Category Archives: Group Project Updates

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. 

Women of Bandura DMP

Description of the Data

We have been provided with programs, song titles, sheet music, photos, audio recordings, performance video YouTube links by WBENA. The dataset will be supplemented with song data and history of women in bandura with research of primary and secondary texts as well as oral history interviews. Since WBENA is an active ensemble, the data set will have new items coming in regularly at a rate of one or two programs per year.

We will be producing two .csv files and one markdown file. We are digesting two programs in six weeks, initiating at a rate of thirteen songs in approximately four weeks. Next, we will research six additional songs from the second program in approximately two weeks. We expect the selected program and song data to remain static.

For this project we are using .csv, PDF, JPEG, MP3 and WAV, which we may need to convert for accessibility, Markdown, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files.

Data Storage and Protection

We are storing a copy of the data in Google Drive folders shared with access restricted to the team and WBENA. The ensemble has hard copies of programs and sheet music. Audio recordings are hosted on Soundcloud, and the videos  are hosted on YouTube. If original copies of any of the data items go down, we’ll have the site and the data powering it posted on GitHub.

Data Format and Documentation

We are using the Wax framework which will be hosted on GitHub Pages. The song and program data will be inserted into .csv files which will power the website rendered in CSS, HTML,  and JavaScript. The history of women in bandura information will be synthesized into an article and published via a markdown file.

For research, we have a running document of sources. We will write up an agreement between us and any potential interviewees. We have taken existing collections from WBENA via Google Drive, which has been documented in several email threads.

We are planning on creating a README for our website which will include explanations of the files and code included. The code itself will be clearly organized and commented on for accessibility sake. Tasha will take on the role of implementation as the Project Manager, while ensuring that the team is following the plan.

Our directory set up is going to be in line with the Wax framework. We will use kebab-case in naming our files for readability. For each song and program we will be assigning them their own unique identifiers. Each song will be identified as SONG[#] where the number refers to the order of addition to the .csv file. Each program will be identified PROG[#] where the number refers to the order of addition to the .csv file.

​​Data Access, Sharing and Archiving

WBENA owns the information that will be hosted on the site. They also have final say over what is published and final ownership of the project.

Primary sources of access will be Google Drive and GitHub. The WBENA will have access to both repositories. We will designate one team member to download and host information on their hard drive. We will use Zoom to record and transcribe interviews with WBENA on the history of women in bandura. We will not publish recordings without explicit permission. All recordings that are not published will be turned over to WBENA or the respective party at the conclusion of the project. Recordings will comprise audio/video and related transcripts.

The published data will be public on GitHub and the Women of Bandura website, but only WBENA and the team will be able to edit the data. The site will be officially published in late April 2025.

The data will be retained for the foreseeable future since it is powering a public website. Any data not used in the final site will be returned to its owners. At least one member of the project (the Project Lead) will act as a consultant after the project’s completion.

Carousels of NYC – Data Management Plan

The Carousels of New York City project will collect, analyze, and visualize data on 14 carousels across the city and include analysis on neighborhood demographic data. Data collection will include observational metadata gathered through Google Forms, demographic data sourced from NYC Open Data, and geospatial data visualized using ARCGIS StoryMaps. The project will use Google Drive for data storage and organization, following standardized file naming conventions. Final datasets will be publicly shared via WordPress and ARCGIS Living Atlas under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Security and privacy concerns are minimal, as no personal or confidential data will be collected. Long-term data preservation will be maintained through Google Drive, with additional archival options considered for institutional repositories. The project will conclude in mid-May 2025, with periodic monitoring by the project lead (Kelly). Adherence to this plan will be monitored by data lead (Carla) and project lead (Kelly),