Category Archives: Personal Blogs

Personal Journal – 4/7/25

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”.

Group Update 2: GDPW

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. 

Hutnick Blog Post: Software Setup (Or, Wrestling with Wax)

Ok, this week, my brain is feeling much better and my morale has been boosted by tinkering with code. First bit of good news – we all successfully installed Wax onto our computers and were able to run the sample site! It took much thread following and bargaining, but we each finally got it to work. Of course, each of our systems were different and took some trial, error, and patience to cajole into accepting all of the dependencies that we just threw at them. I commend my team for not ousting me as their leader when they learned that Wax, the framework I championed, required installing several bits of software over the command line. To anyone who doesn’t know what the command line is, think of that window that hackers use on TV to  write their magic commands. Nothing is more frustrating (and then exhilirating!) to see something fail for seemingly no reason. . . and then figure out the problem (or sometimes stuff in a solution from Stack Overflow) and have it WORK.

I then rinse repeated this feeling of frustration and euphoria as I then had to stuff both of our project CSV’s into the repository and keep entering the commands to generate pages from them and run the site locally until it worked. Let me back up. Last week, I mentioned that I would need to prepare the CSV’s (comma separated values – like a low resolution excel file) that would power the song and program pages of the site. We had been preparing the song CSV file for pretty much the whole semester with our research, but the program CSV would need to be made from scratch. I thought the program CSV would be easy to make since I didn’t have to look for any information – I would just have to fill in what was on the program PDF. Boy was I wrong.

Here’s the issue: most of the information per program – i.e. date of concert, city of concert, performers, etc. have multiple values. The Ensemble performs multiple nights in multiple cities with (obviously) multiple performers. And they don’t always have the same number of performances, cities, performers, songs, etc. And sometimes the data with multiple values was associated with data with even MORE values – i.e. each performer was associated with their home city in the program. So, how was I going to reconcile all of these columns?

The answer was fairly simple – keep one column per data type and separate out the values with semicolons (;). We’ll have to loop through this data on the front end in order to separate the values, but it is the simplest way to prepare the data. I thought that switching to a JSON format for the programs may be easier since the structure could be a bit more freeform, but Nicole helpfully pointed out that 1. We’d still need to loop over the data and 2. While *I* as a programmer think that a JSON would look more readable, anyone not familiar with JSON’s / object oriented programming would probably have a harder time with it. Considering that we’re handing this project off to the Ensemble, who may or may not be familiar with JSON’s, it would be simpler to stick with CSV’s (after all, more people have definitely used Excel at some point in their life). Lesson of the Week: Changing data file types does not automatically solve the problem.

So, I set up the headers and Lini and I got to work transcribing the programs. I was careful to include as many details as I could for accessibility’s sake – while we would have the PDF of the programs available, it’s also good to provide the information in a way that users can parse and that provides users who can’t see the PDF for whatever reason with a way to still receive the data.

After that (and some more trial and error), I was able to generate pages for the current programs / list of songs. Mercifully, there were no curveballs in pulling the Cyrillic names or lyrics. So, we’re in business (locally!). I did push the changes up to our GitHub repository, which Alex will use tomorrow in a lesson in pull requests and general GitHub introduction. Exciting times!

Also, we’re going to be interviewing Nadia Tarnawsky (bandurist and singer featured in Dr. Ostashewski’s article on Women in Bandura) next Monday – it’s all coming together!

 

Personal Journal Entry – 3/31/2025

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.

Personal Post #6

Things have been running smoothly with our group. Our group chat on signal keeps us connected when we don’t meet.

It was super helpful to stay connected to the team last week on signal as I was sick. I was glad I got ahead with prepping the mapping platform so I don’t feel so behind. It’ll be nice to reconnect this week in class and hear about Leonard’s travels and  Julissa’s and Kelly’s trips to carousels, and updates from class

I went to visit Forest Park Carousel earlier this month, which is in my new neighborhood. The opening date was today, so excited for some warmer weather and to visit!

Blog 7

Last week was productive. During class time, we finalized the fonts which was the last item to complete the brand kit. I created a style guide and organized the graphics for the team to easily access. I also accepted the stipend, now waiting for it to be disbursed.

Taking advantage of Saturday’s weather, I visited the Sea Glass carousel.  It was nice yet a long trip, but the kids had a blast! I had to tell them it was snack time just to get a break from chasing them. I like the fact we are taking the time to visit the carousels because it makes it feel more tangible. I was able to get clarity on pricing for example kids under 12 months are free.

Next steps for me, is to update the data on the Sea Glass carousel. Work on a promotional flyer or card to handout and begin creating content to post on Instagram.

 

Personal Blog VI

So much is going on, and so many things must be done. There is not enough time, but I want to know who leaked our group topic project to Madison Square Garden. Haha. In all seriousness, I was surprised earlier this week when I received an email to reserve my free press conference tickets for Taylor vs. Serrano 3, who will be headlining an all-women’s boxing event in July at MSG.

It’s just amazing to see this event happening. I should have focused this DH Project on women’s boxing, but it’s too late to deviate. I also enjoy watching boxing; it’s one of the things my family used to do every month when there was a big PPV event with well-known prize fighters like Oscar De La Hoya, Pacquiao, Mike Tyson, Roy Jones Jr, Mayorga, etc. However, my heart and passion lie in wrestling. I wasn’t upset the event wasn’t wrestling. When will there be a women’s card for wrestling anywhere soon? Lo and behold, one of my good friends messaged me this past Saturday.

Right in Queens, there will be an all-women’s wrestling event, Women Crush Wednesday 5, on April 23, hosted by Battle Club Pro (BCP). I immediately bought my tickets for two reasons: I went to the 3rd show for two years, and it was amazing, and second, it feels like a fantastic outreach opportunity. I did pay out of pocket for this event since my group had already decided that on April 23, Cathy and I would be going to another event, House Of Glory’s (HOG) Isolation on April 25 for outreach. Had I known that BCP had this event planned, I would have bought tickets for WCW 5 instead of HOG with our funding. Oh well, I can’t complain. There are two wrestling shows in one week. I haven’t been to an event since December 2024, when I ran a show gauntlet with some friends and saw AEW/ROH (All Elite Wrestling/ Ring of Honor) at the Hammerstein Ballroom for 3 days straight.
Anyway, I am looking forward to April as we are just about to enter it. The group is in the right headspace, and we have goals and assigned tasks to complete this month. We will work together as a team and persevere if we encounter any hiccups. That’s what makes this project the best I’ve ever worked on. I can count on my team, and they can count on me. I wish everyone a fabulous April.

GDPW Group Project Update: March 26

We had a productive meeting on March 25 and went through our tasks for the upcoming weeks, through Spring Break. Phase 2 of our project begins today.

A lot of the discussion centered around the GDPW visuals:  the logo, the website, and the visualizations. First, we discussed what our first social media posts will feature; this will be the first item on our agenda. Our plan is to make the posts graphics-focused with as few words as possible. Elijah feels that with Reddit and Bluesky, it will be possible to create a conversation around our topic if we want to engage more with the public. Madison brought up the point that on social media, people are really just scrolling through, so our posts should be as simple yet as eye-catching as possible. We won’t have any active links in these posts yet. Madison has completed some preliminary data visualizations and they are up on the AirTable site. She’s run some of the data through: the length of the matches, and some that are comparative (men/women). Madison is also working on mastering even more of Tableau.

Next, we discussed adding resources to Zotero; Cathy will be working with Stephen Zweibel next week to learn a bit of how to use that system. We agreed that we would remove the JS Timeline from our website, and Elijah gave us a tutorial on editing the site using Elementor.  Business card design and printing was next, and Martin and Madison are going to look for a local copy shop that could probably print our cards for less than it would cost to go through a large chain store, or to order them online. Madison is going to work on some design ideas for the business cards so that we can have them ready to go for the wrestling event in Queens on April 25!

Blog 6

Last week was great, we were very productive during class time! The website and map is coming along well, I created an Instagram account @carouselsofnyc, and we finalized on a logo (see below).  I feel like things are starting to come together. Now that we have the logo, I focused on creating a brand kit with theme colors, fonts, graphics, and icons. Next steps on my end is to update the Instagram profile, draft content, create a banner for our website, and, now that it’s getting nicer out, I need to visit some carousels with my kids.