2017 Open House: Celebrating the Art and Science of Information
www.iSchoolOpenHouse.info | March - May 2017
My Role: Project Manager, Information Architect, Front-End Designer
The University of Texas at Austin School of Information (iSchool) hosts its annual Open House every spring to showcase graduate students' projects and information research to the community. I led a small team of students in designing a website to promote the event, including the creation of a database-driven archive of student projects. In my role as project manager, I prioritized and assigned tasks to team members, ensured that deliverables were completed on schedule, and facilitated communication between project stakeholders (Career Development and IT) and the design team throughout the development process. I also spearheaded the information architecture of the web pages and coded the layouts in Drupal 7 CMS, as well as collaborated on the design and creation of the student project database.
Info Portal: The University of Texas at Austin iSchool Student Blog
infoportal.ischool.utexas.edu | July 2016 - August 2017
My Role: Editor-in-Chief, Metadata Manager (SEO), Front-End Designer
Info Portal is a blog by students, for students. It is an online community where members of The University of Texas at Austin School of Information (iSchool) can share their thoughts about the information field as well as their experiences as students and information professionals. One of the iSchool's goals with this effort is that it will help centralize access to information about student groups, student activities, and promote student-derived narratives about the school and the information field.I was tasked with bringing this vision to life. As the solo designer, information architect, metadata manager and editor, I created Info Portal from the ground up in WordPress CMS. My primary design focus was for the site to be student-oriented and relatable to a diverse audience with a variety of professional interests, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the UT School of Information. The result is a curated, yet approachable site which highlights iSchool students' interests and activities, provides a means for students to inspire one another, and informs prospective students about the great things happening at the UT iSchool. As editor, I work to ensure that Info Portal remains an inclusive environment for students of all professional interests by recruiting writers from a variety of information fields to share their activities and perspectives.
Read my articles here.
Behind the Tower: New Histories of the UT Tower Shooting
www.behindthetower.org | January - July 2016
My Role: Content Strategist
As one of 11 students in Professor Joan Neuberger's Spring 2016 Public and Digital History Seminar, I co-led the creation of an online public history of the mass shooting that Charles Whitman carried out at UT Austin on August 1, 1966. Our collective work entitled “Behind the Tower: New Histories of the UT Tower Shooting” aims to raise questions, elicit curiosity, and encourage people to continue to dig into the history of what has to be one of the most important historical events to take place in Austin, Texas."Behind the Tower" presents a collection of 14 essays covering various aspects of the tragic event, including police response, student life, Texas gun culture in the 1960s, Whitman’s drug use and physical and emotional condition, campus counseling services, the university’s response, and the nature of remembering and forgetting traumatic public events. My essay, "Ladies First", explores the possible connection between Whitman’s murder of his mother and wife, and the history of domestic violence in his family, with the random murders that followed. The website also includes biographies for each of the victims.
This online resource received a variety of media coverage around the 50th anniversary of the shooting (August 1, 2016), including articles from Slate, BurntX, The Daily Dot, NBC (KXAN Austin), and more.