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.

I’ve been struggling this last week, to be frank. I’m going to make this post public to our class in case others are feeling this way too.

I know the structure of assignments and work can be comforting to some during times of uncertainty, but it is really hard for me to balance deadlines and the rapid pace of this project development with the current political moment in the air and what I think life is asking from me outside of this program. Our academic peers are being deported for their political views, the views being that our country should not be enabling and funding the indiscriminate genocide of a long-subjugated and occupied population. My friends are holing up, not going out for groceries because they are afraid of ICE. One of the last remaining journalists working in Gaza was killed in a directly targeted attack today; the professional journalists union that I am a part of in my full-time work has said nothing to condemn the killing of more than 200 of our professional colleagues since October 2023, some of them working for our own member unit outlets.

I wish the semester structure and the nature of group work lent themselves more to scheduling in buffer time and room for things to go wrong or slow down. I know we (as a class, as a team) will do our best to make that space but I hate the feeling of responding to an artificial urgency that we have the power to adjust to be more realistic to the current circumstances.

Last week in our in-class work time we had hoped to get Wax up and running for all members of the team and then — very true to the software development “in the real word” — hit a good several speed bumps with both installation options (though I should acknowledge that Tasha was able to get things running, and she is probably the most crucial team member to have local access to running the backend code!). Then for different personal reasons myself and another team member were largely unavailable this week. I am feeling a little disconnected from our project timeline, and again, not super motivated by the self-prescribed deadlines.

I feel really grateful to Lini for stepping in and posting our team wireframes when I was falling short. And, looking at the deadlines that we had ported over to our Asana, I am at least feeling good about getting back on track for some of the upcoming development work in my purview (teaching Git/GH workflows, ticketing out frontend work) that is coming around the corner.

But I am also feeling like the current balance is untenable — especially as life outside of school continues to send unexpected and hard-to-process things our way. In my dream scenario, there would be a little bit of space to soften some of our expectations and pace right now. I hope we are all giving ourselves and each other grace.

Not as much to say this week from me this week unfortunately – I spent the bulk of last week recovering from a (mild!) concussion. Lesson of the Week: if you hit your head and it still hurts the next morning, get it checked out – don’t wait until the next day. Also, don’t get a concussion. And be careful putting away cat food. Thankfully I’m able to get back in the game. I may need to plan out my work more thoroughly / incorporate breaks in my work time, but I’m back in the game.

Thankfully my amazing teammates kept at it with working on wireframes and continuing research, starting on the remaining songs from our second program!

Next up this week: I work on setting up the back-end of the website. Thankfully, the columns for our song research table have come together pretty organically – so the basic structure should be fairly simple. I’m also not too worried about setting up the structure for the program table seeing as I’ll be pulling information directly from the programs for that one. I’m sure the content of the tables will be updated many times between now and April, especially once they start powering the front end.

Soon we’ll be switching from Song Research to History of Women in Bandura, so I definitely have plenty to come back to! It’s definitely daunting to have been gone for a week, but I’m excited to dig in.

Plans change. That is one thing I learned this past week. Initially, GDPW had considered using Commons to host our site. However, after last week, we decided it was best to have our front-end dev, Elijah, choose the domain and site he preferred working on to ensure we have the fewest bumps going forward. In this case, plans changed to benefit the project and the group. So far, we have the most essential things for the project. We have the data, we have the website, and we have plans. We only need to start building on top of the foundation we have built so far and eventually put on the finishing touches by Spring Break.

Things will ramp up for sure, but everything has been moving smoothly as every week goes by; the project keeps improving and is one step closer to completion. After this week, the project lead will need to start setting more structured tasks and timelines so that we can use all of April as much as possible to complete everything. This will prove to be challenging but manageable. I don’t want to overwork the team, but I also want everyone to enjoy the time on this project. Regardless, I will do my best.

Feeling a bit ahead in this class, but struggling to coordinate a time with digital fellow for more follow up questions on our map!

I need to ask about adding photos to our attribute table on our map. I am currently doing a funny copy and paste work around, and it’s messing with the quality of the photo.

Few updates-

I was able to change the color and customize the shading on StoryMap, and also customize what demographic data we wanted to showcase on our map.

I also changed the pin to include our new logo graphic! We voted on a logo last week, and during class time Julissa sent me the .jpg file of just the graphic for our map. A purple geo location pin with a picture of a carousel horse inside. It’s perfect for the map!

Today I plan to look at videos on how to add exact addresses for our pins, my goal is to have all the carousels in, with the agreed upon 4-5 metadata by the first week of April.

I am looking forward to start taking pictures of the carousels in Queens, counting down the days till March 31 when they open!

I think we are doing well with our project. We check in weekly outside of class hours which helps us finalize any questions on the assignment due that week and prepare for the next week. Last week our group discussed the budget, and we decided to allocate some money to pay for Canva, which I’m ecstatic about. Funny enough when it comes to the logo, I prefer the options I already drafted with the free version, however, I still have some inspiration I can try again now with the paid account. Having the paid version will help with other aspects of the project, like creating a brand template that tracks font, colors, etc..   

A lot happened this week! Bullet journaling again:

• Planned our Outreach / Social Media Plan (Thanks to Melissa and to Lini for editing!)
  • Of particular note was our discussion on Social Media:
    • We’ll be using Bluesky (great especially for reaching the DH community) and Facebook (plenty of great Ukrainian cultural groups to connect with)
    • We’ll be following WBENA’s lead tone-wise – don’t want to hand them a headache after this project
      • Also, from speaking with Dr. Marcia Ostashewksi, definitely don’t want to put anyone at risk.
        • This is especially poignant watching the news this week, wondering if the tone of our project is going to drastically shift.
      • We’ll cover both history of women in bandura, current concerts, as well as our progress on the site
        • Teryn offered to share resources for social media!
• Met with Dr. Marcia Ostashewski  (Thanks Melissa for organizing!) – she wrote articles and resources that were instrumental to our proposal, so it was really exciting to talk to her! She was incredibly helpful, including:
  • She put us in touch with Logan Clark, who provided us with the beta version of the Bandura in Canada site through Smithsonian Pathways
  • She provided us with additional resources
  • She stressed the cultural differences between the United States and Canada, including when it comes to reception of bandura. Considering that WBENA spans both countries, these cultural differences will be vital to remember.
• Teryn’s providing us with some great leads, such as:
  • Setting up a meeting with her uncle, an expert on the bandura and keeper of the kobzar tradition
  • Setting up a meeting with her aunt who is an expert on Ukrainian choral music and Dmytro Bortniansky, the composer of one of the songs that we are researching
  • Offering to put us in contact with Maryna Krut, a Ukrainain pop bandurist – one of her songs also appears in the WBENA repertoire
• Went to the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival (sponsored in part by the GC!) this past Friday – Teryn was one of the performers and also played her accompaniment on bandura for one of the pieces
  • Beautiful performances, with a range from more classical sounding to more experimental
    • Highly recommend checking out Pastels by Leonid Hrabovsky / Pavlo Tychyna for an example of the more experimental!
  • Met her aforementioned aunt there, who is very enthused about the project
• Joined the Code4Lib Slack and the minicomp wax channel per Nicole’s suggestion last class
  • Also per Nicole’s suggestion, asked about the feasibility of a particular feature that we would like to add (waiting for a response)
• Tomorrow, Alex will be leading the team through our Wax walkthrough in preparation for starting on the backend of the site
• Song research continues.
• Lesson of the Week: One step at a time!

The GDPW project is beginning to take shape.  The first part of our outreach strategy involves contacting journalists, filmmakers and female wrestlers as well as establishing a limited social media presence.   I queried an AI program, Claude, about journalists to contact, and I was amazed that it came back with a very large number of industry professionals to email.  I am looking forward to seeing whether people respond; in any case, I plan to create the email with just a few words and our amazing logo, so no one has to click a link or open a file (which they probably wouldn’t anyway).  I’m looking forward to reaching out to a few filmmakers, too, as well as some authors, and I hope they express interest in the project.  Tuesday night, after class, some of us are going to see the movie Queen of the Ring, which is about the 1950s champion wrestler Mildred Burke, and an outing to a live match is planned too!