RICHES Internship Blog Post #7

           This week, working on the internship at RICHES, I gathered information on Supreme Court cases. I have been discussing further ideas with not just the Bending Towards Justice team, but also with Dr. Gordon, who I am working with on this specific portion of the project. I had an idea to use a map and timeline to show the origins of each of the Supreme Court cases that supported or did not support voter suppression and when the case occurred. Each of these locations would have pin drops on a map of the United States, when clicking the pin drop it would pull up a brief bio of the case and its decision and perhaps the justices that served on the case. This would allow for this portion of the exhibit to be both interactive and not overly word heavy. It could also be possible to put photos in the information bubbles. These photographs, as I mentioned last week, would have to either have no copyright, or RICHES would have to get permission for educational purposes to use the photographs. During my meeting this week with Dr. Gordon, we discussed my map and timeline idea, which I had brought up in the RICHES meeting this week also. Dr. Gordon liked my idea and I had mentioned I could initially present the Supreme Court cases and their decisions on voter suppression using a program called VisualEyes. This was one of the programs that we used for our final project in Dr. French’s Digital Tools for Historians course this past fall. Though I did not use VisualEyes, I used a similar program called Tableau. The way I used Tableau was to incorporate graphs in my project for that class. I had originally thought that VisualEyes would be a good digital tool for the Bending Towards Justice exhibit. However, after discussing it with Dr. Lester and Kirk, it is only possible to embed the link to if we use VisualEyes table that we work on for Bending Towards Justice project, meaning that you will not be able to see the project that Dr. Gordon and I create for the exhibit if we did it that way. So via email, we discussed that we will work with Ms. Amy Giroux to create a map that will be able to be put on the Bending Towards Justice website. Personally, I find it very exciting to learn all of these cool new digital tools that can be very valuable as I progress throughout my graduate program and into a career. Also, this week I was given full teams access through my UCF student email, which I was very excited about. This means I can edit the documents I need to add things to once I type them in a Word document, and then finalize them with Dr. Gordon. Next week, I plan to continue to work on finding more Supreme Court cases and writing up a short bio along with the decisions on the cases as well.