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.

It’s halfway through the semester, and at this point, it feels that we have done so much, yet there is still much to do. GDPW is moving according to schedule, and the team deserves a reward for its efforts so far. Tomorrow night, some of the team members are going to see the movie Queen of the Ring. QotR is a film about the story of Mildred Burke, the champion professional wrestler who was one of the sport’s pioneers at a time when all-girl wrestling was banned in most of America. Mildred is one of the key figures in our research; it is both an educational and entertaining experience to see the film while it is still playing.
I also look forward to attending a wrestling show in late April with Cathy to do outreach work. There are so many pieces moving for this project to come to fruition. Besides all the hard work, there are moments when it brings me joy to continue doing it, whether going out with team members or even learning about other wrestlers I have never known about.

For my personal blog post this week, I thought I would focus on domain mapping on the Commons in case this information proves useful to others in this class, or future iterations of this class.

We decided to use CUNY Academic Commons for our website since WordPress is a platform we’re familiar with and find that it will be an appropriate tool to showcase our project. It’s great that we have access to this resource with our CUNY credentials.

But, the Academic Commons URL may not be the catchiest, user-friendly, or most discoverable way to find a site that may potentially have broad appeal. On the advice of Dr. Maney, we decided to purchase the domain http://www.carouselsofnyc.com/

But how to map it to our CUNY Academic Commons page? Well, if you’re viewing this within moment of posting this, you may find that there’s errors/glitches to viewing our site. We are currently in the process of working the with the Commons Team to troubleshoot, but in any case….

We thought we might be able to do this domain mapping on our own, perhaps through the dashboard of out site, with a WordPress plugin, or through the domain registrar. BUT, then we found these instructions:

https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/domain-mapping-commons/

Turns out- we need to request this service directly through the CUNY Academic Commons support team. I followed directions to assign our domain a CNAME record in the domain registrar and took a screenshot showing those settings. I then sent an email to [email protected] with that screenshot and our website information to request the mapping. I was very quickly re-routed to a specific support team member who reached out to the parent company of CUNY Academic Commons to connect the domains. Unfortunately, this initial mapping either went to a blocked page (if on a CUNY campus) or the CUNY Academic Commons sign in page.

This issue has been somewhat resolved, but there continues to be issues- it seems that it may have something to do with the original mapping including www. on the domain registrar where there may need to be one that does not with a focus on the https://.

Although we are the process of troubleshooting, I hope that this is helpful for those starting the process of domain mapping via CUNY Academic Commons.

Overview

As professional wrestling is a billion-dollar, multimedia phenomenon with an estimated 90 million fans worldwide, outreach for the Gender Disparity in Professional Wrestling project (GDPW) by design needs to cast a large net. The GDPW staff members leading this effort are Martin Bueno (in-person outreach) and Cathy Melamed (online).

It is important that GDPW stand out among the many individuals, groups, organizations and merchants vying for attention and media coverage in this sport. Thus, outreach needs to be professional and informative, but also not boring.  During the building phase of GDPW we will focus on targeted social media posts as well as media and wrestling industry contacts; later, we will share the completed project with academic institutions and at professional wrestling events. 

Website and Logo

GDPW will be hosted on the CUNY Commons as a WordPress site. We are looking into securing a domain name that will incorporate the project’s title and will link to the site. The license for the site is for three years, over which time updates with additional datasets and visualizations will be possible.  

GDPW lead web developer Elijah Nunez is designing a (possibly animated) logo that includes a silhouette of a female wrestler, airborne in a drop-kick, over a wrestling ring that features “GDPW” in hot pink and purple letters on the mat. 

Promoting and Sharing the GDPW Project

The strategy for promoting GDPW has three phases.  The first is to post “teasers” on the social media site Reddit to gauge early interest while investigating SEO moves. We are initially posting only to Reddit wrestling fan forums to evaluate the project’s potential to trigger trolling.  This first phase will also include contacting female professional wrestlers to see if any would like to provide guidance or collaboration.  The second phase, when the project is closer to completion, will include reaching out to journalists who cover professional wrestling and to others working in the industry (i.e., filmmakers, promoters, archive and museum personnel) via an email featuring the eye-catching GDPW logo, the full title of the project, and a few words about when to expect the project’s launch.  Finally, the completed project will be shared with all previous contacts as well as with academic institutions focused on digital humanities, sports studies, and gender/media studies.  This last phase will also include creation of GDPW business cards (designed by Madison Watkins) with QR codes linked to the WordPress site; Martin will distribute these in person at wrestling events and conferences. 

Measures of Effectiveness

As we branch out to publicize the project through more social media sites, analytics data will provide feedback on our outreach’s effectiveness.  Responses from individuals connected with professional wrestling will also help the team predict potential visitors to the GDPW site when it goes live.  

Similar to other documents we have worked on, I feel that we have already begun to discuss some of these outcomes as a team. For example, will the project be maintained after the semester ends? The data management plan helped to finalize some of those loose ends and also ensured that we were all on the same page. While we are all working on different parts of the project, it’s still important that we all know how to save and search for the files needed. 

When it came to data and this project, I once again thought I had things pretty well figured out. Take the information provided in the programs, take the information that we could find about each individual song, combine them each into their own CSV’s, plug them into the site, add the program PDFs, deploy to GitHub, and we’re good to go from there.

Of course, once again, that was only the beginning. Not only did we need to include what types of files were going to be in the project and how they would be named, but also:

• Who is responsible for backups in case we lose access to Google Drive / GitHub?
• Are the data file formats sustainable?

I hadn’t thought of keeping a copy of our data on a hard drive just in case (foolishly thinking that this is what the cloud was for) or that data file formats may not be sustainable (despite living through the Death of Flash). We really had to flesh out responsibilities relating to data, how we wanted to name / organize our files, what we were doing for backups, and what do we do if we lost our information.

In so doing, we became more familiar with what ownership of data means as well as why we are doing what we are doing when it comes to the backbone of the site (beyond well, this is what the framework needs). CSV’s and PDF’s aren’t proprietary, so we won’t need to worry about losing access to the data files in the future. Also, by agreeing on our file naming conventions now, we can ensure a cleaner repository in the future. Doing the DMP continued to help us as a team continue to be on the same page when it comes to file organization, our audience, data access, and contingency plans. Having these decisions made early in the game helps us to focus on our research, secure in the knowledge that we are prepared for what comes next.

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.

Data is everything. Everyone wants it; everybody needs it to make an informed decision. Gathering the right kind of data and enough data is the backbone of this project. From the initial stages of this project, the extraction process was as rudimentary as I imagined. However, during the process and building of the DMP, it became apparent that the data was more than what we would use to make visualizations. The data is the foundation of our whole project. Without data, how can we call GDPW a digital humanities project?t. Sure, it has the basis for a scholarly project like the research, but it needs the data. Why? Per our revised project proposal, the subtitle is “The Numbers Don’t Lie” by Scott Steiner.

Scouring the data proved just as time-consuming as collecting, extracting, and creating it. It is crucial that our data be flawless and have the information that my team needs to create what we want to show the audience. This data process was the most arduous task I have had to do so far, as it isn’t as simple as I first thought. It required some extra steps. As a current DH student, I am still learning and am looking forward to what other research and data I can uncover and create different projects.

Writing up the data management plan has really organized what types of data we will be needing for our project. As the data lead, I think it was a great way to showcase my expertise but also learn new ways/skills to organize our data.

A few weeks ago, I thought our only pieces of data were the carousel metadata (like address, fees, etc.), the carousel spatial data, and the demographic data. Now, after listening to our guest, Stephen Zweibel, our team realized the photos, videos, our and the snippet of our individual visiting experience and review is also considered to be data.

Zweibel made me rethink what data is, it can be anything we use to make conclusions, visualizations, etc. Thinking about the stages of our data also helped make our data management plan, and also for me to add to our work plan. Thinking of cleaning the demographic data and adding time to do so, I thought of the step to be minimal and quick – but after our guest’s lecture, cleaning is a heavy task and requires attention to detail and time like other parts of our project.

Although, data is my strong suit – I always welcome the opportunity to learn from others in the field to continue to keep rethinking ways I use data.