URAP Project Descriptions

(Remote) Global Lives Project: Web Development, Web Analytics, Digital Art Preservation, and Digital Art Accessibility

David Harris, Lecturer
Business, Haas School

Applications for Fall 2025 are closed for this project.

REMOTE OPPORTUNITIES FOR STUDENTS to work with an arts, film, culture nonprofit organization - 9-11 hrs/wk (3 units), including mandatory online weekly meetings (day TBD).

We are looking for students interested in gaining work experience across our two distinct workstreams: Web development and art preservation. You do not need to be interested in both our web development team and our art preservation team.

When you apply, please specify which workflow you are interested in!

REQUIREMENTS FOR EACH TEAM/ROLE

1. Web Development, Data Science, web analytics
This team will be tasked with the continued management and improvement of our WordPress website (GlobalLives.org), which hosts hundreds of hours of video footage. Students will use web management and design skills to test site functionality and performance, optimize performance, analyze user behaviors, create designs for new web pages that fit within existing brand guidelines, and improve previous page designs. Students will use tools including Google Analytics and WordPress.

Required:
Experience with managing basic websites
Strong writing skills

Preferred:
WordPress
Other types of web design or web management
Google Ads, Google Analytics experience
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator

2. Digital media preservation

You will be responsible for planning and executing an art preservation strategy for the Global Lives Project. Over the past 20 years, the Global Lives Project has produced more than 500 hours of video footage in 17 countries, along with dozens of physical exhibits around the world. Our organization is in the process of indexing and preserving all of the digital and physical assets that we’ve produced over these two decades. Students will work to conduct an inventory of our digital and physical assets, document and catalog them, and then research long-term plans for an “accessioning event,” wherein all or part of the collection will be transferred to a library, museum, or other institution for long-term access. This is a great project for students of Media Studies, Art, Art History, History, or others interested in how cultural works are preserved.

Required:
Interest in the preservation of arts and cultural works
Strong detail orientation

Preferred:
Experience with digital photography and video
Background in art history/media studies/library work
Experience managing large amounts of digital media in multiple formats

Role: BACKGROUND ON THE ORGANIZATION:

The Global Lives Project is a video library of life experiences designed to cultivate empathy across cultures. We curate a large collection of films that faithfully capture 24 continuous hours in the lives of individuals from around the world. We explore the diversity of human experience through the medium of video, and encourage discussion, reflection, and inquiry about the wide variety of cultures, ethnicities, languages, and religions on this planet. Our goal is to foster empathy and cross-cultural understanding.

Founded in 2002, the Global Lives Project is a registered non-profit organization that collects and exhibits footage of the daily lives of everyday people from around the world. Our most recent exhibit, Lives in Transit, is a ten-screen video installation featuring footage of the daily lives of ten transit workers from Nepal, Vietnam, Turkey, South Korea, India, China, Colombia, Canada and Spain, and the United States.

Global Lives exhibits have shown in dozens of venues around the world, as far afield as United Nations University (Tokyo), the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, the Harvard Science Center, as close to home at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive, the Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the CITRIS Tech Museum (Sutardja Dai Hall), and most recently, the Global Museum at San Francisco State University.

OBJECTIVES FOR THE SEMESTER:

During this semester, we are working to preserve this organization and its numerous past exhibits, including hundreds of hours of documentary footage filmed for the video project, ensuring that they remain accessible to the public and any future museum engagements.

Our semester’s objectives include:
Management and updating of our WordPress website, improving design, security, and long-term resilience.
Collect our remaining physical archives from various locations across the bay, index them, and establish long-term storage.
Create public-facing materials to express the GLP’s organizational shift to a video archive

REQUIREMENTS FOR ALL URAP STUDENTS:

This URAP is a student-led initiative that manages a registered non-profit organization under the guidance of faculty and board members. As such, all prospective team members are expected to work independently and communicate effectively with faculty and project managers.

Please make sure you can commit reasonable hours per week and are available for the mandatory weekly meetings, as well as other meetings that may be scheduled separately for each team. The descriptions for each type of role are listed below. We are looking for students who are passionate about the project's mission, can take initiative and responsibility, and are willing to learn.

In your application, please indicate ALL of the roles you believe you are fit for. By the end of the application process, you will be assigned to 1~2 roles with a team of other students to work with, led by a project manager.

*Project Manager
Depending on the number of students accepted, we may look for new project managers (PM) during the application process. This role requires the same time commitment but more responsibilities, including leading small team meetings, delegating tasks, communicating with admin/faculty, etc. If you are interested in being a PM, please indicate that, along with the team/role(s) you are interested in.

Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Owen Doyle

Hours: 9-11 hrs

Off-Campus Research Site: remote with occasional on-campus meetings

Social Sciences Arts & Humanities

Return to Project List