Category Archives: Group Project Updates

Carousels Group Update Week 10

We are continuing to go ahead on a good clip with our project, but aren’t immune from some roadblocks!

What’s going well?

Website: Added our fonts and colors to the website, and have added all of our profiles to the about page. We decided on a template for our carousel blog posts, so Kelly will get started on creating an example post for us each to follow when we post about the carousels we’re assigned to. Leonard is working on using CSS to add the logo to the header of our page.

Visiting Carousels: We’ve had great weather, and some carousel openings, so we’ve all been able to visit at least one, and all have plans to visit more. Kelly was able to visit Prospect Park, and Julissa visited the Sea Glass carousel, so we have plenty of original photos/videos for those carousels to use for our site and social media.

Outreach & Social Media: Leonard has created communication templates and is actively identifying and vetting potential contacts with hopes to initiate contact soon. Julissa is diving into our social media presence, brainstorming post ideas around reviews, fun facts, team introductions, and project promotion on Instagram.

Where are we facing challenges?

  • Carousel Access: Unfortunately, some of our assigned carousels have been either closed or inaccessible for visits. We may need to rely on creative commons pictures for these locations if all else fails.
  • Map Embedding: Carla has successfully generated the map embed code, and it works on standard WordPress instances. However, we’re encountering issues embedding it correctly on the CUNY Commons platform. Carla is going to reach out to our CUNY Commons Mapping Group to see if we can get any tips.

Tasks for the Upcoming Week (Leading up to the presentation):

Leonard:

  • Create a logo for the website header using CSS.
  • Continue outreach efforts.

Julissa:

  • Draft and schedule social media posts.
  • Create Instagram “highlights” for each borough showcasing our visited carousels.
  • Start draft for info-graphic handout
  • “Jazz up” presentation slides with graphic design razzamatazz

Carla:

  • Prepare the project presentation for next class for Julissa to jazz up.
  • Goal: Have all carousels have a pin on the map (even if represented by a placeholder image for now).
  • Reach out to the Map group on CUNY Commons for help with embedding the map on our specific platform.

Kelly:

  • Finalize the blog template structure and complete blog posts for assigned carousels

All Team Members:

  • Visit more assigned carousels to gather photos and videos whenever possible.
  • Research “fun facts” about our assigned carousels for possible social media posts

Carousels Group Project Update March 26

We believe we’re going at a good pace, and have appreciated the time in class to discuss the project, while getting a lot done independently.

In terms of milestones, we have good bones to our website, the map is coming along nicely, we agreed upon a visual identity system (logo, fonts, colors), have started an Instagram page, and have started drafting communication templates for our outreach efforts.

We haven’t visited as many carousels as we anticipated in our timeline, but have visited some. We’re not too worried about it as many carousels are starting to open (literally this weekend), and others have been postponed due to cold/wet/windy weather. We all have plans to visit more shortly.

We also had a domain mapping issue with the website, but it seems to be resolved. We were unable to edit the website for about a week, but we were a little ahead of schedule with that, so no worries.

The map is going well with a combination of ArcGIS Storymaps, and possibly ArcGIS itself (if needed). Carla has been in regular contact with a Digital Fellow to troubleshoot. We’re currently trying to figure out a better way to embed images of the carousels within the metadata.

Since our visual identity system is ready, we can start embedding it more to the website and begin planning for handouts and future posts for social media. We are also going to gather a list of points of interest to reach out to once our outreach templates are complete.

Women of Bandura Group Update Week 9

What we accomplished tonight:

  • Reviewed Song Research Sheet and discussed final steps
  • Briefly reviewed CSV structure
  • Reviewed Lini’s amazing second draft logo designs
  • Brainstormed social media posts
  • FINALLY got Wax to run locally (Tasha – after much frustration)

What we’re working on this week:

  • Alex – continuing with lower priority wireframes and Wax setup
  • Tasha – refine and add existing CSV’s into the backend for testing and check in with Teryn on social media posts, hosting the sound files for the site,  contacts for interviews, etc.
  • Lini – work on banner for social media
  • Melissa + Lini – continue developing our social media post backlog
  • Melissa – reach out to bandurist Nadia Tarnawsky about possibility of interview

Our next team meeting will be Thursday, at which we’ll reconvene on the progress of the above. We will also discuss adjusting course / expectations as we enter into the final month of the project. We’ve already discussed this in regards to our approach to song research tonight, but it will be good to have a refresh with the whole team toward the whole project.

Nicole’s astonishment at the progress each of our projects made was certainly heartwarming and invigorating. It helps to have a reminder of all of the work we’ve achieved up until this point, especially when we’re taking a good look at ourselves and considering what we can reasonably accomplish going forward.

 

Women of Bandura – Approved Wireframes

Our platform choice of Wax does not allow us to present a website framework at this stage. The team worked to unify our vision of the website by creating wireframes and also to get approval from WBENA ensuring transparency at the design stage.

Our front-end developer, Alex Millatmal devised a well designed workshop so we could synchronously create the wireframes for the home, program and song page. Alex took us through the following steps in our virtual workshop:

  • We each took 5 minutes to review four existing sites performing a sort of environment scan.  We then shared our finding, discussing the features that worked and the ones that fell short.
  • Alex selected a simple tool called Excalidraw to sketch the frames and the ease of operation meant that we did not waste any time wrestling with the tool itself.
  • In the shared frame on Excalidraw, we each designed our own version of the Home page. Alex assigned a specific audience focus to each team member. I created the layout from the perspective of WBENA, the actual performers, Alex through the eyes of other bandura ensembles, Melissa with respect to the academic community and Tasha looked at it from the angle of the Ukrainian diaspora. Again a brilliant strategy that allowed us to approach the designs from different audience perspectives essentially covering all bases.
  • After sketching, we reviewed the results.
  • The team created the remaining page sketches asynchronously.
  • Then Alex and I came together to consolidate the best features from the different sketches to form the final frames which were sent out to WBENA for approval.

Below are the approved wireframes.

Wireframe of home, program and song page.

We continue to work on lower priority frames such as the About and Bibliography pages following a similar strategy.

The team is grateful to Alex for the invaluable guidance and direction provided in the collaborative process.

 

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.

Carousels of NYC – Social Media Plan

Platform:

  • Instagram will be the main platform used to promote our project.
  • Linktree will be created if we gain traction or decide to collaborate with others

Outreach and Tracking Goals:

  • Our goal is to engage with tourists, families, and carousel enthusiasts
  • We may potentially track likes, saves, and share

Content & Communication:

  • The tone of our content will be casual and fun. We will primarily be creating our content, however, we may occasionally share content from other users on our story.
  • Julissa will be responsible for responding to any Instagram comments and DMs. When necessary, she will delegate responses to appropriate team members and, when needed, will refer users to the project’s Gmail.

Women in Bandura – Outreach & Social Media Plan

General Goals

The Content Editor/Social Media Specialist (Melissa) will establish relationships with the Bandura community, cultural institutions such as the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America (UNWLA), the Ukrainian Museum, Women’s Bandura Ensemble of North America (WBENA), the Ethnomusicology department at CUNY, Ukrainian History and Education Center in New Jersey (UHEC), Dr. Maria Sonevytsky from Bard and Dr. Marcia Ostashewski from Cape Breton University in order to foster relationships for the later distribution of our project through personal outreach and social media. The plan is to connect with members of the Ukrainian diaspora and garner interest in our project. 

Audience

  • WBENA
  • Academic Scholars
  • CUNY Digital Humanities Community
  • WAX Community
  • North American Ukrainian Community
  • Musical Programmers
  • Ethnomusicology Scholars

Our Values/Voice

The Women in Bandura team is working closely with the WBENA in the framework of “slow archiving” to ensure that the community we are working with is included in every decision we make and has ultimate control over what gets published. We are aware that this project is inherently political in these times and we do not want to draw any unwanted attention to our own work, and more importantly to the Ensemble. 

Website and Logo

Women in Bandura will be created using WAX and hosted on GitHub. Once our site is complete, users will be able to explore two programs from WBENA performances in Boston/Providence and the Rust Belt. They will be able to read about each song featured including details on the composer, genre, theme, tempo, key, description of the song, lyrics, and soloist.

The Women in Bandura logo(s) was created by our Researcher/Assistant Content Editor/Development Shadow, Lini Radhakrishan.

These are the four logo ideas that Lini drafted. We have not decided which one we’ll use as the logo for the project. 

Social Media Strategy

The Content Editor/Social Media Specialist will create social media accounts on Facebook and Bluesky in order to connect with members of the community and to promote and build interest in our project. The Social Media Specialist will create content working with the Assistant Content Editor to post on Facebook and Bluesky. Initially, the Social Media Specialist will post one time per week on Facebook and Bluesky with original content related to our project and supplemental reshared content from the community. This includes blog-like posts on our logo design process, the website design process, sharing any hiccups we have, and fun facts about Bandura history as well as cross posting and/or sharing content produced by the WBENA on their social media accounts. We hope that our social media presence will increase visibility for our project and possibly prompt members of the community to get involved themselves. 

The Social Media Specialist will be responsible for fielding any inquiries and interactions on social media, only escalating to team review when necessary. 

Communication Strategies

Our outreach strategy is multi-pronged. Alongside promoting the project on social media, once the project is complete we will create brochures (both print and electronic) that will provide context for the project, explain the importance of this work and ultimately lead the user to our website via a QR code and WBENA. We will distribute printed brochures to the Mina Rees Library on the CUNY Graduate Center Campus and other cultural institutions where appropriate. We will send out electronic promotions through our social media accounts, the CUNY Academic Commons, cultural institutions and organizations, the WBENA website, and the Graduate Center Newsletter. Additionally we will reach out to WAX and ask to be featured on their channels promoting projects made with the platform and to NYCDH (NYC Digital Humanities) in order to promote our project to the larger community.