Reverse Engineer: Chicana Diasporic

Introduction

I chose to reverse engineer the Chicana Diasporic: A Nomadic Journey of the Activist Exiled, which is an annotated Scalar research hub that focuses on the women of the Chicana Caucus of the National Women’s Political Caucus and their journey from 1973 to 1979. It explains the history of Caucus’, its structure and purpose, and the impact they made on a national level on 1970s second wave feminism. By taking an interactive approach through the visualization on the main page, this makes the website much more interesting as opposed to a traditional non-interactive website layout.

Sources

This is the first scholarly research hub that has provided information collected from an eight-year recovery project called the Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Memory Collective. The Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory collective is essentially a digital museum that provides a wealth of information emphasizing on the important Chicana and Latina voices from the Civil Rights Era. Sources for Chicana Diasporic include historical documents such as photographs, speeches, event posters, newspaper articles, letters and filmed interview clips.

Processing

The way this project is processed is through random and simultaneous connections. Navigation through this project is done through an interactive approach. There are several main topics on the Chicana Diasporic and connected to each of them in a web-like pattern are several other sub sections related to the issue. By clicking on a main topic, it leads to separate pages of the sub sections which include text, images, and/or quotes providing the reader with straightforward information. For example, The Magical Name of Call and Response is a main topic which leads to twelve sub sections, the first being “Nommos: Llamadas Y Respuestas”.

Presentation

The presentation of this project is through Scalar, an open source authoring and publishing platform. In this instance, the navigation through the website seemed linear yet not so simple and straightforward to interact with. If the reader wants to wander off from the suggested navigation, they are almost immediately lost in a world of links and information. That being said, the graph visualization was a great touch and provided an insight into what sub-sections the main topics included in them. The idea behind the meaning of the website is clear and provides interesting information but that being said, the website seems cluttered and disorganized taking away from the experience and wealth of information it offered.