Coming back after Spring Break, we have several soft deadlines to hit before the final day. Next week, we’ll be showing the final(ish) website to WBENA so that we can make edits before the presentation. The backend structure is officially set up –  we’ll still need to add the new recordings once we receive them from WBENA and some new sheet music, but the csv structure is stable. One of my two big priorities at this point is getting a dummy site set up so that we can generate a QR code for our beautiful brochure (thanks Lini and Alex!). Over Spring Break I showed Lini how to update the song CSV and generate pages in Wax and added a sample recording to our repository so we can mock up its inclusion. We also finalized our Mission Statement, finalized the brochure design, and broke out our mini research sections for the History of Women in Bandura page. We have agreed to set our expectations for this page in accordance with our time. This research is my second big priority this week.

I’m happy to be deploying the dummy site early – hopefully we can catch any bugs now and have a smoother final deployment. Wild how soon everything is coming to an end, but the pieces for this MVP are all in place – we’ve just got to sew the seams and remind ourselves to pump the brakes on adding more detail than we can handle.

Spring break brought me a little relief! I’m curious if others are feeling this, but just one little thing off of my plate opens up SO much room.

This week I played catch up.

I caught my breath, I looked at what’s ahead and I made a plan. And I was reminded that sometimes, that is enough — even if we are behind, and even if we wanted to have accomplished or completed more by now.

I’m behind on front-end development. I know this is true. I also feel confident in my ability to get our project to a good place by the finish line. I was reminded of this when I sat down to record a question to send to Tasha about the way that Wax handles page routing. In the process of explaining the thing I was trying to figure out, I talked myself in to a fuller understanding of the way Wax works. In programming, we call this “rubber ducking,” the idea being that even if you talk things out to an inanimate object, like a rubber duck, you will understand the problem in a new way.

It was a helpful reminder that solutions are often simple and, inevitably, “the work is done by doing” (which is something I read online once cited as being an Afghan proverb, a fact I’ve not yet been able to corroborate, and despite all that a mantra of mine that I often return to). The work is done by doing… even if that work happens at a slower pace or different timeline than we think it should.

I’m in awe of my teammates who have been able to be consistent in their own work and gracious with me when I have fallen short this semester. I’m not used to being the one falling short, and their empathy has been an invitation to try to return to and meet my own standards.

I’m learning a lot from this work, even if it hasn’t always felt good.

Some exciting things happened last week. I received our promotional bookmarks and also our stipend!  In regards to other items on my to do’s it wasn’t  as productive as I was hoping for. I have been adjusting my timeline to post on social media. Although according to analytics 73% of our views are from non followers.

I confirmed that one of the carousel I planned to visit doesn’t open until May 3rd, so I may have to miss one, hopefully  I can find a way to squeeze it in.  I was hoping to complete my blog but found it challenging, primarily due to me getting sick towards the end of the week. Thankfully I recovered enough to visit another carousel and watch my little one do their Easter egg hunt.

My goal for this week is to focus more time on social media, I want to post 1-2 times per week until May 13.  I need to complete My blog, and upload my data from the Conservation Carousel.

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.

We are slowly getting things into shape. Carla will be presenting tonight. She designed a wonderful presentation! I finally began posting on Instagram yesterday, and we even started to get some followers. 

I still need to work on my blog for Sea Glass, which I plan to complete tonight, and continue drafting some more posts.  It’s crazy to think we have one month left, and I still need to visit two more carousels.  

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”.

The GDPW group has made a lot of progress over the past two weeks: our logo and banner are finalized; several data visualizations are close to completion; our social media sites are set up and ready to go; we even have business cards!  So, in many ways we’ve met our milestones, but that means we have new ones now. 

This week we are mostly focused on the class presentation for next week.  We are putting together summaries of each person’s work to date, and collaboratively asking ourselves and each other questions that we feel will come from an audience.  For example, “Why wrestling and not some other sport?”  “What is the point of our data visualizations?”  “What is our story, and why is it important?”  “Why now?” “Why were choices around social media and outreach made the way they are?”  “What was your design vision?” Since it’s kind of a test-run for the final presentation, we are trying to think of the “big” and “clarifying” questions that people may want to know about our project.

We have a hard deadline of April 23 to have our social media and website in a preliminary “live” state so that we can use the Queens wrestling match to really hit outreach.  We’re thinking, too, about images, quotes from social media, and even videos (with appropriate permissions) to add to the final version of our site. Finally, as a team we are coalescing around a narrative:  “the numbers don’t lie” and in fact tell an important story about 90 years of women’s pro wrestling that needs to be told.