Personal Journal – 3/24/25

This week has been a slow one for our team. Our leader, Tasha, has been recovering from an injury so we skipped our Thursday check-in and stayed the course of song research and posting the wire frames. I’m not sure if it is the change in seasons or the hellscape we live in, but it’s felt hard to stay motivated this week. Song research remains HARD and honestly I am looking forward to it coming to an end. I am ready to move onto researching the history of women in bandura.

Last week in class Alex walked us through installing WAX on our computers. I used the command line! Alex, Lini, and Tasha were very patient and helpful as attempted to navigate the new experience. It was a great first step in learning about web development tools and how our project will actually be built. I always expect to pick things up easily, but I’m learning something new! And that is not supposed to necessarily be easy.

Looking to the future, this week I really need to get our social media sites up and compose some content. I’m planning to create posts in advance so when it comes time to post I can just upload them, or if I am unavailable someone else on the team can do it. Onward.

Personal Blog #5

I’ve been struggling this last week, to be frank. I’m going to make this post public to our class in case others are feeling this way too.

I know the structure of assignments and work can be comforting to some during times of uncertainty, but it is really hard for me to balance deadlines and the rapid pace of this project development with the current political moment in the air and what I think life is asking from me outside of this program. Our academic peers are being deported for their political views, the views being that our country should not be enabling and funding the indiscriminate genocide of a long-subjugated and occupied population. My friends are holing up, not going out for groceries because they are afraid of ICE. One of the last remaining journalists working in Gaza was killed in a directly targeted attack today; the professional journalists union that I am a part of in my full-time work has said nothing to condemn the killing of more than 200 of our professional colleagues since October 2023, some of them working for our own member unit outlets.

I wish the semester structure and the nature of group work lent themselves more to scheduling in buffer time and room for things to go wrong or slow down. I know we (as a class, as a team) will do our best to make that space but I hate the feeling of responding to an artificial urgency that we have the power to adjust to be more realistic to the current circumstances.

Last week in our in-class work time we had hoped to get Wax up and running for all members of the team and then — very true to the software development “in the real word” — hit a good several speed bumps with both installation options (though I should acknowledge that Tasha was able to get things running, and she is probably the most crucial team member to have local access to running the backend code!). Then for different personal reasons myself and another team member were largely unavailable this week. I am feeling a little disconnected from our project timeline, and again, not super motivated by the self-prescribed deadlines.

I feel really grateful to Lini for stepping in and posting our team wireframes when I was falling short. And, looking at the deadlines that we had ported over to our Asana, I am at least feeling good about getting back on track for some of the upcoming development work in my purview (teaching Git/GH workflows, ticketing out frontend work) that is coming around the corner.

But I am also feeling like the current balance is untenable — especially as life outside of school continues to send unexpected and hard-to-process things our way. In my dream scenario, there would be a little bit of space to soften some of our expectations and pace right now. I hope we are all giving ourselves and each other grace.

Tasha Personal Log: Lost a Turn, Back at Go

Not as much to say this week from me this week unfortunately – I spent the bulk of last week recovering from a (mild!) concussion. Lesson of the Week: if you hit your head and it still hurts the next morning, get it checked out – don’t wait until the next day. Also, don’t get a concussion. And be careful putting away cat food. Thankfully I’m able to get back in the game. I may need to plan out my work more thoroughly / incorporate breaks in my work time, but I’m back in the game.

Thankfully my amazing teammates kept at it with working on wireframes and continuing research, starting on the remaining songs from our second program!

Next up this week: I work on setting up the back-end of the website. Thankfully, the columns for our song research table have come together pretty organically – so the basic structure should be fairly simple. I’m also not too worried about setting up the structure for the program table seeing as I’ll be pulling information directly from the programs for that one. I’m sure the content of the tables will be updated many times between now and April, especially once they start powering the front end.

Soon we’ll be switching from Song Research to History of Women in Bandura, so I definitely have plenty to come back to! It’s definitely daunting to have been gone for a week, but I’m excited to dig in.

 

Personal Blog #5

Feeling a bit ahead in this class, but struggling to coordinate a time with digital fellow for more follow up questions on our map!

I need to ask about adding photos to our attribute table on our map. I am currently doing a funny copy and paste work around, and it’s messing with the quality of the photo.

Few updates-

I was able to change the color and customize the shading on StoryMap, and also customize what demographic data we wanted to showcase on our map.

I also changed the pin to include our new logo graphic! We voted on a logo last week, and during class time Julissa sent me the .jpg file of just the graphic for our map. A purple geo location pin with a picture of a carousel horse inside. It’s perfect for the map!

Today I plan to look at videos on how to add exact addresses for our pins, my goal is to have all the carousels in, with the agreed upon 4-5 metadata by the first week of April.

I am looking forward to start taking pictures of the carousels in Queens, counting down the days till March 31 when they open!

 

 

 

 

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.

 

Personal Blog Post #4

Leonard was out this week, but our team really planned out our tasks and was able to coordinate offline and leading up to the outreach and social media presentation. Shoutout to Kelly, Leonard, and Julissa their teamwork really shined this week.

Since my focus is the data management and our map, this week, I worked on creating a mock-up for our map. It was fun to start learning Storymaps – Parisa, the digital fellow, has been super helpful in navigating and coming up with solutions with me.

We are still keeping options open on finalizing our platform (between Storymaps, which is open access or paid ArcGIS). We are open to using data publish on living atlas, but we don’t want to compromise on styling, customization, and aesthetic editing. Depending on what features are available on Storymaps, we’ll finalize our decision.

See our first draft of our map below!

Blog 5

I think we are doing well with our project. We check in weekly outside of class hours which helps us finalize any questions on the assignment due that week and prepare for the next week. Last week our group discussed the budget, and we decided to allocate some money to pay for Canva, which I’m ecstatic about. Funny enough when it comes to the logo, I prefer the options I already drafted with the free version, however, I still have some inspiration I can try again now with the paid account. Having the paid version will help with other aspects of the project, like creating a brand template that tracks font, colors, etc..