We’re here. The final group post.

Of course, we start off with a slight change of plan – WBENA is only available to meet Tuesday after class at 9. So, deployment will need to be pushed back, but we will still have our MVP of the site ready. And it is all coming together! Alex’s program page template is in review, and the song page template is nearing completion. Lini’s finishing up the home page and the embed page for the History of Women in Bandura StoryMap. I quickly spun up some collections pages for songs and programs for easier navigation (thankfully for Wax this is only one line of code). Everything is coming together before our eyes.  Seeing the Song titles pop up on the program pages (with working links!) on Tuesday was magic.

Our brochures (our own little programs! Thanks Melissa and Lini for the amazing design!!) are printed and cut (thanks, Lini!!) and ready to go.

Now, we’re all reviewing and refining and tweaking (I definitely still have some edits for my StoryMap contributions!). After that, I (or Alex should I be unable) will present on this wonderful site that we have worked so hard to build and share.

I’ll save the emotional stuff for my last personal blog post, but seriously. Thanks everybody. Great work. 😀

We were able to make some practical, and sometimes exciting progress this week!

Leonard worked on some aesthetic details on the website including adding some jazzy imagery, fixing margins, and making page layouts function on both desktop and mobile devices.

Julissa has been posting away on Instagram and has an ambitious to post (almost) daily alternating between posts and stories in the countdown to our project launch. With Leonard’s help, Julissa began mentioning carousels in posts and both Prospect Park and Bryant Park took notice! We also started to to get on the radar of the GC Digital Humanities and Data Vis programs Instagram pages.

We’ve all been working on our individual blog posts for each carousel and are almost ready to link them to our map as a “more information” sort of thing. Speaking of the map, we did notice a display quirk with the layers and Carla is going to ask a GC Fellow for some advice. Carla suspects it may have something to do with the size of the map pin. Carla has also started to work on analysis of what we learned from the map, with an ambitious plan to maybe incorporate a visualization of some sort (but no pressure!).

Carla has also agreed to be our presenter, and I (Kelly) will be the backup. She’s going to do a great job representing our project- which just has a few finishing touches before showtime!

Getting awfully close to the finish line! We have a soft deadline of Tuesday (4/29), so we’ll be ready for our soft deadline of showing WBENA the site Thursday (5/1), so we’ll be ready for the soft launch that is the dress rehearsal Tuesday (5/6), so we’ll be fully ready for the presentation (5/13).

What We’ve Accomplished:

– The backend format is fully set! I added the recording column and split Kupalo (a medley) into 3 song pages – one for each section of sheet music – over Spring Break. We’ll probably revise the content of the CSV’s, but the format is officially good to go. It finished later than anticipated, but we’re still on track.

– Melissa, Lini, and I did research on the History of Women in Bandura page. We wound up finding plenty of discussion worthy points that will be sure to fill the space well.

– Lini set up the StoryMap for the History page – the three of us will fill out the page with our respectively found content and group edit, providing Alex with the last edit as a pair of fresh eyes.

– Melissa continues to rock Outreach, including a post on Bandura for the Future, a fundraising effort by Teryn for hospitals in Ukraine, affiliated with the organization Ukraine Matters.

– Alex provided us with paired programming videos for educational aids and is currently working away on the front-end! We discussed the inner workings of Wax at length on Tuesday.

– We have finalized our Mission Statement and the design for our brochure. I’m currently working on deploying a dummy site so we can generate the QR Code and print the brochures.

While we haven’t fully met the projected due dates in our original schedule, we are still set to deliver everything that we promised in our proposal – 2 programs with associated song pages and a page for the History of Women in Bandura.

We’ve started connecting our data visualizations to the website, and more are on the way soon to really bring the project to life. We also made our first post on BlueSky HERE: https://bsky.app/profile/gdpwcuny.bsky.social and updated our Reddit link on the website so we can start conversations on there as well. On the research side, we will start uploading our materials to Zotero and cleaning up our Excel files to make sure everything is polished and organized to share on the website and be prepared for our data vizzes. Martin and Cathy have been out attending wrestling events for outreach, which has been super helpful as we continue building connections in the community. We’re also spotlighting Battle Crush’s Women Crush Wednesday 5 and tracking HOG’s Isolation at Amuzura, especially thinking about how it all ties into global indie circuits and representation in wrestling. Blogging is still ongoing, we will be focusing on autism awareness in professional wrestling for April and highlighting the events we’ve been attending. We have also printed our business cards to promote the project at the events we attend and within our circles.The last thing we’re focusing on is making final tweaks to our presentation PowerPoint, taking into account the feedback received. Lots moving, but we’re in a good place and excited to keep building.

We’ve made good progress, and learned some things since our last update!

Leonard reached out to decided upon contacts mostly in the tourism/parenting sphere, and got responses from everyone BUT they either said they would not post our project OR wanted a minimum of $500 to do so. Leonard is now brainstorming how to leverage the social media influencer world to see if our project can get some traction in the public sphere that way.

Julissa received our promotional bookmarks and has created a solid social media schedule of her tracker. She has started posting has plans to create “buzz” around our project launch with a countdown+fun facts. She has a goal of 3 posts per week up to the project launch. Julissa and Leonard are in conversation on how to reach out to influencers via Instagram, and considering tagging carousels in our posts for a hopeful re-post!

Carla made great strides with the map. All pins are included and the map is successfully embedded on our site with help from The Center for Teaching and Learning staff. We modified the StoryMap and the embed so it “fit” more nicely on the page. Carla has also been hard at work modifying our project presentation slides.

I made some aesthetic updates to the website, mainly solidifying our header’s logo/color scheme, and a little bit of page formatting. Leonard is going to use his amazing WordPress/CSS skills to further enhances the aesthetic, and to make sure things look good on desktops, tablets, and phones.

We asked permission to use AI to help with our tagline- this is the sort of thing it can be really helpful for. We decided on a melange of responses to land on:

Round and Round: NYC Carousels and the Stories They Spin

This week showed us that we have most of what we need to finish our project; there are just a few things, such as having BlueSky up and running. I already reached out to Chloe and signed the release form. We are hitting the milestones, but we are also making sure that we meet up in Zoom or in-person one time before Spring Break. However, I don’t want to deviate from a timeline where we have Spring Break off, and we deserve it. We may need to make extra effort at the end of the month, but the team deserves some downtime to get back in the zone. Having spring break to reassess and gather our bearings will be necessary for the final push. We all have jobs, lives, and other classes requiring our attention, which was one reason I decided to give everyone Spring Break off on the timeline from the project’s initial start. I will supplement our project during Spring Break to avoid getting overwhelmed after Spring Break, but it will be a small task that needs to be addressed. Knowing when to give your team respite is necessary as a project lead. For now, we are where we need to be.

Week 13 Already! Last night, I checked in with WBENA on their executive call, and I brought up scheduling a final(ish) walkthrough of the website, where they can see everything assembled but still have time to give us edits. They asked if we could send our availability, which we will be discussing in tomorrow’s group call. The date would be some time around the end of the month though, which really puts our timing into perspective. The end is in sight!

So, what else did we do this week?

• Melissa and I went to a Bandura Workshop hosted by Teryn and fellow bandurist Zoya, where Melissa played bandura for the first time!
• I added the sheet music and programs to the backend of the website
• Alex set up our ticketing system in GitHub for working on building out the site as per our wireframes, which we reviewed in class and helped Lini with debugging.
• Lini tested this ticketing system and added in our header as well as images for our front page
• Melissa, Lini, and I interviewed Nadia Tarnawsky, Cleveland-based folk-singer and bandurist, on Monday.
• Melissa and Lini began work on transcribing the interview (sadly Zoom is not like Teams with auto-transcription)
• We discussed the ethics of AI-based transcription

What are we still doing this week (before tomorrow’s meeting)?

• I will add the rest of the backend tickets to our GitHub Project – mostly adding the rest of the sheet music (which we are waiting to receive) and adding in the old recordings as placeholders so we can work out logistics).
• Lini and Melissa will keep working on transcription
• Melissa will continue to work on drafting social media posts
• Alex will continue working on adding / editing / reviewing pull requests for front-end tickets, and the programming crew (myself, Alex, and Lini) will keep working on / reviewing them

Over spring break, we’re going to try to meet up once or twice in paired programming sessions so we can continue to learn from each other and have dedicated time for questions and debugging.

We are currently roughly on schedule. There are some tasks that we have had to soften or which no longer quite make sense exactly as written in the schedule. For some materials, such as some sheet music, lyrics, and recordings, we need to wait to receive them before we are able to plug them into the site. However, while this means that back-end development is technically running over schedule, we’ve still been plugging in information and checking to see that what we have works, so we are still moving forward with the website as planned. We currently don’t have any true blockers (knock wood), and we will continue to be flexible as we keep moving forward. We are still on track to deliver what we said we would (again, knock wood, I’ve already had tendinitis, a concussion, and a knee injury. I have learned not to tempt fate.)

For the most part, we are meeting our milestones, and then some!

Based on our agreed upon template for carousel blog posts last week, I was able to create posts for some of our carousels, to which group members will create their own for their corresponding carousels. Carla has been keeping up with our map and worked out a kink with how to include a featured image on the pin. Leonard commenced outreach and got an excited (but $$$) reply from TimeOut NYC and a more subdued, but promising reply from Brooklyn Bridge Parents. Julissa put up our first post on Instagram and has been working on a social media schedule. She also created a lovely promotional bookmark with an order in (or about to go in!) to be ready to hand out at our May 13 presentation.

Some setbacks that have been mentioned before has been the difficulty visiting some carousels to take original photos/videos due to weather or them not being open yet for the season! To make up for this, we have strategized a way to find, incorporate, and give credit to creative common license photos- mostly found via Google Image Search -> Flickr.

We continue to have embedding issues on CUNY’s instance of WordPress- but now it’s not just the map! Turns out if a video isn’t YouTube or Vimeo- it ain’t embedding. We are also having a strange glitch with our logo showing up on our header on mobile, but not on PCs. Nicole was kind enough to suggest a contact (Laurie H.) at the Teaching and Learning Center at the GC. Laurie provides workshops and support for CUNY Academic Commons to faculty, but Nicole thought she may be willing to help. We have also put in a ticket to CUNY Academic Commons- so we’ll see! We know the things work on other WordPress instances- so a mystery abounds!

Most of us will be around for Spring Break and plan on putting some asynchronous individual work in. I (Kelly) will be out from Thursday-Tuesday (but in class!)