eng406

Project Description:
1. In its current, completed form, my project is a WordPress Website which offers biographical information on the prominent Hollywood fashion designer Maxwell Shieff and contextualization and analysis regarding Shieff’s place in the history of fashion. The website also includes a narrative of how I discovered Maxwell Shieff and conducted the necessary research to uncover his identity and significance. The information included in the site draws from a variety of sources, including magazines, newspapers, and an in-person interview with Shieff’s son to create as comprehensive an overview as possible.
1. My final project differs from my initial plan in that it lacks about half of the interactive, visual features I planned to include in the site due to time-constraints and lack of initial, realistic project-planning.
1. My audience for this project has always been first and foremost the Davidson community, due to the origin of the project—the Davidson College library which is relevant and familiar to all of us. Apart from this, I initially completed the project with the idea that the non-Davidson audience would be historians, specifically fashion historians like those I cited in my Lit-Review, as well as anyone who is interested in the mystery genre, or even true-crime (even though my project doesn’t have to do with crime). After making contact with Shieff’s son, my audience quickly expanded to include Shieff’s family. This was when privacy-protection, authorship, and permission became important things to keep in mind as I continued work on the site. Shieff’s son subsequently reached out to officials at Los Angeles’s FIDM museum in early March to inquire about entering his father’s materials into a permanent archive at the museum. When FIDM officials responded positively to Bill Shieff’s inquiry, the audience for my project expanded to include everyone who works for and with the FIDM Museum. Both Bill and I agreed that my project could have a significant impact in proving Shieff’s legitimacy as a unique and historically significant figure in Hollywood fashion history, and that if communication between Bill and FIDM continued successfully, I might be able to leverage my research to help establish a Maxwell Shieff archive. When I began this project, I never imagined that my audience would extended this far, all the way across the country to Maxwell’s descendants and museum officials in Los Angeles. The best impact my audience could have on this audience is that it could contribute to creating the permanent recognition Maxwell Shieff deserves as a designer and artist.
Individual Roles and Responsibilities:
1. Me, Maura Tangum: Since I chose to pursue this project alone, I am responsible for every aspect of the site’s content, design, and creation. This includes sorting through dozens of sources and gathering information from online databases such as Pro-Quest as well as conferring with a certified research librarian, Cara, in order to dig deeper and find the periodical-based information I was unable to uncover using only ProQuest. Joe at the Davidson Library also proved to be very helpful during this time by uncovering censored Canadian articles which helped me find more information and helped me discover and contact Bill Shieff. So, I like to think of Cara and Joe as two behind-the-scenes sidekicks who served as incredible helpers during the heavy-duty research stages of the project. I was also responsible for keeping myself on track to turn things in on time, which was difficult. Most importantly, I served as a journalist when I organized and conducted a two-hour long in-person interview with Bill Shieff at his home in California on March 4^th, 2020. The materials I gained access to and the things I learned during this conversation proved to be crucial to the completion of my project.
Project Goals and Objectives:
1. Goals:
  1. To gain a deeper understanding of who Maxwell Shieff was.
  1. To create a more comprehensive overview of Shieff’s life, career, place within fashion history, and cultural significance as a designer and artist.
  1. To narrate my own discovery of how I found out about Maxwell Shieff and began conducting research on him.
  1. To broaden the audience of people who might be interested in knowing about Shieff.
1. Objectives:
  1. Research: At the start of my project, I wanted my research to be detailed and comprehensive, yet I remained hesitant about how much research I would be able to gather since so little is known about Shieff. I was surprised by the final outcome—research makes up the bulk of my site and I was able to compile and uncover more research concerning Shieff’s life and career than I ever expected. Thus, the bar for my research objective started off low, but ended high.
  1. Writing: I intended for the written components of my site to be entertaining, immersive, narrative-driven and informative. I usually have a lot of fun writing in the narrative-style, so I wanted to not get so carried away with crafting the various narratives of the “mystery” that I veered from academic, fact-driven written information. In other words, my writing objective was to have fun, but not too much fun. Since I have been so passionate about this research and this project, it was important to me to demonstrate this by writing in a mature, authoritative style that still sounded like my subtly humorous voice as a writer. I think I achieved this balance in my final outcome. I am especially proud of my Literature Review, through which I think I really tested my writing-skills. I didn’t think it would be possible to even write a literature review about Shieff, but once I compiled the necessary sources and notes, I couldn’t stop writing until I had hit 13 pages. Thus, my writing objective was to establish a balance of academic and narrative-style and I think I achieved this while still having fun by engaging in somewhat creative storytelling.
Project Activities & Process:
1. The chronology of my project happened in phases which honestly were not very equally divided in terms of information gathered and work completed. I didn’t begin really diving into in-depth periodical research until about halfway through the semester, when I consulted Cara for help in uncovering obscure articles. From here on, my research process continued at a steady pace and peaked when I was able to interview Bill in early March. I completed a large bulk of additional research pretty recently as I constructed my site’s Story-Map. The work that went into creating the first two prototypes was pretty evenly spaced out because I barely had anything to consolidate and add to my site at that point. I devoted more time to my third prototype in which I focused mainly on design choices and settled on something I thought would work. I ended up completely changing this design aspect for my fourth and final prototype. A huge chunk of work was completed then, when I also rearranged the site’s navigation and added the bulk of the content.
1. My lit review proved to be crucial component of my project, which is something I never thought I would say at the start of the semester when I thought it would be impossible to even write a lit review about a non-academic subject like Shieff. After writing the review (and proving myself wrong), I used the lit review to historically contextualize Shieff and prove his importance as a historical figure. This became one of the key sections of my website and will help me to write a proposal to FIDM museum if they are interested in establishing a Maxwell Shieff archive.
1. I ended up using one of the digital storytelling platforms we discussed during our first week of class, The NYTimes’s Snowfall, as a model for the final design of my site. Snowfall served as inspiration for the way in which it fluidly told a story with equal parts sophistication and clarity. I modelled my header and the first page of my site off of Snowfall, with the intent of gently pulling my readers into the world of The Maxwell Mystery without overwhelming them with unnecessary information or distracting graphic content.
1. Not visible in the project are the many hours I spent sorting through ProQuest advertisements in order to establish the dates spanning Shieff’s career and as well as the rise, fall, and high and low points of his career. I did this because there was no other way to do it. Before this project, the only information which existed regarding Shieff were advertisements and newspaper articles—all of which collided in a jumbled, unsorted mess on Pro-Quest’s online database. I ended up sorting through roughly 50-100 Pro-Quest sources which mentioned Shieff’s name in order to sort out which were most important and which actually offered important information about Shieff. From these, I made educated deductions about his career and life, which I verified during my interview with Shieff’s son. I analyzed these more important sources and included them in the Story Map I created. These sources are also the only way in which I was able to write a biography of Shieff, which before now had not existed. I knew this from. The start of the project which is why I devoted so much time to it.
1. Project was only affected by the changed that happened as a result of COVID and being forced to evacuate campus. I lost access to a few interlibrary-loan online sources temporarily, but I was able to recover them a few weeks after leaving campus by consulting Joe.
1. I worked on UX testing with Maria and Grace’s group as well as with Maurice during in-class sessions. Suzanne also helped me address UX issues that I might want to fix for my final site. While at home, I also consulted my mom, dad, and sister, who navigated my website and offered varied commentary on ways in which my site might be improved to ensure optimal UX usability.
Accomplishments & Lessons Learned:
1. In my original project proposal from January 28^th, I proposed “a comprehensive investigation of the question, ‘who is Maxwell Shieff?’ within a public, interactive DH platform.” I seemed to have anticipated the importance that my Lit Review would play in my final project when I added in my initial proposal that I would utilize “scholarship surrounding fashion history and art history.” I ended up achieving both of these initial goals that I presented in my proposal. In the proposal, I express concern at not having enough primary sources to reach the level of complexity and informational and visual variance that I desired for my final project. I ended up solving this issue by asking for help and working with knowledgeable people outside of myself in order to uncover more information. As a naturally shy person, this required me to step out of my comfort zone for the sake of creating a more interesting and academically legitimate research project. Because I did this, my overall accomplishments ended up exceeding my expectations. My final project features the in-depth information which I was worried would be absent. The element currently lacking in my final project is visual content. In an effort to establish a higher quantity of accessible written information on my site, I overlooked many important visual complements such as embedded images and galleries. My failure to meet my objective for “visual content” in time for the class deadline taught me that sacrifices often have to be made between the inclusion of written and visual content when making a DH platform on a strict deadline. I also learned that it is most practical and fluid (at least to me) to create corresponding written and visual content simultaneously. I realized that these two tasks are both important to me but must be completed separately and then merged together.
1. Had I “world enough and time” I would have added these missing visual components to my website to break up long text segments and aid readers’ consumption of the site’s lengthy sections of written information. This would increase UX usability and would add the visual components to the site that were so important to Shieff as an artist and designer.
Works Cited:
1. Branch, John. “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” The New York Times, The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html#/?part=tunnel-creek. Accessed 11 May 2020.

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