Tasha Blog Post: Forging Connections

A lot happened this week! Bullet journaling again:

  • Planned our Outreach / Social Media Plan (Thanks to Melissa and to Lini for editing!)
    • Of particular note was our discussion on Social Media:
      • We’ll be using Bluesky (great especially for reaching the DH community) and Facebook (plenty of great Ukrainian cultural groups to connect with)
      • We’ll be following WBENA’s lead tone-wise – don’t want to hand them a headache after this project
        • Also, from speaking with Dr. Marcia Ostashewksi, definitely don’t want to put anyone at risk.
          • This is especially poignant watching the news this week, wondering if the tone of our project is going to drastically shift.
        • We’ll cover both history of women in bandura, current concerts, as well as our progress on the site
          • Teryn offered to share resources for social media!
  • Met with Dr. Marcia Ostashewski  (Thanks Melissa for organizing!) – she wrote articles and resources that were instrumental to our proposal, so it was really exciting to talk to her! She was incredibly helpful, including:
    • She put us in touch with Logan Clark, who provided us with the beta version of the Bandura in Canada site through Smithsonian Pathways
    • She provided us with additional resources
    • She stressed the cultural differences between the United States and Canada, including when it comes to reception of bandura. Considering that WBENA spans both countries, these cultural differences will be vital to remember.
  • Teryn’s providing us with some great leads, such as:
    • Setting up a meeting with her uncle, an expert on the bandura and keeper of the kobzar tradition
    • Setting up a meeting with her aunt who is an expert on Ukrainian choral music and Dmytro Bortniansky, the composer of one of the songs that we are researching
    • Offering to put us in contact with Maryna Krut, a Ukrainain pop bandurist – one of her songs also appears in the WBENA repertoire
  • Went to the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival (sponsored in part by the GC!) this past Friday – Teryn was one of the performers and also played her accompaniment on bandura for one of the pieces
    • Beautiful performances, with a range from more classical sounding to more experimental
      • Highly recommend checking out Pastels by Leonid Hrabovsky / Pavlo Tychyna for an example of the more experimental!
    • Met her aforementioned aunt there, who is very enthused about the project
  • Joined the Code4Lib Slack and the minicomp wax channel per Nicole’s suggestion last class
    • Also per Nicole’s suggestion, asked about the feasibility of a particular feature that we would like to add (waiting for a response)
  • Tomorrow, Alex will be leading the team through our Wax walkthrough in preparation for starting on the backend of the site
  • Song research continues.
  • Lesson of the Week: One step at a time!

C. Melamed Blog

The GDPW project is beginning to take shape.  The first part of our outreach strategy involves contacting journalists, filmmakers and female wrestlers as well as establishing a limited social media presence.   I queried an AI program, Claude, about journalists to contact, and I was amazed that it came back with a very large number of industry professionals to email.  I am looking forward to seeing whether people respond; in any case, I plan to create the email with just a few words and our amazing logo, so no one has to click a link or open a file (which they probably wouldn’t anyway).  I’m looking forward to reaching out to a few filmmakers, too, as well as some authors, and I hope they express interest in the project.  Tuesday night, after class, some of us are going to see the movie Queen of the Ring, which is about the 1950s champion wrestler Mildred Burke, and an outing to a live match is planned too!

Personal Journal Entry – 3/17/25

This past week I spent a lot of time working on the outreach and social media plan and planning for our meeting with Dr. Ostashewski, a Ukrainian Canadian ethnomusicologist at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia. We used one of Dr. Ostashewski’s articles in our proposal and decided that we should reach out to her and see if she’d meet with us. I was absolutely delighted when she agreed to meet with us! It’s not a great time to be an American asking a Canadian for a favor, but Dr. Ostashewski was excited about our project and even mentioned the possibility of future collaboration!

Song research is much harder than I thought it would be. I played the violin for many years in school and I am sad to report that I’m not sure I ever understood sheet music. None the less it’s interesting to try and search for information and I found this great performance of Maryna Krut (a well known bandurist in Ukraine) performing on KEXP, a radio station whose YouTube videos my wife likes, which didn’t exactly advance my research but was enjoyable. And just today we received a learning resource that Dr. Ostashewski helped to make from Smithsonian Folkways (that is not yet published/in beta!!) that accompanies an album by Julian Kytasty that is being re-released soon. So far everyone in the community we’ve talked to has not only been excited about the project, but they’ve also been very generous with their time and resources. It’s great to see the impact our project could have on the community, it makes all of the hard work a little easier.

Domain Mapping

For my personal blog post this week, I thought I would focus on domain mapping on the Commons in case this information proves useful to others in this class, or future iterations of this class.

We decided to use CUNY Academic Commons for our website since WordPress is a platform we’re familiar with and find that it will be an appropriate tool to showcase our project. It’s great that we have access to this resource with our CUNY credentials.

But, the Academic Commons URL may not be the catchiest, user-friendly, or most discoverable way to find a site that may potentially have broad appeal. On the advice of Dr. Maney, we decided to purchase the domain http://www.carouselsofnyc.com/

But how to map it to our CUNY Academic Commons page? Well, if you’re viewing this within moment of posting this, you may find that there’s errors/glitches to viewing our site. We are currently in the process of working the with the Commons Team to troubleshoot, but in any case….

We thought we might be able to do this domain mapping on our own, perhaps through the dashboard of out site, with a WordPress plugin, or through the domain registrar. BUT, then we found these instructions:

https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/domain-mapping-commons/

Turns out- we need to request this service directly through the CUNY Academic Commons support team. I followed directions to assign our domain a CNAME record in the domain registrar and took a screenshot showing those settings. I then sent an email to [email protected] with that screenshot and our website information to request the mapping. I was very quickly re-routed to a specific support team member who reached out to the parent company of CUNY Academic Commons to connect the domains. Unfortunately, this initial mapping either went to a blocked page (if on a CUNY campus) or the CUNY Academic Commons sign in page.

This issue has been somewhat resolved, but there continues to be issues- it seems that it may have something to do with the original mapping including www. on the domain registrar where there may need to be one that does not with a focus on the https://.

Although we are the process of troubleshooting, I hope that this is helpful for those starting the process of domain mapping via CUNY Academic Commons.

Gender Disparity in Professional Wrestling Outreach Plan

 

Overview

As professional wrestling is a billion-dollar, multimedia phenomenon with an estimated 90 million fans worldwide, outreach for the Gender Disparity in Professional Wrestling project (GDPW) by design needs to cast a large net. The GDPW staff members leading this effort are Martin Bueno (in-person outreach) and Cathy Melamed (online).

It is important that GDPW stand out among the many individuals, groups, organizations and merchants vying for attention and media coverage in this sport. Thus, outreach needs to be professional and informative, but also not boring.  During the building phase of GDPW we will focus on targeted social media posts as well as media and wrestling industry contacts; later, we will share the completed project with academic institutions and at professional wrestling events. 

Website and Logo

GDPW will be hosted on the CUNY Commons as a WordPress site. We are looking into securing a domain name that will incorporate the project’s title and will link to the site. The license for the site is for three years, over which time updates with additional datasets and visualizations will be possible.  

GDPW lead web developer Elijah Nunez is designing a (possibly animated) logo that includes a silhouette of a female wrestler, airborne in a drop-kick, over a wrestling ring that features “GDPW” in hot pink and purple letters on the mat. 

Promoting and Sharing the GDPW Project

The strategy for promoting GDPW has three phases.  The first is to post “teasers” on the social media site Reddit to gauge early interest while investigating SEO moves. We are initially posting only to Reddit wrestling fan forums to evaluate the project’s potential to trigger trolling.  This first phase will also include contacting female professional wrestlers to see if any would like to provide guidance or collaboration.  The second phase, when the project is closer to completion, will include reaching out to journalists who cover professional wrestling and to others working in the industry (i.e., filmmakers, promoters, archive and museum personnel) via an email featuring the eye-catching GDPW logo, the full title of the project, and a few words about when to expect the project’s launch.  Finally, the completed project will be shared with all previous contacts as well as with academic institutions focused on digital humanities, sports studies, and gender/media studies.  This last phase will also include creation of GDPW business cards (designed by Madison Watkins) with QR codes linked to the WordPress site; Martin will distribute these in person at wrestling events and conferences. 

Measures of Effectiveness

As we branch out to publicize the project through more social media sites, analytics data will provide feedback on our outreach’s effectiveness.  Responses from individuals connected with professional wrestling will also help the team predict potential visitors to the GDPW site when it goes live.  

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. 

Blog 4 – Reflecting on Data Management

Similar to other documents we have worked on, I feel that we have already begun to discuss some of these outcomes as a team. For example, will the project be maintained after the semester ends? The data management plan helped to finalize some of those loose ends and also ensured that we were all on the same page. While we are all working on different parts of the project, it’s still important that we all know how to save and search for the files needed.