Update on Project Activities
This past week has been focused on our first Zoom call with Erin and Mary, some of our community partners at AEMP. This was particularly important for our group because we had not yet met either of them as Adrienne and Magie attended the in-person meeting last week. We started off the week in an email conversation with Deland, Erin, and Mary to schedule our Zoom call (which ended up occuring on Wednesday, October 10th at 8:30am). Erin and Mary provided us with several of their past grant materials for us to review, as well as the website for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant. We individually read these materials and thought about questions/comments we’d like to pose to Erin and Mary. During the call itself, we spent some time introducing ourselves and talking about our personal interests and on-campus connections, with the hope that we could help AEMP through multiple channels (for example, two of our group members are broadcasters and leadership at KZSU, Stanford’s FM radio station, and another is leadership for Students for a Sustainable Stanford). We then discussed our group strategy for approaching the grant-writing, which is our main focus at the moment (see “Moving Forward” for more details). We wrapped up by outlining the scope of our project and what other tasks/deliverables we should expect to complete by the end of the quarter. The call lasted approximately one hour. Since then, we have divided up a list of past winning grant narratives for NEH amongst ourselves and begun to read them. We hope to glean some successful strategies for responding to each individual aspect of the grant prompt. What We Observed and Learned This week, while focusing on reading AEMP’s previous grant applications and the guidelines for NEH grant applications, we started to build an intuition for what qualities or angles each grant-offering institution values. The NEH grant is a humanities grant, so AEMP wants to frame the atlas as an interdisciplinary, digital humanities project, as opposed to a quantitative, cartography project. This frame means that we should focus on the collaborative, analytical work, revealing processes and experiences of the human environment of the Bay Area and looking to the past, present, and future. On Sunday, we will observe the operations and interactions of the entire collective and look forward to seeing more of how our efforts will play a role in the team. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward The Zoom meeting this week was successful because everyone came prepared, having read the NEH application requirements and previous grant proposals shared with us by the AEMP project. This allowed us to jump straight in to more in-depth, critical questions about how we should tackle this task, instead of familiarizing ourselves with the task itself. Because there are so many moving pieces, it is already challenging to juggle responsibilities and will continue to be this way. However, outlining the project’s scope with Mary and Erin helped us to begin formulating a manageable timeline for this quarter, and discussing daily to-dos over our group chat has helped us keep track of deadlines and tasks. Moving forward, we have the following list of tasks:
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