It’s hard to believe that we soft launch tomorrow to both the class and WBENA. This project and Lini, Tasha, and Alex have been such a large part of my life these last three months and as we close in on the launch it also means our time working together is coming to an end. I have learned so much about teamwork and what it takes to build something. At the beginning of this project I couldn’t have imagined what it would take to pull this off. I’m so proud of the work we have done together and I can’t wait to see where Tasha takes it next.  This pride and excitement is slightly tempered by my sadness that I won’t get to work with my team anymore. This semester I have admired Tasha’s leadership, Lini’s steadiness and determination, and Alex’s calm methodical thoughtfulness. I’ve become quite used to their presence in my life and it will take some time to get used to the change. I’m so grateful to have gotten this opportunity to learn and grow with my team and my peers.

Things are quickly wrapping up with the sites impending launch and hopefully minimal edits before the showcase. Later this week I will reach out to Nadia, Dr. Ostashewski, and Dr. Sonevetsky and update our social media sites. Lini, Tasha, and Alex are working so hard to get this project over the finish line and I’m excited to see what people will think of what we built.

Looking forward, I’m finally feeling up to revisiting my own project proposal from last semester with the skills I have learned from this class and through this project. Now that I have a slightly better grasp on what it takes to build a project I’m excited to see what I can accomplish.

At work today I noticed an upcoming deadline and it dawned on me that May is basically here… which means we are rapidly approaching the projects launch. Logically I understand this (and am aware of the deadlines of this class) and tomorrow we’re finalizing the website and practicing the launch before we show WBENA. It’s all coming together and it feels kind of unbelievable. Lini suggested a story map for our history section. It’s user friendly and I think gives the section a sort of material experience with some images and using the map to bring us from Ukraine to North America. We were going to work on our sections asynchronously, but we realized this may cause some issues with saving the map so we’re going to finalize it tomorrow together.

I’m excited to see the project tomorrow! I feel a little disconnected, by choice, from the technical side of the site. I’ve been overwhelmed with the state of the world and life and just haven’t had the bandwidth to do anything that I wasn’t required of me. I vaguely know what’s going on because of the group chat and group meetings. Alex created all of these really great training materials that I hope to look at when things slow down a little.

I continue to chug along on social media content. Once the website is ready it will be time to get back in touch with Dr. Sonevetsky, Dr. Ostashewski, and Nadia to share the final result with them!

I cannot believe how quickly the end of this semester is approaching. Over spring break I finished my half of the transcription of Nadia Tarnawsky’s interview and launched our social media sites (now linked in the class notes doc). It was fun to revisit the interview with Nadia even if the manual transcription was a little tedious. We couldn’t decide how to handle the use of AI and transcription and for this interview decided we didn’t want to run the interview through AI. We are trying to schedule one more interview with either Irene (WBENA President) or Teryn (our WBENA liaison and the Concert Mistress of the ensemble) in order to round out our history portion of the website and I am not sure what we will decide to do, but time constraints may push us towards accepting AI assistance.

While I am now posting on our social media sites I am still figuring out who to connect with and how to get the word out about our project. I have had more luck with Bluesky and getting some interaction with out content through the CUNY community, mostly because I shared the project intro post on my personal page. My personal Facebook is kind of a hotbed of political discourse, so I don’t necessarily want that mixing with this project in a way that could negatively impact WBENA. For that reason I haven’t and probably won’t share the project via Facebook on my personal page, but will try to lean into WBENAs network and connections.

This past Saturday Tasha and I went to the New York Bandura School for a bandura workshop led by Teryn, our WBENA liaison, and Zoya, a member of WBENA. Unfortunately for Tasha, her wrist kept her from playing, which was my good fortune as I got to play Stanislava, Tasha’s bandura who many of us met last semester. I ended up having so much fun! The bandura is fairly heavy and requires you to hold it up with your thighs, which is harder than it sounds. I did play the violin 8 years so somewhere in the recesses of my brain I know how to read music. I was surprised how quickly reading music came back to me when I had an instrument in my hand. The music has both bass and melody parts, which you play simultaneously. By the end of the workshop I was playing the bass with my left hand and the melody with my right all while reading music. It was exhausting but such a rewarding experience to connect me to our project.

This evening me, Tasha, and Lini spoke with Nadia Tarnawsky, a bandurist and folk singer, who we read about in an article by Dr. Ostashewski. We have officially moved onto the women’s history portion of our research, which has me really excited! Our conversation was AWESOME. Nadia was funny and candid with us and had some really powerful things to say. Unfortunately we forgot to enable to transcribing software, so Lini and I will be doing it old school. I am totally in awe of the generosity of the bandura community. I hope we can get the site to a point where the interview can eventually be featured in full. This semester has felt hard at times with the state of the world, a long winter, and life in general and I haven’t felt as consistently invigorated by school like I did last semester. But tonight I feel like I got a much needed boost in morale.

Last week Alex wrapped up her development training with Lini and I. She is such a patient and kind teacher and I know more about coding than I ever have. It’s starting to feel less intimidating, but right now I am happy just to watch how its done. I feel so lucky to be working with Alex, Lini, and Tasha this semester and I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished so far.

I still haven’t managed to launch our social media sites, but I am hoping tomorrow after presentations we can get everything ironed out to make our first posts! Here is our Bluesky – I think the kids say “watch this space”.

I’m really deep in my outreach role right now. I contacted a bandurist who was written about in Dr. Ostashewski’s article on women in bandura, Nadia Tarnawsky, about doing an interview with us for the history portion of our project. I’ve been particularly excited about this part of the project and started fantasizing about all of the interviews we were going to do and how it would contribute to the strength of the project. Alex provided a much needed reality check during our Thursday team meeting. A full scale oral history project was wayyyyy outside the scale of our project. We all agreed it made sense to take recordings of the interviews for future use and possible publication, but to ultimately stick to our plan and make sure that we meet our deliverable. We’ll talk to Nadia this coming Monday 4/7 and then hopefully Julien and Irene or Teryn from WBENA.

I also created a social media calendar with my wife’s help. I was nervous to make the social media plan, but she helped me understand and personalize a calendar that she was given at her job. I used Canva to create an intro and team page that Tasha was running past Teryn in their meeting this week. I think we will firm things up tomorrow and then our Facebook and Bluesky will be launched! And then we start to curate our online presence.

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.

This past week I spent a lot of time working on the outreach and social media plan and planning for our meeting with Dr. Ostashewski, a Ukrainian Canadian ethnomusicologist at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia. We used one of Dr. Ostashewski’s articles in our proposal and decided that we should reach out to her and see if she’d meet with us. I was absolutely delighted when she agreed to meet with us! It’s not a great time to be an American asking a Canadian for a favor, but Dr. Ostashewski was excited about our project and even mentioned the possibility of future collaboration!

Song research is much harder than I thought it would be. I played the violin for many years in school and I am sad to report that I’m not sure I ever understood sheet music. None the less it’s interesting to try and search for information and I found this great performance of Maryna Krut (a well known bandurist in Ukraine) performing on KEXP, a radio station whose YouTube videos my wife likes, which didn’t exactly advance my research but was enjoyable. And just today we received a learning resource that Dr. Ostashewski helped to make from Smithsonian Folkways (that is not yet published/in beta!!) that accompanies an album by Julian Kytasty that is being re-released soon. So far everyone in the community we’ve talked to has not only been excited about the project, but they’ve also been very generous with their time and resources. It’s great to see the impact our project could have on the community, it makes all of the hard work a little easier.

Prior to our class where Steve Zweibel presented on data management plans I hadn’t really thought much about the data of our project. I still imagine data as rows on a spreadsheet (maybe they are??) and not as the programs, sheet music, photographs, and audio recordings. So it was helpful to get a sense of the full breadth of data and then the considerations in managing it. I feel like I have a lot to learn as far as documentation in a digital space, which is both exciting and daunting depending on the day. My team is patient and always willing to answer any questions I have about the technical lingo and what it all means, which helps it feel less overwhelming.

The exercise of doing the data management plan made me realize how much information we have and the importance of how we’re going to organize it, for both ourselves and for outside folks who may be interested in the dataset. Understanding and being able to navigate the data will be integral to the longevity and preservation of the project. Having these things in place as we’re beginning our research means we’re able to collect data with this goal in mind.

Melissa McDonald (she/they) is a part time masters student at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Digital Humanities program and works full time as a Paralegal. They have their undergraduate degree in History and English, with interests in feminist theory, intersections of identity, queerness, and twin studies. Her academic career includes a proposal for a twin research database and an interactive fiction that explores identity in twins. They are a researcher, content editor, and social media/outreach specialist on the Women in Bandura project. When she’s not at school or working you can find her hanging out with her sister, watching movies with her wife, having a salon with friends, and staring longingly at her cats.