Meeting with the team was super helpful this week, it was really nice to touch base, finish up some items from class, and to get to know the team a bit better.

We were able to work out the details of our group and discussed future times to meet. Kelly got us organized and using tools like google drive to set up notes, project proposal, and other files all in one place. With her agenda for the meeting with hit many of the points in Rockwell’s quick guide to working in teams.

Without looking into this week’s readings, our team hit some of the advice given. Getting to know each other, team building, and laying the groundwork on how we will make tough decisions. The readings tied nicely into our first personal blog posts. It was cool to read the process of One Week One Tool and their day to day. It was a reminder that the importance of the class is the process of creating a tool, the team building, and the skills we will learn along the way, not necessarily the product that comes out of this class.

I am looking forward to getting to know my team better, to dive into the work of the project, and to continue to learn from our professor, my other classmates, and the digital fellows throughout the semester.

This week we voted on which projects we would make this semester. I’m interested in archiving and digital exhibits, so I was initially drawn to Tasha’s proposal “Bandurapedia” and thrilled when a group started to coalesce around the project. I am taking on a researcher/outreach co-role with Lini. I’m looking forward to learning some development and UX skills from shadowing Alex and Tasha.

In our first zoom meeting at the end of last week we tossed around new names for the project, discussed how to revise the proposal, and the collaborators agreement. I volunteered to start looking for a professor or doctoral student who could advise us. There is a professor in the CUNY Grad Center’s Ethnomusicology department who I thought could be a good fit, but her area of expertise is South Eastern Europe, which does not include Ukraine. Lini reached out to a friend who recommended we connect with a Bard professor – Dr. Sonevytsky, who specializes in post-Soviet Ukraine and music. This is a great recommendation and based on her bio I think it’d be a really exciting opportunity for us if we get to talk to her. I am anxious to reach out to her – I am sure she’s very busy with her own projects, course load, etc. and since she is outside of our institution I feel like even more of an imposition. I have drafted an email to her that I want to go over with my teammates. I thought that my outreach skills were fairly strong, but I am finding this email intimidating and feeling frustrated by my lack of confidence. Too vulnerable?

Right now we’re keeping a shared google drive and communicating via signal. From this weeks reading/resources I hope we can add a project management tool like Trello or Asana to our arsenal. I feel a sense of anxious anticipation as we begin this project. Ultimately, I’m really excited to be working with Alex, Lini, and Tasha and I can’t wait to grow and learn alongside them this semester.

The process of finalizing three projects from six strong pitches was not easy, but there was a helpful air of generosity and a sense of community in the room. There was no time to dwell on the outcome as we immediately settled into our groups and in project Bandurapedia we had a quick yet fruitful discussion on roles and responsibilities. I took on the role of one of the two researchers and I will also help create content for outreach as well as shadow the Frontend/Backend programmers to satiate my interest in coding. The team agreed to share weekly reporting responsibilities by making individual entries to a shared document so the project manager had the information available for compilation. Given that each member will be taking on multiple roles, it is crucial to find ways to share the load as evenly as possible so we can meet the timelines we set ourselves.

In the past week, we set up communication channels (Signal/ google drive folders), had our first meeting over zoom and set up action items to address the proposal feedback, revision process, platform selection and collaborative agreement. We discussed options for an alternate project name since Bandurapedia indicated a larger scope than the project’s current focus on the Women’s Bandura Ensemble of North America. This also brought us to one of the major dependencies of the project that requires WBENA approval for all the content, a known risk that is acceptable considering the project’s determination to feature the community’s voice and build trust in the spirit of the slow archives approach. To mitigate the risk to the extent possible, we decided to work on an agreement with WBENA to assure transparency through the cycle, settle on conflict resolution strategies and seek early approval of prepared wireframes of the webpages. We have also set up our introductory meeting with WBENA.

The stage is now set for revising the proposal, finalizing roles and getting the show on the road. We have a long way to go, but we are coming together as a team. The team members are enthusiastic, positive, generous and there is a heartening spirit of collaboration and cooperation. The start is reassuring.

Recommended reading: One of the readings from the Politics and DH course proposes an ethical visualization workflow that could be useful to all three projects. The advice to follow an ethical approach towards data collection, curation and visualization is explained through the comparison of two projects. The approach advocating for transparency to convey the veracity of the data sources and due care to avoid biases could be particularly beneficial to the GDPW project and data normalization suggestions could be useful to consider for the carousel project if they decide to go ahead with recommending geographical areas for new carousels.

Hi Everyone.

In preparation for my proposal pitch next week, I thought I post this recent article. Since my project focuses on gender disparity in professional wrestling, I would like to draw interest for my project by looking at how wrestling can be used to study and teach other subjective matters such as English and Math. Also, how it can empower youth. Some or all of you might not watch wrestling or know much about it but maybe some of the subjects matters currently revolving around it may interest you.

https://www.espn.com/professional-wrestling/story/_/id/43584536/the-wrestling-club-wwe-aew-wrestlers-brooklyn-kipp-amp

The second article displays the audience race composition across multiple wrestling promotions from 2021-2023. This is a great example of how I envision the data viz part of the project but with the focus on gender disparity/composition instead of race.

https://wrestlenomics.com/2023/12/05/audience-composition-race-demographics-for-wwe-aew-impact-new-japan-wow/

It’s interesting how all these things started to take form in 2021, which was about the same time I started watching wrestling after about a 15 year hiatus. Although my knowledge of wrestling may seem that I am a longtime expert. I started to watch it 3.5 years ago and just recently started involving it in my scholar works as of 2023. Wrestling as a teaching tool is fairly new and about the same time it seems interest around the subject of professional wrestling has started to blossom outside its sports entertainment lens and into a subject matter that can be also be studied, especially within the field of digital humanities.

Have a lovely weekend everyone.

Kind Regards,

MB