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GDPW Group Update | Week 14

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APRIL 30TH

This week in class, we had the pleasure of hearing from guest lecturer Stephen Klein, who walked us through key concepts in web archiving. His insight helped us better understand the long-term value of preserving digital history, especially relevant to our project as we are finalizing everything and thinking about the future of GDPW.

Project Progress:
Madison finalized our data visualizations with support from Elijah, and they have now been uploaded to our WordPress site. Cathy and Martin worked on refining and updating our final presentation materials, ensuring the deck is clean, coherent, and reflective of our group’s progress, objectives, and each member’s contributions.

What’s Next:
Martin explained that future contributions to our website will include short narratives celebrating a specific community’s history and presence in professional wrestling.
Possible themes include:
– Black wrestlers and Black History Month
– Hispanic/Latinx Heritage
– Japan and Asia’s broader influence on wrestling
– LGBTQ+ representation
– Women’s History Month

These community spotlights will help us highlight professional wrestling as a space where identity, performance, and representation intersect.

Elijah is working on integrating Zotero into the site to improve how we display and organize our references and sources. He is also constantly refining and updating the website, to help bring it to culmination. Madison will provide front-end/UX support, to help polish the website. We’re also beginning to think about our personal final reflections. For our Final/White group Paper, everyone has been assigned three pages to do. Martin communicated that we will discuss the group paper more thoroughly after next week’s presentation. He is now preparing to individually lead an early run of our presentation on Monday.

Check out our progress so far on the official project website: https://gdprowres.com/

Personal Blog Post #4

Leonard was out this week, but our team really planned out our tasks and was able to coordinate offline and leading up to the outreach and social media presentation. Shoutout to Kelly, Leonard, and Julissa their teamwork really shined this week.

Since my focus is the data management and our map, this week, I worked on creating a mock-up for our map. It was fun to start learning Storymaps – Parisa, the digital fellow, has been super helpful in navigating and coming up with solutions with me.

We are still keeping options open on finalizing our platform (between Storymaps, which is open access or paid ArcGIS). We are open to using data publish on living atlas, but we don’t want to compromise on styling, customization, and aesthetic editing. Depending on what features are available on Storymaps, we’ll finalize our decision.

See our first draft of our map below!

Outreach Plan – Carousels of New York

The Carousels of New York’s outreach plan can be organized into three phases based on temporality and target communities.

Phase 1: Research Assistance

Phase 1 takes place while we’re completing our research. Our plan is to find specific contacts and email/call them we develop our work to get more expertise on our research. The target demographic for this phase will be professionals and academics who can provide guidance and assistance for this project. In general, this will include researchers in programs for Urban Planning, Architecture, History, Anthropology, Art History, Digital Humanities, Data Analysis and Visualization, and Urban Education. We may also potentially present this project at future academic conferences.

This phase does not require us to complete any of our public-facing materials as we’re using this phase to continue building the project.

Phase 2: Carousel Patrons

After we’ve finished a full draft of the project and published it, we want to make sure that actual patrons of the carousels see it as soon as we can! This includes tourists, families, carousel enthusiasts, and fans of whimsy. This is highly intertwined with our social media plan, but outside of that we plan to connect with NYC online groups/forums and contact organizations to spread the word.

Additionally, we want to make sure that we contact the carousels themselves. When we go to them, we hope to leave them with flyers to hang up and retrieve contact information for carousel representatives and employees who may be able to help us. This way, our work visiting each of the carousels in-person can help us collect more data and spread the word about our project!

This phase requires us to have already completed preliminary research on all carousel locations and a completed version of the website.

Phase 3: Outreach for Change

After our project has had some time to settle and we’ve had time to analyze the data, we want to try to reach out to whoever we can so that we can advocate for areas that have no carousels. Our overarching goal is to either bring carousels to the new area or make the existing carousels more financially accessible. This would include reaching out to city developers and organizations. This would include NY Carousel, non-profits like the Prospect Park Alliance and Central Park Conservancy, or other carousel related organizations. 

This phase requires us to have a social media presence and a more finalized version of our research.