Personal Blog VII

Wow, I have seven of these posts already. Anyway, shout-out to all my GDPW gold members this week for helping with the presentation. As we all learned last week, the presentation is to be done by a single person. I was looking forward to being up there with my GDPW members, but the final show will be a singles match, haha. Cathy and I had discussed the presentation in class last week; she was going to make it and present it.

However, as it later became known, a single person will do it, and presenting in front of a crowd should be the Project Lead’s task. Although the group has learned a vast knowledge of professional wrestling, I would have no issues with anyone filling my shoes for the presenter role. Furthermore, since Cathy created the presentation, I needed to write the blog this week, and she could take a break from this week’s personal blog. Elijah and Madison also contributed to the presentation, including the design and input. I loved the team effort and unity that made the presentation for Tuesday possible. It will improve after Tuesday’s feedback, and we can all go to the drawing board while we work on the missing pieces for our project.

Regardless of feedback, the team came through this week, which is what collaboration in DH is all about. Like minds creating something even as simple as a slide presentation, the effort is always there, and it’s just another great week of making something together. Business cards should be coming in this week. We have already blown our budget and have still not received the grant funds. That has not stopped us, and we can’t wait until May 13th when GDPW invades Martin E. Segal Theatre; tickets are on sale soon.

Personal Journal – 4/7/25

This past Saturday Tasha and I went to the New York Bandura School for a bandura workshop led by Teryn, our WBENA liaison, and Zoya, a member of WBENA. Unfortunately for Tasha, her wrist kept her from playing, which was my good fortune as I got to play Stanislava, Tasha’s bandura who many of us met last semester. I ended up having so much fun! The bandura is fairly heavy and requires you to hold it up with your thighs, which is harder than it sounds. I did play the violin 8 years so somewhere in the recesses of my brain I know how to read music. I was surprised how quickly reading music came back to me when I had an instrument in my hand. The music has both bass and melody parts, which you play simultaneously. By the end of the workshop I was playing the bass with my left hand and the melody with my right all while reading music. It was exhausting but such a rewarding experience to connect me to our project.

This evening me, Tasha, and Lini spoke with Nadia Tarnawsky, a bandurist and folk singer, who we read about in an article by Dr. Ostashewski. We have officially moved onto the women’s history portion of our research, which has me really excited! Our conversation was AWESOME. Nadia was funny and candid with us and had some really powerful things to say. Unfortunately we forgot to enable to transcribing software, so Lini and I will be doing it old school. I am totally in awe of the generosity of the bandura community. I hope we can get the site to a point where the interview can eventually be featured in full. This semester has felt hard at times with the state of the world, a long winter, and life in general and I haven’t felt as consistently invigorated by school like I did last semester. But tonight I feel like I got a much needed boost in morale.

Last week Alex wrapped up her development training with Lini and I. She is such a patient and kind teacher and I know more about coding than I ever have. It’s starting to feel less intimidating, but right now I am happy just to watch how its done. I feel so lucky to be working with Alex, Lini, and Tasha this semester and I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished so far.

I still haven’t managed to launch our social media sites, but I am hoping tomorrow after presentations we can get everything ironed out to make our first posts! Here is our Bluesky – I think the kids say “watch this space”.

Women of Bandura Week 10 Group Blog Post

What we achieved this past week:

  • The team got the Wax software installed!
  • Melissa mapped out the first few social media posts and scheduled an interview with bandurist Nadia Tarnawsky on Monday
  • Lini pitched the final draft of the logo and banners for social media
  • Tasha prepped the CSV’s for upload into Wax / generated basic pages and met with Teryn
  • Alex led the team through an intro to git / GitHub and completed the lower priority wireframes
    • We decided that for each pull request, the rest of the review team (comprised of Alex, Lini, and myself) will need to approve the edits before merging them into the main branch.

Our goals for this week:

  • Alex will lead the team through GitHub training part 2 on Thursday and will prepare ticketing for development tasks
  • Melissa will continue working working on social media drafts
  • Lini will QA the song csv and update social media images
  • Tasha will add the sheet music PDF’s into the data folder
  • Thursday, the team will undergo GitHub training part 2, begin planning our printed material design, unveil the ticketing process, and discuss the History page.
  • Saturday, Melissa and I will attend a bandura workshop hosted by Teryn and Zoya, who lead the New York Bandura School
  • Monday, we’ll interview Nadia Tarnawsky

How are we doing on deadlines?

We’ve had some back and forth on dates due to WBENA / Teryn’s busy schedule (and our own personal injuries, obligations, etc). As a result, we’ve looked at our deadlines and loosened our expectations, especially with our song research practice, so we can get to the goal in a healthier manner. We’ve decided to prioritize each other’s well-being over deadlines or perfectionism, which I believe has served us well. So far, so good.

At this point, we are planning on using our oral history interviews as a main source for our History of Bandura page. We’re going to ask our interviewees if they would like us to upload a recording of the interview after the semester finishes – we decided to place that boundary to avoid piling on more work.

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

Group Update 2: GDPW

The GDPW group has made a lot of progress over the past two weeks: our logo and banner are finalized; several data visualizations are close to completion; our social media sites are set up and ready to go; we even have business cards!  So, in many ways we’ve met our milestones, but that means we have new ones now. 

This week we are mostly focused on the class presentation for next week.  We are putting together summaries of each person’s work to date, and collaboratively asking ourselves and each other questions that we feel will come from an audience.  For example, “Why wrestling and not some other sport?”  “What is the point of our data visualizations?”  “What is our story, and why is it important?”  “Why now?” “Why were choices around social media and outreach made the way they are?”  “What was your design vision?” Since it’s kind of a test-run for the final presentation, we are trying to think of the “big” and “clarifying” questions that people may want to know about our project.

We have a hard deadline of April 23 to have our social media and website in a preliminary “live” state so that we can use the Queens wrestling match to really hit outreach.  We’re thinking, too, about images, quotes from social media, and even videos (with appropriate permissions) to add to the final version of our site. Finally, as a team we are coalescing around a narrative:  “the numbers don’t lie” and in fact tell an important story about 90 years of women’s pro wrestling that needs to be told. 

Hutnick Blog Post: Software Setup (Or, Wrestling with Wax)

Ok, this week, my brain is feeling much better and my morale has been boosted by tinkering with code. First bit of good news – we all successfully installed Wax onto our computers and were able to run the sample site! It took much thread following and bargaining, but we each finally got it to work. Of course, each of our systems were different and took some trial, error, and patience to cajole into accepting all of the dependencies that we just threw at them. I commend my team for not ousting me as their leader when they learned that Wax, the framework I championed, required installing several bits of software over the command line. To anyone who doesn’t know what the command line is, think of that window that hackers use on TV to  write their magic commands. Nothing is more frustrating (and then exhilirating!) to see something fail for seemingly no reason. . . and then figure out the problem (or sometimes stuff in a solution from Stack Overflow) and have it WORK.

I then rinse repeated this feeling of frustration and euphoria as I then had to stuff both of our project CSV’s into the repository and keep entering the commands to generate pages from them and run the site locally until it worked. Let me back up. Last week, I mentioned that I would need to prepare the CSV’s (comma separated values – like a low resolution excel file) that would power the song and program pages of the site. We had been preparing the song CSV file for pretty much the whole semester with our research, but the program CSV would need to be made from scratch. I thought the program CSV would be easy to make since I didn’t have to look for any information – I would just have to fill in what was on the program PDF. Boy was I wrong.

Here’s the issue: most of the information per program – i.e. date of concert, city of concert, performers, etc. have multiple values. The Ensemble performs multiple nights in multiple cities with (obviously) multiple performers. And they don’t always have the same number of performances, cities, performers, songs, etc. And sometimes the data with multiple values was associated with data with even MORE values – i.e. each performer was associated with their home city in the program. So, how was I going to reconcile all of these columns?

The answer was fairly simple – keep one column per data type and separate out the values with semicolons (;). We’ll have to loop through this data on the front end in order to separate the values, but it is the simplest way to prepare the data. I thought that switching to a JSON format for the programs may be easier since the structure could be a bit more freeform, but Nicole helpfully pointed out that 1. We’d still need to loop over the data and 2. While *I* as a programmer think that a JSON would look more readable, anyone not familiar with JSON’s / object oriented programming would probably have a harder time with it. Considering that we’re handing this project off to the Ensemble, who may or may not be familiar with JSON’s, it would be simpler to stick with CSV’s (after all, more people have definitely used Excel at some point in their life). Lesson of the Week: Changing data file types does not automatically solve the problem.

So, I set up the headers and Lini and I got to work transcribing the programs. I was careful to include as many details as I could for accessibility’s sake – while we would have the PDF of the programs available, it’s also good to provide the information in a way that users can parse and that provides users who can’t see the PDF for whatever reason with a way to still receive the data.

After that (and some more trial and error), I was able to generate pages for the current programs / list of songs. Mercifully, there were no curveballs in pulling the Cyrillic names or lyrics. So, we’re in business (locally!). I did push the changes up to our GitHub repository, which Alex will use tomorrow in a lesson in pull requests and general GitHub introduction. Exciting times!

Also, we’re going to be interviewing Nadia Tarnawsky (bandurist and singer featured in Dr. Ostashewski’s article on Women in Bandura) next Monday – it’s all coming together!

 

Personal Journal Entry – 3/31/2025

I’m really deep in my outreach role right now. I contacted a bandurist who was written about in Dr. Ostashewski’s article on women in bandura, Nadia Tarnawsky, about doing an interview with us for the history portion of our project. I’ve been particularly excited about this part of the project and started fantasizing about all of the interviews we were going to do and how it would contribute to the strength of the project. Alex provided a much needed reality check during our Thursday team meeting. A full scale oral history project was wayyyyy outside the scale of our project. We all agreed it made sense to take recordings of the interviews for future use and possible publication, but to ultimately stick to our plan and make sure that we meet our deliverable. We’ll talk to Nadia this coming Monday 4/7 and then hopefully Julien and Irene or Teryn from WBENA.

I also created a social media calendar with my wife’s help. I was nervous to make the social media plan, but she helped me understand and personalize a calendar that she was given at her job. I used Canva to create an intro and team page that Tasha was running past Teryn in their meeting this week. I think we will firm things up tomorrow and then our Facebook and Bluesky will be launched! And then we start to curate our online presence.

Personal Post #6

Things have been running smoothly with our group. Our group chat on signal keeps us connected when we don’t meet.

It was super helpful to stay connected to the team last week on signal as I was sick. I was glad I got ahead with prepping the mapping platform so I don’t feel so behind. It’ll be nice to reconnect this week in class and hear about Leonard’s travels and  Julissa’s and Kelly’s trips to carousels, and updates from class

I went to visit Forest Park Carousel earlier this month, which is in my new neighborhood. The opening date was today, so excited for some warmer weather and to visit!