We had a productive meeting on March 25 and went through our tasks for the upcoming weeks, through Spring Break. Phase 2 of our project begins today.

A lot of the discussion centered around the GDPW visuals:  the logo, the website, and the visualizations. First, we discussed what our first social media posts will feature; this will be the first item on our agenda. Our plan is to make the posts graphics-focused with as few words as possible. Elijah feels that with Reddit and Bluesky, it will be possible to create a conversation around our topic if we want to engage more with the public. Madison brought up the point that on social media, people are really just scrolling through, so our posts should be as simple yet as eye-catching as possible. We won’t have any active links in these posts yet. Madison has completed some preliminary data visualizations and they are up on the AirTable site. She’s run some of the data through: the length of the matches, and some that are comparative (men/women). Madison is also working on mastering even more of Tableau.

Next, we discussed adding resources to Zotero; Cathy will be working with Stephen Zweibel next week to learn a bit of how to use that system. We agreed that we would remove the JS Timeline from our website, and Elijah gave us a tutorial on editing the site using Elementor.  Business card design and printing was next, and Martin and Madison are going to look for a local copy shop that could probably print our cards for less than it would cost to go through a large chain store, or to order them online. Madison is going to work on some design ideas for the business cards so that we can have them ready to go for the wrestling event in Queens on April 25!

Last week was great, we were very productive during class time! The website and map is coming along well, I created an Instagram account @carouselsofnyc, and we finalized on a logo (see below).  I feel like things are starting to come together. Now that we have the logo, I focused on creating a brand kit with theme colors, fonts, graphics, and icons. Next steps on my end is to update the Instagram profile, draft content, create a banner for our website, and, now that it’s getting nicer out, I need to visit some carousels with my kids.

This week has been a slow one for our team. Our leader, Tasha, has been recovering from an injury so we skipped our Thursday check-in and stayed the course of song research and posting the wire frames. I’m not sure if it is the change in seasons or the hellscape we live in, but it’s felt hard to stay motivated this week. Song research remains HARD and honestly I am looking forward to it coming to an end. I am ready to move onto researching the history of women in bandura.

Last week in class Alex walked us through installing WAX on our computers. I used the command line! Alex, Lini, and Tasha were very patient and helpful as attempted to navigate the new experience. It was a great first step in learning about web development tools and how our project will actually be built. I always expect to pick things up easily, but I’m learning something new! And that is not supposed to necessarily be easy.

Looking to the future, this week I really need to get our social media sites up and compose some content. I’m planning to create posts in advance so when it comes time to post I can just upload them, or if I am unavailable someone else on the team can do it. Onward.

I’ve been struggling this last week, to be frank. I’m going to make this post public to our class in case others are feeling this way too.

I know the structure of assignments and work can be comforting to some during times of uncertainty, but it is really hard for me to balance deadlines and the rapid pace of this project development with the current political moment in the air and what I think life is asking from me outside of this program. Our academic peers are being deported for their political views, the views being that our country should not be enabling and funding the indiscriminate genocide of a long-subjugated and occupied population. My friends are holing up, not going out for groceries because they are afraid of ICE. One of the last remaining journalists working in Gaza was killed in a directly targeted attack today; the professional journalists union that I am a part of in my full-time work has said nothing to condemn the killing of more than 200 of our professional colleagues since October 2023, some of them working for our own member unit outlets.

I wish the semester structure and the nature of group work lent themselves more to scheduling in buffer time and room for things to go wrong or slow down. I know we (as a class, as a team) will do our best to make that space but I hate the feeling of responding to an artificial urgency that we have the power to adjust to be more realistic to the current circumstances.

Last week in our in-class work time we had hoped to get Wax up and running for all members of the team and then — very true to the software development “in the real word” — hit a good several speed bumps with both installation options (though I should acknowledge that Tasha was able to get things running, and she is probably the most crucial team member to have local access to running the backend code!). Then for different personal reasons myself and another team member were largely unavailable this week. I am feeling a little disconnected from our project timeline, and again, not super motivated by the self-prescribed deadlines.

I feel really grateful to Lini for stepping in and posting our team wireframes when I was falling short. And, looking at the deadlines that we had ported over to our Asana, I am at least feeling good about getting back on track for some of the upcoming development work in my purview (teaching Git/GH workflows, ticketing out frontend work) that is coming around the corner.

But I am also feeling like the current balance is untenable — especially as life outside of school continues to send unexpected and hard-to-process things our way. In my dream scenario, there would be a little bit of space to soften some of our expectations and pace right now. I hope we are all giving ourselves and each other grace.

Not as much to say this week from me this week unfortunately – I spent the bulk of last week recovering from a (mild!) concussion. Lesson of the Week: if you hit your head and it still hurts the next morning, get it checked out – don’t wait until the next day. Also, don’t get a concussion. And be careful putting away cat food. Thankfully I’m able to get back in the game. I may need to plan out my work more thoroughly / incorporate breaks in my work time, but I’m back in the game.

Thankfully my amazing teammates kept at it with working on wireframes and continuing research, starting on the remaining songs from our second program!

Next up this week: I work on setting up the back-end of the website. Thankfully, the columns for our song research table have come together pretty organically – so the basic structure should be fairly simple. I’m also not too worried about setting up the structure for the program table seeing as I’ll be pulling information directly from the programs for that one. I’m sure the content of the tables will be updated many times between now and April, especially once they start powering the front end.

Soon we’ll be switching from Song Research to History of Women in Bandura, so I definitely have plenty to come back to! It’s definitely daunting to have been gone for a week, but I’m excited to dig in.

Plans change. That is one thing I learned this past week. Initially, GDPW had considered using Commons to host our site. However, after last week, we decided it was best to have our front-end dev, Elijah, choose the domain and site he preferred working on to ensure we have the fewest bumps going forward. In this case, plans changed to benefit the project and the group. So far, we have the most essential things for the project. We have the data, we have the website, and we have plans. We only need to start building on top of the foundation we have built so far and eventually put on the finishing touches by Spring Break.

Things will ramp up for sure, but everything has been moving smoothly as every week goes by; the project keeps improving and is one step closer to completion. After this week, the project lead will need to start setting more structured tasks and timelines so that we can use all of April as much as possible to complete everything. This will prove to be challenging but manageable. I don’t want to overwork the team, but I also want everyone to enjoy the time on this project. Regardless, I will do my best.

Feeling a bit ahead in this class, but struggling to coordinate a time with digital fellow for more follow up questions on our map!

I need to ask about adding photos to our attribute table on our map. I am currently doing a funny copy and paste work around, and it’s messing with the quality of the photo.

Few updates-

I was able to change the color and customize the shading on StoryMap, and also customize what demographic data we wanted to showcase on our map.

I also changed the pin to include our new logo graphic! We voted on a logo last week, and during class time Julissa sent me the .jpg file of just the graphic for our map. A purple geo location pin with a picture of a carousel horse inside. It’s perfect for the map!

Today I plan to look at videos on how to add exact addresses for our pins, my goal is to have all the carousels in, with the agreed upon 4-5 metadata by the first week of April.

I am looking forward to start taking pictures of the carousels in Queens, counting down the days till March 31 when they open!