Hi!

I’m not sure exactly what time it is in New York, as I am abroad for this weekend and have been remotely off-line. Im sorry if this is at all late.

I am working as the Project Manger and Outreach person for the Immigrant Newspapers group.The last two weeks have been a really great start to figuring out what the work flow and focuses will be for our project. Having one person (Antonios) who is well versed in the coding and programming side of things is pretty awesome, since I do not possess those skills in the least! Jennifer and Sandy have been very helpful in steering the specification process of our project and their previous research and work that they have put into the project plan throughout the last semester is invaluable to giving us a jumpstart on research.

Most importantly, we have settled on a specific three decades that seemed like they would most easily return the highest results for number of publication houses. This is based on the polling of newspaper printers that has been collected and organized into immigrant group and chronology. The highest amount of papers seems to be within the area of 1860-1890, which includes quite a few immigrant groups. It also seems like a rich historical moment in American history to be focusing on, and for all of these reasons we have settled on these dates.

The biggest hope is that we can locate these newspaper printers geographically. Plans for an interactive map are being researched, and they would be a very visually rich way to be looking at the city and also presenting information about group locale. I am also hoping that we are able to replicate an archival website that we found since it utilizes the perfect sort/search features on its homepage that would be great for our project.

Currently, each member of the group has a main focus, and that is to gather as much information as possible about the newspapers and printers within our assigned immigrant groups. The more information we gather, the more understanding we will have of the possibilities our data allows for us. I’m very interested to see what kinds of trends are discovered throughout this research process, whether within one specific paper or as a trend across different immigrant groups. Any degree of these similarities is possible, and I look forward to discovering the information and figuring out the most powerful way to display it.

Our group has been communicating on Slack and has just had some documents added to Airtable. There is a lot of preliminary work to do as we continue to solidify our project outline. I’ve been trying to stimulate some communication surrounding deadlines and help us keep to them, but mostly everyone has been doing their own work every well separately and there hasn’t been an issue. I also accumulated a lot of the writing for the updated Project Proposal based on Sandy and Jennifer’s original Project Plan and on our conversations as a group following our assignment day. It has been difficult for me to travel this weekend and feel a bit disconnected, but I will be back very soon and have no plans to go away for the rest of the semester, so it will be okay!

So far, just looking to spend as much time as possible in the research phase and helping out in whatever way I can!

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