Last week was productive and fun. We are getting lots of traction on our Instagram page, specifically due to the Meet the Team Post! We received 716 views and 19 likes. I did fall slightly behind schedule with my weekend post; however, I am now back on track and feel confident about maintaining my schedule.
I do, however, need to buckle down on my blogs. I hope to finish one today and begin working on the other one, too!
Alright, finish line’s in sight.Let’s go.
The dummy site is live – I tried to include everything that we’ll use in the actual site, including PDF’s and recordings so there would be as few surprises as possible when we deploy the real thing. It took a few common sense tweaks here and there, but the sample site is currently live and stable. This means that we were also able to put the finishing touch (the QR code) on the brochure. After stumbling in awe through the second floor of Staples, I have acquired proper heavy, glossy brochure paper. Unfortunately, my efforts to print using said beautiful glossy paper were in vain this evening as I could not figure out how to switch the GC printer to the proper tray. Lini and I are going to try tomorrow before class, and between the two of us I’m sure they will be brought into the world in proper tribute to Melissa and Lini’s designs. I look forward to pinning them across the GC and the city at large.
For the next few days, it’ll be pulling together, finishing up the Story Map, making content edits, and finishing the front-end so we can give WBENA the first look (and first crack at critique / suggesting improvements!) for the website. The first deadline is on the horizon. Once we make that, it’s the three R’s – refinements, rehearsals, and write-ups.
TL;DR: I am Bad™️. Things are Bad™️. I’m making my blog post public because I’m tired of being Bad™️ in a bubble. Let’s be Bad™️ together!
Every time I feel like I catch up to the work in class, something in my life outside of class decides to clamp down on me. Right now it’s work, where there’s a compounding of fabricated deadlines and senses of urgency, and some tension with (and, in my humble opinion, a non-zero amount of mismanagement by) my boss.
That said, a thing I did this week that I am proud of: when I was on a plane and the wifi I had been banking on was not working, I decided to move methodically through trying to figure out some of the Wax templating on my own without very reference resources. I screen recorded myself talking through the problem in digestible 10-15 min increments and uploaded the videos to a team folder for others to review when they wanted to understand more about the problem. I think they’ve been educational for others so far, and the construct was certainly a helpful device for me to break down the problem space for myself. I felt like I unlocked a little cheat code for ways of working through overwhelm.
An aside: Relatedly, this idea of writing about “slow development” (as a twin to “slow archives” for us digital humanists) keeps knocking at my mind, and I think my experiences at work and school this semester feel like lessons pointing me towards work on it. Who knows when that might happen or how relevant it will be once I work on it!
My goal last week was to get an MVP version of the program page layout and song page layout looking as close to the wireframes as possible by class tomorrow. Right now, I think I will be lucky to get the program page done by that deadline.
I think my revised goals are:
In awe of my teammates and all of us doing the most and doing our best as the world is truly reorienting itself.
It feels like literal crunch time!!! But not for this class for some odd reason.
I worked on the map tweaking little things and my two blog posts for our site, I can now say I am a Queens carousel expert! I think the anxiety for my assignments in my other class has me thinking all about the carousels, maybe as a way to avoid the very long research paper I have to write for my other class.
But I have to say, carousels of NYC has really been a positive outlet for me. I am still deciding if I have the courage to present our groups amazing work, and with each passing day I am leaning towards yes. It’s been fun working with my group and being a part of a creative process, and I think the last thing I can really get out of this class is working on my presenting skills.
Last week, I went to visit the Queen’s carousels, and I spoke to the workers at Forest Park, I shared what the project was and told them I’ll be back to give out our super cute bookmarks (shoutout to Julissa)! Even though I have a zillion things to do for my other class, I find myself wanting to go back to my carousel sites, take more pictures and videos, and talk to more workers and people visiting. It motivated me to get my work done for my second class these past few days, and now I can go back this week and share bookmarks, nudge people to follow our socials, and just take a pause and admire the pretty carousels.
At work today I noticed an upcoming deadline and it dawned on me that May is basically here… which means we are rapidly approaching the projects launch. Logically I understand this (and am aware of the deadlines of this class) and tomorrow we’re finalizing the website and practicing the launch before we show WBENA. It’s all coming together and it feels kind of unbelievable. Lini suggested a story map for our history section. It’s user friendly and I think gives the section a sort of material experience with some images and using the map to bring us from Ukraine to North America. We were going to work on our sections asynchronously, but we realized this may cause some issues with saving the map so we’re going to finalize it tomorrow together.
I’m excited to see the project tomorrow! I feel a little disconnected, by choice, from the technical side of the site. I’ve been overwhelmed with the state of the world and life and just haven’t had the bandwidth to do anything that I wasn’t required of me. I vaguely know what’s going on because of the group chat and group meetings. Alex created all of these really great training materials that I hope to look at when things slow down a little.
I continue to chug along on social media content. Once the website is ready it will be time to get back in touch with Dr. Sonevetsky, Dr. Ostashewski, and Nadia to share the final result with them!
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
Coming back after Spring Break, we have several soft deadlines to hit before the final day. Next week, we’ll be showing the final(ish) website to WBENA so that we can make edits before the presentation. The backend structure is officially set up – we’ll still need to add the new recordings once we receive them from WBENA and some new sheet music, but the csv structure is stable. One of my two big priorities at this point is getting a dummy site set up so that we can generate a QR code for our beautiful brochure (thanks Lini and Alex!). Over Spring Break I showed Lini how to update the song CSV and generate pages in Wax and added a sample recording to our repository so we can mock up its inclusion. We also finalized our Mission Statement, finalized the brochure design, and broke out our mini research sections for the History of Women in Bandura page. We have agreed to set our expectations for this page in accordance with our time. This research is my second big priority this week.
I’m happy to be deploying the dummy site early – hopefully we can catch any bugs now and have a smoother final deployment. Wild how soon everything is coming to an end, but the pieces for this MVP are all in place – we’ve just got to sew the seams and remind ourselves to pump the brakes on adding more detail than we can handle.
