Skills that didn't make it into the final project.
Voyant
While using Voyant wasn't difficult, I did not know how to incorporate it into my site naturally. I could've put in more focus on the lyricism and used Voyant for that, but again, I don't know where I would've put that. Maybe the Appeal section? Also, Voyant has a bit of hard time with non-English stuff, like it has a fairly comprehensive block list for Spanish right off the bat but I had to put in a lot more keywords to filter out when I was working with it. Also, Voyant doesn't work too well with lyrics, since songs can have much fewer lines and more repetition in comparison to full length texts. If I did use academic articles, I don't think I would've learned much that I haven't already learned. Cool feature, but I think it would've ruined the flow of the site.
Google Maps
I thought about using it, but as I was making my StoryMap I realized just the sheer amount of people who are from California, specifically from LA. Even those who weren't born in California at some point move there or become notable in the area. While my project does feature a lot of locations, most of them are very broad such as "X artist is from Y country." It makes using coordinates or addresses difficult since it's a very broad, vague area. And sadly there aren't many monuments per say? I could only find one name of a notable venue, and luckily it's still around but it was closed for a time. I decided to axe it since it would've been a lot of people congregated in California.
Thinglink
I came to an issue with the photo I used for the Thinglink I created. I found the image on JSTOR, and assumed that I could use it for educational purposes. But I wanted to make sure, so I went to the company site and searched up the photographer (who I don't think works for that particular company anymore since he wasn't on the current contracted photographers). After a bit of looking, I found the photo and it said that I needed to purchase it. This made me pause since why would it be up on JSTOR if it needed to be purchased? I'm not fully sure. I do have the photographer credited, but I decided to not use it. Thinglink is great for demonstration, and I don't necessarily have anything that needs demonstrating demonstrating.
Flourish
Another cool feature! Makes making graphs easy, but I sadly don't have any quantitative or even qualitative data that I could use to make a chart with Flourish. If I had done more with Voyant in terms of what topics are mentioned the most in song lyrics, I think I could've made something. But I couldn't find the time to do anything like that, and again, I feel like the repetition I found in so many songs would've skewed any data I would've gathered. Below is one of the two Flourish charts I created.
Wordpress
Here is the link to my Wordpress site!