Author Archives: Lini Radhakrishnan

Final Blog – Week 15 with gratitude

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I dedicate the final blog to my wonderful team. It has been a privilege to be part of this team and experience the generosity of my knowledgeable teammates. We worked so well as a team and managed to build a project without the degree of stress normally associated with such ventures. The credit goes entirely to the incredibly supportive environment both within the team and the classroom. The support could not have been more timely given the incredibly stressful time we are living in. The experience has been generative and constructive both technically and personally. 

Everything came together quickly this past week running up to the project dress rehearsal as pieces fall into place and the project site emerges from the foundational blocks set up over the semester. Pull requests for all the pages are gradually being merged into the main branch and we are working towards getting the site ready both for the dress rehearsal and the WBENA review tomorrow. I added an automatic carousel to the home page with call to action buttons linking to the history StoryMap, programs and song page, added a dropdown to the about tab with pages for the history, team, bibliography content and contact page. Looking forward to seeing the outcome with the rest of the pages being added and fine tuned by Alex and Tasha. Tasha and I printed and hand cut the brochures which in its tiny imperfections showcase the team’s labor, creativity and the quality of being human. As soon as the site is up, we can begin putting up the brochures around CUNY.

With the final weeks approaching, there is joy and satisfaction in what we have accomplished, the way we have had each other’s back through the process, how much we have learned from each other, and there is also an immense sense of loss and sadness. I will miss the camaraderie, the creative banter, the adorable cats walking across Tasha, Melissa, Alex’s screens demanding attention and everything about my amazing team. I would like to stay hopeful about the outside world by believing that my team and our classroom represents the future. I don’t have words that can adequately express my gratitude for being part of this wonderful journey, so I will just say a simple heartfelt thank you to my team, to my classmates and to our Professor. Thank you!



Women of Bandura – Approved Wireframes

Our platform choice of Wax does not allow us to present a website framework at this stage. The team worked to unify our vision of the website by creating wireframes and also to get approval from WBENA ensuring transparency at the design stage.

Our front-end developer, Alex Millatmal devised a well designed workshop so we could synchronously create the wireframes for the home, program and song page. Alex took us through the following steps in our virtual workshop:

  • We each took 5 minutes to review four existing sites performing a sort of environment scan.  We then shared our finding, discussing the features that worked and the ones that fell short.
  • Alex selected a simple tool called Excalidraw to sketch the frames and the ease of operation meant that we did not waste any time wrestling with the tool itself.
  • In the shared frame on Excalidraw, we each designed our own version of the Home page. Alex assigned a specific audience focus to each team member. I created the layout from the perspective of WBENA, the actual performers, Alex through the eyes of other bandura ensembles, Melissa with respect to the academic community and Tasha looked at it from the angle of the Ukrainian diaspora. Again a brilliant strategy that allowed us to approach the designs from different audience perspectives essentially covering all bases.
  • After sketching, we reviewed the results.
  • The team created the remaining page sketches asynchronously.
  • Then Alex and I came together to consolidate the best features from the different sketches to form the final frames which were sent out to WBENA for approval.

Below are the approved wireframes.

Wireframe of home, program and song page.

We continue to work on lower priority frames such as the About and Bibliography pages following a similar strategy.

The team is grateful to Alex for the invaluable guidance and direction provided in the collaborative process.

 

Personal Blog #1 – The Beginning

The process of finalizing three projects from six strong pitches was not easy, but there was a helpful air of generosity and a sense of community in the room. There was no time to dwell on the outcome as we immediately settled into our groups and in project Bandurapedia we had a quick yet fruitful discussion on roles and responsibilities. I took on the role of one of the two researchers and I will also help create content for outreach as well as shadow the Frontend/Backend programmers to satiate my interest in coding. The team agreed to share weekly reporting responsibilities by making individual entries to a shared document so the project manager had the information available for compilation. Given that each member will be taking on multiple roles, it is crucial to find ways to share the load as evenly as possible so we can meet the timelines we set ourselves.

In the past week, we set up communication channels (Signal/ google drive folders), had our first meeting over zoom and set up action items to address the proposal feedback, revision process, platform selection and collaborative agreement. We discussed options for an alternate project name since Bandurapedia indicated a larger scope than the project’s current focus on the Women’s Bandura Ensemble of North America. This also brought us to one of the major dependencies of the project that requires WBENA approval for all the content, a known risk that is acceptable considering the project’s determination to feature the community’s voice and build trust in the spirit of the slow archives approach. To mitigate the risk to the extent possible, we decided to work on an agreement with WBENA to assure transparency through the cycle, settle on conflict resolution strategies and seek early approval of prepared wireframes of the webpages. We have also set up our introductory meeting with WBENA.

The stage is now set for revising the proposal, finalizing roles and getting the show on the road. We have a long way to go, but we are coming together as a team. The team members are enthusiastic, positive, generous and there is a heartening spirit of collaboration and cooperation. The start is reassuring.

Recommended reading: One of the readings from the Politics and DH course proposes an ethical visualization workflow that could be useful to all three projects. The advice to follow an ethical approach towards data collection, curation and visualization is explained through the comparison of two projects. The approach advocating for transparency to convey the veracity of the data sources and due care to avoid biases could be particularly beneficial to the GDPW project and data normalization suggestions could be useful to consider for the carousel project if they decide to go ahead with recommending geographical areas for new carousels.

Skills – Lini Radhakrishnan

Hi, I am Lini and I am in my second semester of the DH program. I did my Masters and PhD in Art History from Rutgers University in NJ. I have a strong research background and my focus is in the intersection of art, medicine and care.

Project Management: I have extensive project management experience from my earlier IT career where I managed teams executing the software project life cycle as well as in my academic journey where I managed my teaching, research and editorial responsibilities along with my scholastic work. I have used software such as Microsoft Project and can learn to use other tools if required.

Developer: I started off as a developer although in legacy languages but that gave me a foundation in programming logic. In the past semester, I taught myself Python, gained some practical experience writing code in the DAV data fundamentals course assignments, used data visualization platforms like Tableau, Knightlab storytelling tools and created web pages integrating these elements. I am a problem solver and would love to assist the primary developer in building the project.

Design/UX: I have a Bachelor in Fine Arts (Painting) and that along with my insights of user experience from my earlier career could help with design decisions and simplification of the interface.

Outreach/ Social Media: Not my area of expertise. However, I conducted an assessment for a museum that involved evaluating the social media usage of a few institutions to build a guidance document to increase their online presence. So, I could contribute if required.

Documentation: I am organized and good at following standards and guidelines. Have some experience in the area from my earlier software career.

Research and Writing: I consider these elements to be strengths. My field involves extensive writing. I have taught art history courses that involved academic writing and college writing course across different genres.

I look forward to being part of our classroom community, finding ways to support each other within and across teams and learn from each other.

 

Art Exhibit Intervention Proposal Pitch

Confront the Canon

Overview

A 2019 diversity study of eighteen U.S. museums found that 85% artists in the collections are white and 87% are men (Topaz 2019). A similar trend was observed in the racial make-up of the curatorial staff and the resultant displays tend to propagate a largely Western perspective. Exhibitions play a crucial role in promoting and perpetuating the myth of greatness concretized in the art historical canon. Critical examination of the collection can uncover problematic institutional practices and allow the display to be viewed in a new light that reveal relevant hidden context. Confront the Canon (CTC) is visualized as a tool designed to reflect on the institutional bias integral in museum collection/ exhibition practices with the aim of highlighting marginalized or missing voices. The central question being explored is: How does an institution’s collection and curatorial practices contribute to the marginalization of artists based on race/gender/nationality?

Why CTC?

The inspiration for CTC is Fred Wilson’s brilliant project, Mining the Museum that delivered a powerful statement against institutional racism. While Wilson culled forgotten African-American artifacts from the Maryland Historical Society’s permanent collection to create compelling interventions in their conventional display, CTC will empower the users to challenge the represented histories. The project will provide contextual information on the exhibited objects that highlight potential exclusionary aspects and allow the informed user to introduce an alternate intervention object that could initiate important conversations around biased institutional practices.

Apart from art institutions, CTC can be adapted to examine collections hosted in museums of natural history, libraries and other custodians of history. The platform audience could include art historians, researchers, students from art history/ digital humanities/ gender studies, curatorial staff, museum educators and others interested in exploring exclusions in preserved histories. Institutions can use CTC to evaluate their collections, invite collaborators to diversify their displays and make their audience interactions more inclusive. Since several institutions have a digital presence when it comes to the exhibition space, there is an opportunity to adapt CTC with the express aim of engaging their audience to examine their collections. CTC is also intended to work as a pedagogical tool that will allow students to participate in their learning process and use the platform as an alternative to standard evaluations.

Vision for the Final Product

The project will encourage users to examine how curatorial practices enact the canon and reinforce the set narrative. To this end, CTC will showcase a past exhibition featuring additional contextual information in the object labels, produce relevant visualizations and allow the user to insert strategic replacements in the display. The project website will host the following panels using the WordPress platform:

  • Past Exhibition Panel: Display selected past exhibition.
    • Research past exhibitions on museum websites to finalize a display.
    • Create basic dataset design.
    • Create the display utilizing Google Slides* to provide an immersive experience. The accompanying object labels will provide insightful contextual information.
  • Intervention Panel: CTC seeks alternative perspectives and insights into the collection in the form of these interventions.
    • Users will have the option to intervene in the display in a meaningful way by choosing to replace an exhibit in the original display with an appropriate intervention object.
    • For replacement objects, the option is to partner with a smaller collection and use Omeka* to provide a searchable object list to choose a replacement intervention object.
    • Create the new display after integrating the intervention object into the exhibition display.
  • Data Visualization Panel: Provide additional context about the exhibit.
    • A separate page will feature Tableau generated data visualizations displaying statistics involving the race, gender, nationality of the featured creators.
    • Visualization data will analyze the objects in the display. Depending on the availability of usable data, additional visualizations analyzing the entire collection will be included.

* Contingent on the theory that Google Slides and Omeka can be embedded into WordPress.

One of the challenges is to locate a manageable dataset because collection datasets are typically huge and will require considerable investment of time in data cleaning and data management. At the prototype stage, the solution is to either work with a smaller collection so both the intervention selection and the visualizations can benefit from having access to the entire collection OR feature just the exhibition data on the project site and direct the user to the original museum site to explore intervention objects while the visualizations will be limited to the available data. There are also access restrictions to consider and the issue of permission rights will have to be addressed by taking appropriate steps to seek permission or locate alternatives in the public domain.

CTC will be disseminated with the help of the project team and consultants. The team will approach academic institutions (departments of fine art/ art history/ history), libraries, museum curatorial and education departments. CUNY GC Digital Initiatives team and GC Digital Fellows Team will be consulted to reach the CUNY community along with platforms such as CUNY ACADEMIC COMMONS to spread awareness of the project and invite collaborations to enhance CTC’s capabilities as well as advance the project into its next phase of expansion to work with different collection types.

STAFF/PARTNERS

  • Project Lead/Researcher: Review collections to select one for the project, initiate intervention object options and collaborate with programmers and consultants on visual design and usability.
  • Programmer, Data Analyst: 1-2 team members with programming expertise on Python to scrap data, build datasets and website. Expertise in Omeka.
  • Consultants:
    • CUNY GC Digital Initiatives team and GC Digital Fellows: Consult for project approach and optimum digital tool options.
    • CUNY GC Art History Department: Consult Art History graduates for perspectives on project approach and suggestions on making meaningful interventions.
    • Museum Curator: Perspective on the collection and curatorial practices, appropriate collections and intervention objects to consider.

The project will be a team effort, truly collaborative and we will make all critical decisions collectively as a group.

Tentative Work Plan