On Friday April 5th, Arizona Crowbirds hosted a “Launch Lunch” as a way to announce changes and developments to the Crow website, as well as a way to thank instructors and administrators for their support and feedback. With the new changes to the Crow interface, instructors will now be able to request full text access. Furthermore, there have been improvements based on past workshops and feedback such as the ability to get dynamic frequency data from filters (e.g., assignment or student’s country of origin) rather than from the entire corpus.
At the “Launch Lunch,” Dr. Staples gave a demonstration of the interface and then instructors were able to explore on their own and offer suggestions as they came up. We also announced our plans for the addition of repository materials from the University of Arizona, and our new intake form that will streamline the collection process We’ll pilot the form this summer and release an updated version this fall. Dr. Staples also briefly displayed the mock-up for the online version of MACAWS, which will be launched in Fall 2019. Since the lunch, our developer Mark Fullmer has already made changes to the site, including highlighted search terms in the full text, to make it as user-friendly as possible.