This week, UrbanEyes (or what was left of UrbanEyes as half of the group was unable to attend due to the Daniel Spectrum event or a child’s illness) decided to finally take some steps to create our interactive website, and catch up on the interviews conducted by residents.
Our initial plan was to use Canva to create a website, but upon suggestion from our instructor, we switched to Squarespace instead. This way, we can merge our website with the existing URB430 course site, and we would be able to use the existing Squarespace credentials without having to pay for a premium subscription from Canva. This proved to be slightly challenging, as most of us already had experience with Canva but not with Squarespace, and the interface was not as user-friendly as expected. However, after meddling around for a bit, we now have a fairly good grasp of how it works. We created a home page, an “About Us” page, and some details about our interviewees. Below are images from our website as of now. We still need to replace certain images and text on the website, including our home page in which we plan to include an image of Regent Park residents during a festival from the Regent Park Archives.
Figure 2: Meet the team 1/2
Figure 3: Meet the team 2/2
Since half of our team was absent for last Thursday’s class, we refrained from any discussion regarding the logistics of editing the interviews and deciding which part to keep and how to present it, as we wanted everyone to be able to listen in and give their opinions. We plan on discussing the role of the recorded interviews in our website either next week, or our upcoming weekly outside-of-class meeting.
We are hoping to get in touch with the Regent Park Archives to find some pictures of community activities or events/festivals that we can use for our website. However, at this point in time, we have zero images of Regent Park residents (excluding the ones in our group).
In terms of our interviews, we are almost done! Out of the seven interviews that must be conducted, five were done as of last Thursday, and one is being conducted today (Friday). We are simply waiting on our last but not least interview from Gail, and we will be ready to upload them onto our website. Additionally, the U of T students have already begun their research on the histories of Latin, Vietnamese, and Irish immigration, but it is still in its early stages and we plan on diving in deeper once the last interview is complete.
UrbanEyes: Ipshita, Tanishka, Gail, Lizette, Saquib, Fardowsa