. I should support the development part. I am thinking of taking the My SQL part. Technology part including python, API, and database is the hardest part of this project, and it is a crux of the project. If we still face limitations and difficulties, we should limit our scopes which means we should reduce some parts. Actually, we haven’t discussed this part in details.

This week, we got chances to have two group meetings. I think that was a great chance to know each member better. At the first meeting, we revised the website. We found out that there were few unnecessary social media icons.  Fonts were small so the designers enlarged it. On the next day, we visited the media lab and got advises from the digital fellows.

To help the development, I should start learning MySQL and reading instructions on Instragram API and API Python. Also, I will go to the media lab and talk to the digital fellows.  I am excited to learn new materials from “exotic” fields. I totally agree that learning the programming languages is similar to learning foreign languages. It is difficult, but it is challenging.

I should do multitasking. Sometimes I help outreach. This time, I will help the development part.

This week was dramatic and busy. I faced several difficulties, but everything went smoothly in the end.

For my DH Praxis class, I luckily got a better understanding of my role as a project manager and group project in a relation to technologies.

My role

At first, I was overwhelmed to serve the manager role in terms of leadership. In my case, I joined the well-framed boat. Min and Tessa are clear about what they really want to accomplish for this class. Under these circumstances, I would rather support their ideas and help testing the functionality of coding. Currently, our team is having a technology issue which is the most essential part of our project. Learning programming languages and new technologies are difficult without having the background information. However, I got opportunities to expand my academic and occupational scopes. In particular, I get chances to know what fashion studies is. Fashion studies is interesting and interdisciplinary.

My activity 

My role is quite fluid. This week, I helped outreach part.

Since 2012, I have used Instagram. I am familiar with following users based on my interest and using hashtags. To do the project, I followed certain NY-based fashion brands and designers. I also followed my high school friends who graduated from FIT and Parsons. Most of them are working at fashion branding companies and retail stores as directors/ managers. In outreach perspectives, we should make our accounts more active and attractive. I found one useful Instagram user which is closely related to Sprezzatura and New York.

Presentation on Tuesday

I will briefly introduce the background information on fashion which will function as an icebreaker and explain each team member’s role. Since I came from Sociology background, I will add sociological voice.

Improvement 

• COMMUNICATION
• Always be open to hear
• Take better quality of memo during the class discussion
• Try to learn basic concept and function of Python
• Fluid role playing
• Support the developer
• Collect references for our final reports
• BE MORE INDUSTRIOUS !!!