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!

Blog 7

Last week was productive. During class time, we finalized the fonts which was the last item to complete the brand kit. I created a style guide and organized the graphics for the team to easily access. I also accepted the stipend, now waiting for it to be disbursed.

Taking advantage of Saturday’s weather, I visited the Sea Glass carousel.  It was nice yet a long trip, but the kids had a blast! I had to tell them it was snack time just to get a break from chasing them. I like the fact we are taking the time to visit the carousels because it makes it feel more tangible. I was able to get clarity on pricing for example kids under 12 months are free.

Next steps for me, is to update the data on the Sea Glass carousel. Work on a promotional flyer or card to handout and begin creating content to post on Instagram.

 

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.

 

GDPW Group Project Update: March 26

We had a productive meeting on March 25 and went through our tasks for the upcoming weeks, through Spring Break. Phase 2 of our project begins today.

A lot of the discussion centered around the GDPW visuals:  the logo, the website, and the visualizations. First, we discussed what our first social media posts will feature; this will be the first item on our agenda. Our plan is to make the posts graphics-focused with as few words as possible. Elijah feels that with Reddit and Bluesky, it will be possible to create a conversation around our topic if we want to engage more with the public. Madison brought up the point that on social media, people are really just scrolling through, so our posts should be as simple yet as eye-catching as possible. We won’t have any active links in these posts yet. Madison has completed some preliminary data visualizations and they are up on the AirTable site. She’s run some of the data through: the length of the matches, and some that are comparative (men/women). Madison is also working on mastering even more of Tableau.

Next, we discussed adding resources to Zotero; Cathy will be working with Stephen Zweibel next week to learn a bit of how to use that system. We agreed that we would remove the JS Timeline from our website, and Elijah gave us a tutorial on editing the site using Elementor.  Business card design and printing was next, and Martin and Madison are going to look for a local copy shop that could probably print our cards for less than it would cost to go through a large chain store, or to order them online. Madison is going to work on some design ideas for the business cards so that we can have them ready to go for the wrestling event in Queens on April 25!

Blog 6

Last week was great, we were very productive during class time! The website and map is coming along well, I created an Instagram account @carouselsofnyc, and we finalized on a logo (see below).  I feel like things are starting to come together. Now that we have the logo, I focused on creating a brand kit with theme colors, fonts, graphics, and icons. Next steps on my end is to update the Instagram profile, draft content, create a banner for our website, and, now that it’s getting nicer out, I need to visit some carousels with my kids.