Alexandra Millatmal is a software engineer in love with the world outside of (impacted by, apart from, in spite of) tech. As a Digital Humanities masters program candidate, she hopes to bring her artistic, personal, and professional worlds in closer alignment, using the tools of her trade to engage in questions that deeply resonate with her personhood.

On the Women of Bandura project team, Alex contributed as the frontend developer. Additionally, drawing on her past experience as a teaching assistant and curriculum designer for multiple learn-to-code programs, she also planned shadowing and educational opportunities for team members looking to level-up their development skills.

In noticed I am still struggling to get back into the swing of class, I think it is because work style is different, which makes sense given it is a project-based course. What I wasn’t planning on is for both of my program for work to become busy at the same time, along with other changes happening at work. In short, work as me stressed!  However, my team’s weekly meeting and my planner are helping me find that rhythm.

My role in the carousel project is social media and graphic design and field worker. What I am most excited about is using my creativity. While I will primarily use Canva and even considering finally paying for it, I have the opportunity to explore other tools, and ensuring what I use is open source. I also know that once I begin to design the logo, or draft post I will spend hours on it, out of simple enjoyment of selecting a color, or adding a sticker.

I’m looking forward to leading our next meeting, as I feel that my part in the project won’t really kick in until later.  Which I know it’s really more in theory as time flies. I believe I think this way as I tend to favor actionable items, but we need to first visit the parks and get pictures before I can really dive into the work. For now drafting the work plan will help me get a better understanding of when I can dive into creating the posts.

Going to bullet journal this week.

• Lesson of the Week (TM) – Life happens and we move on, or: Don’t get tendinitis
• What We Accomplished:
  • Finished the project proposal!
  • Shared the project proposal, project Google Drive, and proposed agreement with Teryn, our WBENA liaison
  • Received the last three program folders and some recordings from Teryn, with more to come
    • We’re going to start with the Boston / Providence tour from last year
  • Set up the team Asana board – gotta love that feeling of moving tasks from To Do to Done!
  • Started pooling resources for song research
    • Finding English language resources can be tough
    • Finding resources on these specific songs at the jump can be tough – Teryn agreed to send us the sheet music and any other documentation that they have, so that should be a great starting point.
      • (My Nancy Drew senses are tingling!)
    • Going home to DE to pick up some books this weekend
    • A trip to the Ukrainian History and Education Center library in South Bound Brook, NJ may prove useful in the future as they do have a large collection of sheet music and literature (though most of the literature is in Ukrainian).
  • Lini pitched some awesome logo ideas and copied the shared WBENA files to our Project Drive
  • Alex is planning on setting up our programming lessons, including our first official team Wax deep dive
  • Melissa reached out to 3 potential project advisors (with one reply so far!)
• Coming Soon
  • We’re going to wireframe the home page, individual program page, and individual song page as a team tomorrow
  • We’re also going to assign out songs to research tomorrow!
    • I feel like I’ve said this a lot in the past few weeks, but – And so it begins!

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.

Having a day off from class week worked out perfectly for me. Our team met on Friday before we had off and decided to take the time off and meet this week. I went away to see family in Colombia, and the timing worked out great. It’s still early in the semester that it wasn’t a heavy lift to go away and be offline.

By working through our project proposals, defined our roles, and established concrete team and project guidelines, I am clear on the expectations. We have established a good relationship and rapport, I know if I needed clarity or assistance I can reach out at any time. I’m leading the data collection and mapping for the project. Our team set ourselves up to work and think about the project individually, I set up a task tracker in google sheets to organize deliverables and created a data folder and began collecting information.

Before leaving, I looked at more data sets on IPUMS, kaggel, and NYC Open Data and began to work and play in ARCGIS. I thought I work on more during the weekend, but with no wifi on flight and terrible connection at my grandparents my productivity slowed down. Again, it was nice to disconnect, it’s early enough in our project to take the break now.

I am excited to meet with our guest this week and take advantage of the ARCGIS workshop being offered on Wednesday. Time to jump into work mode!

Over the last 2 weeks we worked on editing and finalizing our proposal, workshopped a new name for the project, met with WBENA and introduced ourselves, chose potential scholarly advisors to reach out to, started to construct on our work plan, and started to navigate working together. We have been meeting on Thursday evenings to touch base and figure out our work flow.

After class 2 week ago we met with Teryn, WBENAs concert mistress and our contact for this project, her mom, Irene, who is the president of the ensemble, as well as some other WBENA board members as they jumped onto the call for their own meeting after ours. Teryn and Irene both seemed really excited about the project which in turn was exciting for me! I was already interested in the project, but talking to WBENA made it real.

Our conversations around how to name the project have been really interesting and thoughtful. The team is taking care to not be too limited in our language, but we’re also bumping into the limitations of English. I think we are looking for a more inclusive term than women, but Non Men in Bandura doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. We put the question to WBENA and Teryn liked Women of Bandura. Personally I think the focus on women is the heart of the project, but I would also hate for anyone to feel left out/excluded by that language. This isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled with this question of language and I am sure it won’t be the last.

I reached out to 3 possible scholarly advisors on Friday – Dr. Marina Berezutskaya (a Ukrainian scholar of Ethnomusicology who has written about the bandura), Dr. Maria Sonevytsky (an Anthropology and Music professor at Bard who was recommended by a friend of Lini’s, her research focuses on post-Soviet Ukraine with interests in folklore), and Dr. Marcia Ostashewski (a Canadian scholar at Cape Breton University who wrote a piece on women in bandura that we used as a resource in our proposal). I was absolutely delighted to hear back from Dr. Ostashewski! She is interested in our project and included her project coordinator in her email response in order to set up a time to meet. I am looking forward to sorting out the next steps with the team in class Tuesday and getting a meeting with her on the calendar.

I think we’re on track so far, though experiencing a bit of an unanticipated (we knew WBENA would be busy in March, but are figuring out what we need to prioritize first in order to prevent later hiccups) crunch since WBENA will be unavailable for much of March, preparing for an upcoming concert. We’re trying to get some basic wire frames ready for them to review and make sure we have all the materials we need from them before they will be too busy to assist us. Tasha created an Asana board for project management, which so far has been satisfying in terms of seeing what we have crossed off! And what is yet to come. I think it will be a good tool for us to keep up with each other as the semester gets busier and this project gets rolling.

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.