Author Archives: Benjamin Moerch

Group Outreach and SoMe Plan – Community Gardens

Audience

Our project “Welcome to the digital garden” wishes to explore and engage an audience in community gardens by digital means. By mapping different data we are creating first hand visuals for the user who wishes to explore what a community garden is in New York City by bringing in different perspectives. Furthermore we are opening up the possibility to explore and interact by asking questions and crossing different datasets. We wish to aim the project towards the people who are engaged in community gardens and want to learn more about them on a broader scale through a digital humanities perspective, both to highlight strength and weakness in the work being done across New York City. When considering our intended audience we found it important to analyze who could potentially benefit and be interested in our project. There could be many different actors in the field of community gardens since we are exploring different aspects of them. It could be on a political, educational and academic level. However, to narrow down the scope of who we wish to target specifically we believe we would be most helpful and relevant to those already engaged in community garden work. This accounts for organizations and academics as well. In other words we are targeting volunteers, coordinators and scholars who wish to strengthen the effort done around community garden work.

Communication channels and tone

Through the project we will get a better understanding of the intended audience and their needs and resources, but our main communication will be online through our website and outreach channels. We are additionally gonna present our project to the gardens who we are in contact with through our small ethnographic research. To understand our audience’s use of SoMe we mapped out what platforms the “official” gardens use (not volunteers). Few of them have a website and twitter but most have a facebook and/or an instagram, albeit with little activity

With our project we wish to create a website that is informative whilst showing different important perspectives. The tone for communicating will be educational, inspiring and enlightening. We hope to create a trust in our work that is legit and worth considering and exploring further. Therefore our main choice of social media is twitter. This for two main reasons. Firstly twitter corresponds with our wish for communication between different individuals and communities. The comment section on Twitter encourages discourse within those who find the tweet engrossing. We hope through this outlet those who are interested in community gardening will find a way to link and connect with those already involved or are looking to be involved. Furthermore, the weblink tweeted on our profile should ideally lead to more traffic on our website through likes and shares. In addition we are also considering starting a Facebook page. In many cases it works well for communities of shared interest in groups, which could become relevant for us to share our work. However this will only happen if our research shows us that our audience uses the platform actively.

Social media strategy

One of our goals with this project is to create awareness about community gardens and therefore we will be working on social media alongside our project. The main purpose of our twitter will be to get people to visit our website and engage with the content. We will share the responsibility of posting and engaging with our twitter accounts, so one person is in charge each week. Firstly we will follow relevant people and organizations in the field of community gardens, secondly we will develop content that will revolve around topics directly related to our project. Our content will be news and research shared from others, our own findings and perspectives and lastly a more personal approach with updates on our progress concerning the website. Each post will include a link to our website and we will use different relevant hashtags together with tagging different organizations. Since our audience is a specific group of interested people we don’t aim for a lot of followers or a lot of engagement in our posts but we are hoping to reach at least some people working with community gardens to visit our social media accounts and site.

Website and outreach

Our final product is a website so we will not be working on an additional one as a promotion site. Instead our twitter account will serve as our means of communicating the progress of our website. We will test it before launching and get a review from outside individuals before making final adjustments. After the website is done we will share it and publish in relevant networks to spread the word.

Benjamin Mørch Personal Bio/Contribution Statement

Benjamin Mørch graduated from Copenhagen University in 2017 with a B.A. in Ethnology and Visual Anthropology. His main academic interest has been working with processes of othering or the figure of ‘the stranger’ in the media and education system often with a feminist scholar framework. During his bachelor’s he focused on ethnographic fieldwork using visual and audio methods, and developed workshops about cultural history for educational use. Since he has used his skills in different settings and worked on documentaries, as a teacher, ethnologist conducting fieldwork and campaign leader for an NGO. His interest in pedagogy using media and digital tools has grown in the last years where he has worked making educational material for high schools students and as a teacher. He is currently in his first semester of a master in Digital Humanities, and he hopes to explore and learn more about digital pedagogy and skills in digital tools for educational use. In the project “What is a Community Garden in the Digital Age” his main task is to design and conduct a smaller ethnographic fieldwork with selected community gardens and work with the user experience and development of the final site.

Benjamin’s Skillset

Hi everybody.

Nice meeting you all last week. I’m Benjamin and this is my first semester at CUNY so I’m still new to DH, but I’m excited about the pitches and to start working on the projects. I have a background in media production and ethnographic studies with teaching experiences at different levels. I have combined my skills in ethnographic methods and media by working on creating podcasts and video documentaries for different projects, NGO’s and educational material. Before arriving in New York I was working as a campaign leader, where I, together with a team, created educational material and raised awareness about women rights in Ethiopia. As it is my first semester I’m not an expert in DH, but I find it very interesting working with the digital in connection to education, communities and making humanities studies more accessible to a larger group of people.

I’m open to taking on different roles and enjoy working on team projects and a collaborative approach.

Project manager:
This is a role I previously have taken on for several projects, and I could do it again if necessary, but I enjoy working more with the creative aspects of a project and less in managing.
Developer:
Unfortunately my knowledge in developing is quite little, but I’m eager to learn more and this is also one of the reasons why I find this course interesting. I have learned and worked with visual and audio programs like photoshop, adobe premiere and illustrator and have also created content for webpages in those formats.

Design/UX:
As mentioned above I have worked with different graphic and design programs like photoshop, illustrator, and InDesign. I’m not an expert though. I find it interesting to work with visual communications, and would like to explore it more. With my background in ethnographic studies, I have also worked with conducting surveys and researching users’ preferences, needs etc. when creating products.

Outreach/social Media:Through my job as a campaign leader I worked with communication, outreach and social media to engage people in the project and create awareness about the educational material. If nobody feels like doing it, I could take on this role in a group, but I would also be up for a more collaborative role and sharing my knowledge.

Documentation:
I find this an interesting part of projects and a good way to evaluate the process throughout. Most of my documentation experiences come from using visual and audio methods rather than writing.

Research:
I have studied and since worked on ethnographic research projects both in academia and industry. I feel confident in designing, conducting and analyzing ethnographic research, and if it makes sense for the project, I could do that again. I have also worked with researching historical sources though my studies, but primarily in a european context.