team reports: April 26

[jeffreybarry]

add your team reports as replies to this issue.

[halfant99]

Quality Control Team Report

Team Report.docx

[clevelande19]

Editorial and Strategic Communication Team Report As the editorial and strategic communication team, our main priority is ensuring that everyone’s work--both individual eBooks and the final report-- fits together into cohesive pieces that we can then advertise and make available to the public. Because our team will be involved in so many aspects of these projects, we will need to collaborate closely with the other teams at every step of the process to prevent any miscommunication. This weekend, we will be editing everyone’s choice articles from Shenandoah and reorganizing them into 18 eBooks with content from different issues. We are going to try to sort each ebook by format, topic, or theme and will post them of Github on Tuesday so that people can choose which they would like to produce. The primary challenge of this week’s assignment is the amount of content we will have to review (between 72-90 articles) and the organization of those articles. For example, some may seem like they do not fit in a particular topic, but there may also be some ebooks with the same topic. Furthermore, we will likely need to review Shenandoah issues to pull new pieces so that each eBook can have around four to five pieces that fit into some sort of cohesive narrative. Next week, we intend to review everyone’s topics for their innovation reports so we can see what types of topics people will be exploring in preparation for editing them for clarity and cohesion.

[mitchellc21]

Industry Analysis Team Report #1 Curtis, Zander, Rob, Evans, Jon

As the industry analysis team, we plan on identifying new and innovative strategies in the publishing industry. This includes researching market trends and breaking down successes within the industry. In doing so, we hope to identify potential gaps and room for growth, not necessarily right now but rather in the upcoming years. For instance, we hope to come up with a product that could fill a void in the publishing industry such as a subscription service that automatically uploads children’s bedtime stories to a device nightly.

One of the greatest challenges our team faces is being able to come up with products/services that will revolutionize the industry. We do not know what the future holds in terms of advances in technology and this limits our brainstorming capabilities. Another challenge is that the industry is already continually innovating and it is likely that many of our ideas are currently being pursued. As of now, we have limited exposure to the publishing industry and thus need to research it so that we can better understand what is going on. There are also challenges in terms of competing with large scale publishing companies like Penguin Random House which dominates the education publishing industry. For instance, almost 80% of the textbook industry is dominated by 5 publishing companies (Penguin Random House, Hatchette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, and Simon and Schuster) (Business Insider). As such, we need to find ways to penetrate the market through strong innovations or by providing unique services.

As the industry analysis team, there is a lot we need to know. Foremost, we need to recognize market trends and current innovations in the publishing industry. We need to identify popular products and services and understand what makes them successful so that our ideas can be successful. We also need to research past failures in the market so that we can avoid similar mistakes. We also need to know about the competitors in the industry and how smaller companies compete against bigger companies.

Looking forwards to next week, we hope to have a strong, in-depth understanding of the publishing industry and be able to articulate it to the whole class. We hope to have an overview of the market and its major companies as well as an understanding of innovations driving growth and success in this industry. We also hope to identify gaps and voids in the industry in which we can then come up with products/services that will improve the industry and bring a company success.

[fonviellem21]

Documentation Team Report: As a team, we are trying to become familiar with Github in order to better understand the functionality this web interface offers users in terms of documentation and project management. By exploring the multifunctional web interface, we seek to adopt a greater understanding of it's various organizational and management tools. By understanding the GitHub project board option, we hope to facilitate more organized documentation as well as rank order tasks in relation to priority. This will help us understand how projects are managed and be able to fully document the endeavors of each team. Moreover, We will explore what a “Wiki” is on GitHub and how we can use this as a beneficial tool in the documentation process. Along with the challenges of exploring and becoming comfortable with GitHub inside and out, we will attempt to understand the steps each team is taking and record their process in a concise manner. It will be difficult at times to understand the work of each team, but we will work closely with all team members to correctly understand and record their work. Eventually, we want to record and track the various teams progress on the project using the GitHub interface. Next week we will dive into our venture of documenting the specific events of each team.

[colemanlucas]

Design Team Team Members: Rich, Barrett, & Coleman

As the design team, our main goal is to produce an eBook that is engaging to the audience and sparks curiosity for our readers. We plan to do this by creating an aesthetically pleasing cover for each eBook and giving special attention to details such as font and color scheme throughout. In addition to the book, our team will work alongside the other teams in the production of the posters for the Spring Festival. Just as with the eBook, it is important that the posters peek the audience’s curiosity because our ability to do this is crucial to attract readers. In order to succeed in this, we will keep the posters simple, void of dense reading, and make it engaging through the use of visuals and bright colors.

Moving forward, we expect to face many challenges both technologically and visually. Of our three group members, two have never used the software necessary to produce an eBook and we fear our lack of experience may lead to a slower production time. Additionally, the physical characteristics pose many challenges because we will need to ensure the fonts and colors are consistent throughout and the pictures appropriately accompany the topics being covered. It is necessary for us to know how to use the software and what visual elements have worked with other eBooks.

In the upcoming week, all three members of our team will be looking at eBooks available to us online and see what we find visually pleasing and what we do not. It is important for us to specifically look at eBooks because as Craig Mod talked about, what looks good on a physical book cover does not always look good in an online format. As we analyze different covers, we will also being brainstorming potential ideas for the eighteen covers which will all need their own individualized design and style depending on the content.

[changj19]

DCI-175_Coding Team_Deliverable_1.docx

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Christian Hanna, Jesse Chang DCI-175 | Coding Team | Team Report No. 1 Professor J. Barry 4/26/2019

The team’s goals revolve exclusively around creating a functional and accessible eBook/ePub file. We will be taking text and visual elements, and in using proper eBook/ePub format, arrange it into a visually appealing file. We will be working closely with the editorial team, the design team, and the quality control team throughout the process, as they will all be providing us with content for the publication and suggestions on how the eBook should be formatted. We will also be passing on information to the documentation team, as they will help us remain organized and document the changes we make throughout the process to ensure they are not lost over time.

Most of our challenges will present themselves in the coding itself. As we have not specifically coded an eBook before, we must familiarize ourselves with coding styles specific to eBook/ePub creation before proceeding with the creation of the publication. Additionally, since a lot of text will be involved, it is crucial that we maintain an organized file structure so the code can be easily edited if need be.

As mentioned above, we need to know the specifics about the file structure of eBooks/ePubs. We also need to learn specific HTML and CSS which are commonly used in eBook production - as well as eBook coding conventions we are unfamiliar with, if any exist. Also, we need to ensure that we familiarize ourselves with Atom and can smoothly commit to Github as we did previously with VSCode.

By next week, our team hopes to learn more about the inner workings of ePub files. We will be scraping the Shenandoah site and uploading each file onto a separate GitHub repository. We plan on extracting the raw HTML from each article that the class wanted to include in the eBook production. (We will also be organizing the scraped files so our classmates can easily find what they are looking for, instead of the whole website thrown into a single directory.) We would also like to create a type of template that could be used across the numerous eBooks the class will be creating, and maybe even a short, test eBook to test different formatting and styling methods for title pages, table of contents, etc.

[barrettdowd]

As discussed in our previous team report, members individually looked at online book covers to see what we thought worked well and what we thought did not work well. Having done this, we discovered bigger pictures with fewer words worked best for the covers. Specifically we looked at the IBooks store and realized that covers using smaller print were not as appealing to us because the words were hard to read. Additionally, smaller pictures were also less aesthetically pleasing because the details were lost when viewed so much tinier.

Now that the editorial team has chosen the various themes our class will create ebooks on, the design team can move forward in brainstorming cover ideas. This will be our task over the following week as we discuss what pictures we find appropriate for each individual theme and what we want the cover to convey. We have decided that we do not want the cover images to simply state each ebooks theme, but rather the images should show a deeper meaning and we want the reader to analyze the image to see its symbolic meaning. To achieve this, we will pick more abstract images.

We will also be discussing the digital aspects such as dimensions and which dimensions will work the best. This is because not only will the images need to look good online, but when printed they must maintain their quality and clarity. This will be one of our challenges over the next week as we work through this issue. Additionally, we face the challenge of copyright issues and ensuring all images used are available for reuse and modification. We can avoid this challenge by setting our google searches to the “reuse and modification” setting, however, this itself poses another challenge. Once on this setting, there are fewer images available that we are able to use.