Author Archives: Martin Bueno

Project Work Plan

Work Plan/Management Timeline

Feb 4 – 18 (Phase 0)

  • Pitch Proposal, assign roles, supervision/guidance (MB)
  • Documentation and Research of Necessary Historical Content, Start Upcoming Group Blog Post(CM)
  • Creating WordPress, Creating Links, Create Social Media Accounts (Reddit and BlueSky) (EN)
  • Install Tableau or any software that will be used for data visualization, and look at samples of data visualization. (MW)
  • Establish a form of group communication and a Google Drive.
  • Discuss Gender Disparity and Professional Wrestling
  • All members should provide any input before the revised proposal pitch due date. They should also add additional writing to the group blog post.
  • Possible Zoom meet-up on Feb 18 to discuss anything essential and provide updates for upcoming Phase 1.

 

Feb 19 – Mar 4 (Phase 1)

  • Data Extraction, Creating assignments on Airtable, Discussing and Provide Essential Interpretation of Data, Supervision/Guidance, Floater (MB)
  • Provide Sample Data Visuals, Sort Through Data, Assist Front End (MW)
  • Provide Sample Data Visuals, Start WordPress Web Design, Sort Through Data (EN)
  • Research Any Additional Information, Documentation Crucial Information For Group (CM)
  • All Members should keep posting their weekly group and solo blogs and should reach out for any concerns.

 

Mar 5 – 24 (Phase 1.5)

  • Oversee All Progress of Current Roles, Provide Any Feedback, Update Timeline if necessary, Float (MB)
  • Begin a Paper Outlining and Drafting for the Final Group Paper (CM)
  • Create Data Visuals; Provide a summary of why you chose these visuals (EN)
  • Create Data/Map Visuals; Provide a summary of why you chose these visuals (MW)
  • We will vote on which Visuals to use moving to Phase 2
  • Everyone should be thinking about what they want to include in the final paper and possibly start writing About Us page

 

Mar 25 – Apr 11 (Phase 2)

  • Float, Supervise, and Begin Discussion of Outreach Implementation (MB)
  • Writing Drafts/Documenting and Working with the Project Manager to Determine What Written Information Will Be Added to the Site (CM)
  • Upload and Submit Final Data Visuals to Google Drive and Assist the Front End with Web Design(MW)
  • Upload and Submit Final Data Visuals to Google Drive and Commence Implementing Web Design (EN)
  • All members should check in from April 8 -11 to see if everything is in order, provide any concerns, request feedback, and ask or check if anything else needs to be done before moving on to Phase 3.

 

Apr 12 – 20

  • Spring Break! Enjoy It!
  • Do reach out to the group if anything

 

Apr 21 – May 5 (Phase 3)

  • Supervise and Commence Outreach Implementation (MB)
  • Begin Adding Visuals to the Website and Finalizing Web Design (EN)
  • Write Up and Summarize What The Audience Should Be Thinking When Looking At The Data Visuals and Assist Front End (CW)
  • Commence Outreach on Social Media and Establish a Presence; any documents/drafts and updated Docs should all be on Google Drive(CM)
  • All members should start drafting and/or writing their portion for the final and solo papers.
  • In addition to that, personal information should be included on the About Us page.
  • Everything should be completed at this point on the weekend leading up to class on May 5.

 

May 6 – 18 (Phase X)

  • Dress Rehearsal (May 6)
  • Last Minute Fixes, Additions, and Project Polishing (May 7 -12)
  • Showcase! (May 13)
  • Finalize Project Reports and Submit individual papers (May 20)

 

Summary

The first couple of weeks consist of the proposal pitch and acquiring a group of participants. The project manager’s task during this stage is to pitch and assign roles to the new participants based on their strengths and the comfortability of each member. We will be using AirTable to delegate tasks and keep deadlines. No one is to be assigned a role or task requiring learning a new skill or software that may add additional time to this project. During this time, the new participants will provide any further input for the project that will be considered and documented if anything is to be added or altered. Lastly, the last step during the first couple of weeks is to establish a standard method of communication for contact and opening Google Drive that everyone in the project has access to and provide any information/documents that will be crucial to the project. 

The project manager will serve as a floater for the project. It will be necessary to assist all members when they require assistance and to lessen the workload. All members should refer to the Timeline for details and requirements for those dates and phases. The project manager can elaborate on any specific information and, at any time, is welcome to add or change any task they feel is cumbersome to their assigned role. The role of front end and back end have also decided to split the data visualizations and mapping creation, in which the project manager has extracted and provided two separate files of Excel data that will be available for both members to decide the data visuals they will create. Please remember that any due dates and assignments for the class are not listed in this Timeline. It is for group project management only, so we all know where we should be and if there is any work you will need to catch up on. Don’t hesitate to contact the group or project manager for any days you may miss. Please also refer to the Notes doc on Google Drive for any information. 

Lastly, for reference purposes, the initials in parenthesis refer to the name of team members and depict what each task/assignment is due in that phase.

 

PS: I have invited the professor to our AirTable. We are using AirTable, and although this Workplan has bi-tri weekly timelines, through AirTable, I am personally setting weekly tasks and deadlines to accommodate my team and their schedules as well.

Personal Blog II

Last Tuesday, our group I asked our group to reconvene on Zoom for a session to discuss the next steps and discuss/review the revised project proposal before submitting it. The session was productive as we reviewed Cathy’s research leading up to that date. The research presented data and similar projects so that everyone on the team better understood what our final project might look like and what it is currently missing. Madison also presented and gave us a tutorial on using AirTable, which we plan to use to assess our tasks for each role going forward.

On the more personal side of this blog, it is unbelievable that the month has passed, and there is still much more work to do. Although we are ahead of our initial timeline, I hope we have enough to complete this project. I don’t want to let my group down; I also want to see this project through with everyone’s vision they have contributed. I look forward to getting back to class on Tuesday on Zoom and going over any other things we are missing.

Personal Blog I

I would describe last week’s class as, the evolution of an idea turning into reality. Last semester, I went into an Intro to Digital Humanities class without a topic and a very rudimentary foundation for making a project of this scale. Now, I have a solid team, an interesting topic (Gender Dispartity in Professional Wrestling, aka GDPW ), and a much better understanding of what DH is and how to use the tools, or at least know they exist. Though these two sentences describe the start and present of my experience, it doesn’t capture all the work, changes, and struggles that evolved a simple idea over time, week after week, reading after reading into what it is today and what it will look like at the end of this semester. Working among peers who are as dedicated as I am to making the GDPW project a reality means a lot to me. Their contribution to our project will allow us to share this experience as we advance.

The GDPW began as such a large-scale idea that needed to be trimmed to accommodate the short time frame. It was huge, focusing on various global promotions, other topics of disparity in the world of professional wrestling, and the inclusion of LGBTQ+ wrestlers. At one point, the title was rustic, called Using Data to Analyze the Matches Differences between Male and Females in Professional Wrestling, aka UDAMDMFPW. That’s a mouthful. Now, it has a shorter title, a catchier name, and a catchy acronym, GDPW. Deciding what to keep in the project and what to cut from it proved as difficult as coming up with a new title. So much was left out, but still enough to create something from nothing.

This journey has been a long one, and it is still not over. After my project was selected, I felt both relief and sadness. I am relieved because I am part of a project I know plenty about, and all the roles being adequately allocated by classmates I know are more than qualified for their positions on this project. I am sad because now I have to consider another capstone idea. Regardless of that initial sadness, I have begun dwelling on possible new topics in professional wrestling with a DH twist. Still, for the moment, I am dedicating my full time to managing and leading my team for the big showcase event.

Currently, we are using Signal to communicate and share Google Drive to upload notes, research, data, and account information. Everyone has been pitching new ideas, and we hope we have enough time to submit our revised Research Proposal with all these new changes and additional research.

Gender Disparity in Professional Wrestling – Proposal Pitch

Do you believe in equal opportunities for all genders? Do you want to challenge yourself with a different genre outside of the typical fields of academia?  This is the project for you. You don’t have to be a wrestling enthusiast to be part of this project. This project focuses on exposing the issue of gender disparity in professional wrestling through data visualizations. Gender disparity is evident in many fields and is still an issue today. However, the field of professional wrestling is rarely discussed on the subject of gender disparity, much less information and data available on it. Get in on the ground floor to a project, and you can cement your name into the foundation. Thanks for your time. Any questions can be asked in the comment section or by email.

Abstract

Over the decades, professional wrestling has entertained billions of people via television, radio, the internet, and other media. Though how audiences consume professional wrestling has changed, the lack of female matches in wrestling events is evident if one is to look at the event cards. This project aims to examine professional wrestling through the available digital humanities data visualization method to reveal and analyze the disparity between genders in professional wrestling, in which males have more matches than females over the decades. Data will be gathered from the Cagematch.net website. Cagematch.net is a website that serves as a database for professional wrestling information. It includes match results, ratings, and other information about wrestling events worldwide, and this data will be used to create interactive data visualizations on Tableau and publish this information and findings on WordPress. The disparity explored in this project will show that despite the inclusion of more female wrestlers in professional wrestling, they still perform fewer matches than male wrestlers on average.

By viewing and extracting the final event of each year from 1934 to 2024, which took place in Madison Square Garden, we can examine the overall difference between genders in the world of professional wrestling through Tableau and WordPress to display how much the inclusion of female wrestlers over the years has barely improved. By creating an interactive data visualization, I will make it possible for website visitors and fans of professional wrestling to reach their conclusions about this gender disparity. More academic-based research on professional wrestling needs to be conducted compared to other forms of entertainment to explore these disparities. In an industry that is overlooked and seen as mock combat, this project will use digital humanities tools and collaboration to expose gender disparity, starting with ninety events that took place over ninety years in New York City.

Work Plan

The first steps of this project fall on the project manager, who will be responsible for extracting the data from each year and inputting it in Excel to allow the Data Viz expert to create an interactive table, charts, or graphs that will enable viewers to use the data we have provided to make their own conclusions. The data for this project will be gathered from Cagematch.net, the largest wrestling internet database. Cagematch.net was founded on the 15th of March, 2001, by the trio of Philip Kreikenbohm, Nicolas Pape, and Knut Linke. The site started as a traditional combination of a wrestling news site and a discussion forum (the “Cageboard”), as they had some experience with this format, which was pretty popular then. Cagematch.net officially opened the site to the public on the 1st of June, 2001, with a team of about 20+ people working on the discussion forum and posting news from around the wrestling world. In 2007, they revolutionized the wrestling internet by establishing the first internet wrestling database and creating the rating system, which allowed thousands of wrestling fans to rate their favorite wrestlers, events, matches, etc. In total, over a hundred people have helped make Cagematch.net a success. Currently, they have over 30 voluntary team members working to keep the database up-to-date and fill in the gaps in history that are not yet covered. The website has data from each wrestling event in Madison Square Garden from the 1930s to 2024. Data is crucial in digital humanities as it allows multiple tools to be used to create a project such as this one. The data used for this project will be as unbiased as possible by not specifically choosing a promotion or random dates. The data from each year will be needed for the last event that took place at Madison Square Garden, which is likely to always be in December.

This yearly wrestling data also allows a more manageable workload to be used, and it will not impede other staff as we are focusing on just one month, once a year, for 90 years compared to twice a year or each month of every year. The data required for each yearly selected event will consist of how many matches took place, how many were men’s matches, how many were women’s matches, the date/year, how many men performed, how many women performed, broadcast type, name of event, and name of promotion. The best thing about cagematch.net is that it provides all this information, and although it may need to be manually extracted into an Excel file, no one will need to sit through all these matches and watch them. Lastly, the project manager is responsible for tidying the data as it is a critical problem to ensure it is clean and accurate.

During the same time frame as data extraction, which should be about two weeks, the Data Viz expert will focus on the best methods and tables used for this data. Thus, the Data Viz expert will be required to present handwritten and hand-drawn rough drafts of how this data will look by just looking at the data that will be extracted. In this case, after the first ten years of data have been extracted, it is the project manager’s responsibility to send that small amount of data to the Data Viz expert to allow them to see what the rest of the data will look like and allow them to use that data to begin designing the visualizations. During the initial stages, the web designer on WordPress will need to commence creating the site and sending invitations for administrative rights to the other staff members. When the site is opened, the web designer must send a hand drawing or screenshot of how they see the site and what it should look like for the project, allowing an earlier insight into how and what links will be available for others.

Less than halfway through the semester, about week five/six, the data extraction for each year of wrestling in Madison Square Garden should have already been filled in Excel and submitted to the Tableau expert to begin creating their tables, graphs, etc. At this point, the lead project manager will work closely with each staff member to ensure that all appropriate data on Tableau and WordPress are moving in the right direction from the project’s initial vision. The Data Viz expert should have at least three to four kinds of data visualizations by the end of the project. Still, only three will be used, and at least one must be submitted weekly so the web designer can attach the Tableau data to WordPress. Each data visualization presented will require a summary of what the data means and what can be learned. One staff member is responsible for writing an overview of how to use the data visualization so that the Web Designer can include it in WordPress.

Following these steps, the copy editors must adequately check all the information on the data, Tableau, WordPress, and white paper to ensure everything is correct and accurate. The copy editors will be all three staff members, making the next step essential. Throughout the semester, the copy editor must submit a weekly summary of what they have adjusted or fixed for their part in the project and what they need from other members to progress. Thus, this will allow everyone to double-check their work in the future and allow for communication between staff members on what is missing or needs attention.

In the last weeks, all staff members must complete each task and submit any last-minute changes before presenting the final product. The project manager must check the data correctly; the Data Viz expert must check if their visualizations are all working fluidly; the web designer must check if there are any broken URLs, if the page has public accessibility, etc. Suppose any team member is unwell or needs help to do work for a particular week. In that case, it is always possible to continue the following week, or if help in any way or form is needed, the project manager should be notified, and proper time will be given to allow us to finish any work that needs to be done. All of this is doable in one semester the way it is planned out.

List of Participants

  • Project Lead, Outreach, and Data Extraction/Entry: Martin Bueno
  • Excel/Data Visualization (Data Viz) Expert/Outreach(Flexible): OPEN
  • Web Designer/Developer for WordPress: OPEN
  • Researcher/Documentation/Copy Editors: OPEN

Endgame

The final product of this project should be a WordPress site with links to three different data visualizations that depict the disparity of genders in professional wrestling matches throughout the years in New York City. The website will be distributed online within wrestling communities such as Reddit and BlueSky so that others can look at this data and have a different perspective about how there is still an inequality gap in almost 90 years of including women in professional wrestling. Moreover, other communities may also want to examine how the disparity is reminiscent of different sports. The project lead will also disseminate the website in person at local wrestling shows within the tri-state area. Our project will include our findings about gender disparity. However, it is crucial to allow visitors to the website to make their own conclusions by interacting with the data visualizations created for this project. Though more data can be included in this project, there are limitations and considerations to other staff members who may need adequate time to balance workloads from other academic projects, personal lives, and employment. Though my project proposal may be small in scale from its initial stages, it aims to keep building on the findings. This continuation may include the use of other digital humanities tools that can further ground itself in both academia and the sport of professional wrestling.

Skillsets – Martin Bueno

Hello! I am Martin Bueno, a current DH student in the master’s program. I have a B.A. in Political Science with double minors in Sociology and Legal Studies. I have also recently enrolled in a wrestling academy to further understand and learn about professional wrestling, especially its physical and mental aspects. I have a background in hardware and software and like to tinker with technology. If there is a particular software or program you intend to use, I am a fast learner, and it will likely take me about a few days to grasp it and a week to fully use it without a guide. My educational background can provide insights into different research and methodological approaches that can be beneficial as a researcher.

Project Manager: I have never managed any research/group project. The closest I have managed projects are music ones and basic PowerPoint science projects as an undergrad, where one person did the PowerPoint, the other wrote up the summary paper, and the other was the speaker. My experience managing music projects primarily focused on me doing everything because I owned the recording software to create the tracks and produce/master them. Also, I have knowledge of musical instruments and playing abilities, such as percussion, guitar, bass, songwriting, vocals, and various knowledge effects. (Skill Level – 3/5)

Developer: I have never developed anything. I usually use WordPress or templates to create sites/forums, but I have never made something from scratch. I can use Tableau, Timeline JS, Omeka, Audacity(Cubase, Garageband, Ableton), and WordPress fluently. (Skill Level – 2.5/5)

Design/UX: I can create and add something if templates are provided. But making one with any concept behind it won’t be easy for me. (Skill Level – 2/5)

Outreach/Social Media: I don’t have any social media; the closest thing I use to social media is Reddit because it is easy to get news on the topics that are important to me. I have checked out BlueSky, and I wouldn’t be opposed to using it for any project. Regardless, I am comfortable with in-person outreach, and I have done so when promoting previous music projects and doing interviews for academic work. (Skill Level – 4/5)

Documentation: During the pandemic, times were tough and rough for everyone. One of the skills I improved without doing so intentionally was documenting crucial information about whatever could have arisen in that terrible and horrifying era. I have documented everything that I have done or needs to be done more efficiently to serve my needs. (Skill Level – 3.75/5)

Research: I have experience with this as an undergrad in three different fields of study. I enjoy it mainly because I like jumping down rabbit holes and learning where concepts and ideas/topics come from and how they have evolved. This helps with trying to create a foundation for any project, and I have a great appreciation for it (Skill Level – 4.5/5)

I am open to learning new things and contributing in any way. I look forward to working with any group this semester and seeing the projects’ end results. As a DH student, this will help me significantly understand how to go about my own capstone project.

Brooklyn classroom uses pro wrestling as a teaching vehicle

Hi Everyone.

In preparation for my proposal pitch next week, I thought I post this recent article. Since my project focuses on gender disparity in professional wrestling, I would like to draw interest for my project by looking at how wrestling can be used to study and teach other subjective matters such as English and Math. Also, how it can empower youth. Some or all of you might not watch wrestling or know much about it but maybe some of the subjects matters currently revolving around it may interest you.

https://www.espn.com/professional-wrestling/story/_/id/43584536/the-wrestling-club-wwe-aew-wrestlers-brooklyn-kipp-amp

The second article displays the audience race composition across multiple wrestling promotions from 2021-2023. This is a great example of how I envision the data viz part of the project but with the focus on gender disparity/composition instead of race.

https://wrestlenomics.com/2023/12/05/audience-composition-race-demographics-for-wwe-aew-impact-new-japan-wow/

It’s interesting how all these things started to take form in 2021, which was about the same time I started watching wrestling after about a 15 year hiatus. Although my knowledge of wrestling may seem that I am a longtime expert. I started to watch it 3.5 years ago and just recently started involving it in my scholar works as of 2023. Wrestling as a teaching tool is fairly new and about the same time it seems interest around the subject of professional wrestling has started to blossom outside its sports entertainment lens and into a subject matter that can be also be studied, especially within the field of digital humanities.

Have a lovely weekend everyone.

Kind Regards,

MB