The Playboy Contract...

For my class on digital history, I have to work with two classmates in creating an online exhibit. We must utilize UNC Charlotte's archives, so my group is basing our project on the collection of Playboy magazines available. The contract for this project, essentially outlining our goals, tools, and schedule, is due later today. The contract was completed yesterday, but I would not say it is finalized.

Creating our contract took a bit longer than I anticipated, but we got it done. Samantha and I had to do a lot of brainstorming to begin our contract, since our focus was redirected towards the cliche topic of sexuality. We originally wanted to examine American social movements during the 1960s and 1970s through the lens of Playboy, following the women's movement (including sexuality), the civil rights movement (MLK Jr. interview in 1965 issue!), and the movement that spawned from the Vietnam War (creation of hippie, drug, anti-war culture). These ideas morphed into the categories of female sexuality, male sexuality, and black civil rights...but civil rights obviously does not fit here. We wanted to include the black civil rights movement in our project, because there is a surplus of relevant material in Playboy that gives an interesting point of view, but Samantha and I could not think of a logical way to link sex, sex, and race within Playboy. Maybe Samantha and I weren't creative enough, but we felt forced to exclude anything other than sexuality. The mission statement of our contract reads, "In our exhibition, we will explore the perceptions of male and female sexuality through the lens of Playboy magazine in the mid 1960s through the late 1970s..." This is exactly what one would expect from an analysis of Playboy, but still somewhat interesting.

Once we finally had our mission statement, Samantha and I were able to complete the rest of the contract. We had to keep it rather vague, since we were missing a group member, and we were not entirely sure what to anticipate. Neither of us have created an online exhibit before, or dealt with metadata. I hope our schedule is reasonable, but we will probably have to include further specifics once we get a bit deeper into the project. I look forward to the actual research: flipping through the magazines to figure out what I want to use in the exhibit. It's so interesting! Although, I think narrowing the material down and actually deciding what to use and not use will be difficult. I'm also excited about playing around with the web aspect of the site and learning about various digital tools. Making the schedule made me realize that an immense amount of effort, time, and communication must go into this project for it to be successful. Everything that has to be done is intimidating, but breaking it down into pieces should make it manageable.