We were able to make some practical, and sometimes exciting progress this week!

Leonard worked on some aesthetic details on the website including adding some jazzy imagery, fixing margins, and making page layouts function on both desktop and mobile devices.

Julissa has been posting away on Instagram and has an ambitious to post (almost) daily alternating between posts and stories in the countdown to our project launch. With Leonard’s help, Julissa began mentioning carousels in posts and both Prospect Park and Bryant Park took notice! We also started to to get on the radar of the GC Digital Humanities and Data Vis programs Instagram pages.

We’ve all been working on our individual blog posts for each carousel and are almost ready to link them to our map as a “more information” sort of thing. Speaking of the map, we did notice a display quirk with the layers and Carla is going to ask a GC Fellow for some advice. Carla suspects it may have something to do with the size of the map pin. Carla has also started to work on analysis of what we learned from the map, with an ambitious plan to maybe incorporate a visualization of some sort (but no pressure!).

Carla has also agreed to be our presenter, and I (Kelly) will be the backup. She’s going to do a great job representing our project- which just has a few finishing touches before showtime!

We’ve made good progress, and learned some things since our last update!

Leonard reached out to decided upon contacts mostly in the tourism/parenting sphere, and got responses from everyone BUT they either said they would not post our project OR wanted a minimum of $500 to do so. Leonard is now brainstorming how to leverage the social media influencer world to see if our project can get some traction in the public sphere that way.

Julissa received our promotional bookmarks and has created a solid social media schedule of her tracker. She has started posting has plans to create “buzz” around our project launch with a countdown+fun facts. She has a goal of 3 posts per week up to the project launch. Julissa and Leonard are in conversation on how to reach out to influencers via Instagram, and considering tagging carousels in our posts for a hopeful re-post!

Carla made great strides with the map. All pins are included and the map is successfully embedded on our site with help from The Center for Teaching and Learning staff. We modified the StoryMap and the embed so it “fit” more nicely on the page. Carla has also been hard at work modifying our project presentation slides.

I made some aesthetic updates to the website, mainly solidifying our header’s logo/color scheme, and a little bit of page formatting. Leonard is going to use his amazing WordPress/CSS skills to further enhances the aesthetic, and to make sure things look good on desktops, tablets, and phones.

We asked permission to use AI to help with our tagline- this is the sort of thing it can be really helpful for. We decided on a melange of responses to land on:

Round and Round: NYC Carousels and the Stories They Spin

For the most part, we are meeting our milestones, and then some!

Based on our agreed upon template for carousel blog posts last week, I was able to create posts for some of our carousels, to which group members will create their own for their corresponding carousels. Carla has been keeping up with our map and worked out a kink with how to include a featured image on the pin. Leonard commenced outreach and got an excited (but $$$) reply from TimeOut NYC and a more subdued, but promising reply from Brooklyn Bridge Parents. Julissa put up our first post on Instagram and has been working on a social media schedule. She also created a lovely promotional bookmark with an order in (or about to go in!) to be ready to hand out at our May 13 presentation.

Some setbacks that have been mentioned before has been the difficulty visiting some carousels to take original photos/videos due to weather or them not being open yet for the season! To make up for this, we have strategized a way to find, incorporate, and give credit to creative common license photos- mostly found via Google Image Search -> Flickr.

We continue to have embedding issues on CUNY’s instance of WordPress- but now it’s not just the map! Turns out if a video isn’t YouTube or Vimeo- it ain’t embedding. We are also having a strange glitch with our logo showing up on our header on mobile, but not on PCs. Nicole was kind enough to suggest a contact (Laurie H.) at the Teaching and Learning Center at the GC. Laurie provides workshops and support for CUNY Academic Commons to faculty, but Nicole thought she may be willing to help. We have also put in a ticket to CUNY Academic Commons- so we’ll see! We know the things work on other WordPress instances- so a mystery abounds!

Most of us will be around for Spring Break and plan on putting some asynchronous individual work in. I (Kelly) will be out from Thursday-Tuesday (but in class!)

We believe we’re going at a good pace, and have appreciated the time in class to discuss the project, while getting a lot done independently.

In terms of milestones, we have good bones to our website, the map is coming along nicely, we agreed upon a visual identity system (logo, fonts, colors), have started an Instagram page, and have started drafting communication templates for our outreach efforts.

We haven’t visited as many carousels as we anticipated in our timeline, but have visited some. We’re not too worried about it as many carousels are starting to open (literally this weekend), and others have been postponed due to cold/wet/windy weather. We all have plans to visit more shortly.

We also had a domain mapping issue with the website, but it seems to be resolved. We were unable to edit the website for about a week, but we were a little ahead of schedule with that, so no worries.

The map is going well with a combination of ArcGIS Storymaps, and possibly ArcGIS itself (if needed). Carla has been in regular contact with a Digital Fellow to troubleshoot. We’re currently trying to figure out a better way to embed images of the carousels within the metadata.

Since our visual identity system is ready, we can start embedding it more to the website and begin planning for handouts and future posts for social media. We are also going to gather a list of points of interest to reach out to once our outreach templates are complete.