Personal Bio and Contribution Statement

By Sabina Pringle (she/ella) | Published: February 24, 2019

Personal Bio

Sabina Pringle is Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of English at City College of New York (CCNY) – CUNY since August 2017. She is currently teaching English 21007: Writing for Engineering. She is also Writing Fellow in the English Department at Baruch College – CUNY, where she works in curriculum development, grant writing and student support, as well as CUNY CAP Fellow in the Office of Executive Legal Counsel at Baruch College, where she does paralegal work. Sabina is a student in the Master of Arts in Digital Humanities Program at The Graduate Center – CUNY. She expects to graduate in October 2019.

Sabina developed Open Educational Resources for the writing section of a Freshman Inquiry Writing Seminar on the politics of language and literacy in 2018 which she then taught at CCNY. Before that, Sabina taught English as a Second Language at Universidad del Atlántico, Barranquilla, Colombia as Fulbright English Teaching Assistant and Fulbright Senior English Teaching Assistant from 2015 to 2017. In Colombia Sabina produced a multidisciplinary Caribbean adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (in Spanish), which was performed in Barranquilla, Bogota and Santa Marta, and ran for a full year.

Sabina was born in Formentera, Spain. She moved to Paris, France at age eleven, lived there for eight years, and then moved to New York. She earned a BA in English Literature at CCNY and a Teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certificate through International TESOL Teacher Training (ITTT). In addition to teaching, Sabina has worked in radio, press and international logistics.

Contribution Statement

For Project TRIKE, my role involves WordPress development, some GitHub development, and outreach. I may also make a contribution to content by transforming and critiquing a dataset which I am in the process of selecting. I am excited about the pedagogical utility of building a WordPress site which will effectively present different ways of transforming data and a framework for exploring the effects and ramifications of decisions made in the process of manipulating and transforming data.

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Hamilton Personal Bio and Contributions

By Brittany Ann Hamilton | Published: February 24, 2019

The course syllabus/schedule was not clear on what exactly we were supposed to submit for today, so here is my best effort. I’ve written it in a more formal context, as it would appear in a more official report/proposal.

Personal Bio:

Brittany A. Hamilton, MA, is an employee of the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Medicine in the role of Curriculum Mapping Specialist within the Research and Evaluation Office. Previously, she worked for The University of Chicago: Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology as the Training and Education Specialist.

Hamilton received her undergraduate degree in Secondary Education: English and Communications from the Pennsylvania State University and her Master of Arts degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from DePaul University. She is currently in the Digital Humanities Master of Arts program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Her research interests include medical education, feminist theory, feminist pedagogy, and intersectional digital humanities. Her publications/conference presentations are listed below:

  • Creative Pedagogy: Transformation and Heartbreak in the Classroom (Brittany A. Hamilton and Rachel Wills) presented on May 13, 2016 at DePaul University’s Heartbroken in the Borderlands: Languages of Authenticity and Vulnerability
  • Weaving Pedagogy, Research, and Graduate Assistantships Towards Social Justice: Exploring Chicago-Based Activist Projects (Brittany A. Hamilton, Nicole A. Clark, and Rachel Wills) presented on February 20, 2016 at The Pennsylvania State University Women’s Studies Graduate Organization: Crossing Borders, Building Bridges 2016 Graduate Conference
  • Understanding University Rape Culture: An Interdisciplinary and Intersectional First-Year Seminar Curriculum to Resist the Campus Sexual Violence Epidemic (Brittany A. Hamilton) published in completion of DePaul University’s Master of Arts program in Women and Gender Studies, June 2016

Contributions: 

Hamilton’s contributions to the Freedom Dreaming: A Call to Imagine project include project management, research and social media outreach. She was chosen by her team to take on the leadership and organizational role of project manager because of her organization skills, abilities to communicate and knowledge of social media/research. She will be helping to organize all project requirements including tasks that need to be completed for the project’s success, and assisting with research, outreach and content development needs.

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Personal Bio & Contribution Statement

By Nancy Foasberg | Published: February 24, 2019

Personal Bio:

Nancy Foasberg is an academic librarian and Associate Professor at Queens College, CUNY, serving in the role of subject liaison to several humanities departments, including English, Comparative Literature, and Drama, Theatre & Dance. At Queens College, she has also served in the role of Coordinator of Library Instruction, and will soon be taking on the role of Open Knowledge Librarian. She is the the Academic Works Coordinator for the QC campus, and does a lot of outreach around open access, author’s rights, and other scholarly communication issues.

Previously, she created tutorials for the University of Pennsylvania’s Engineering Library. Prior to entering librarianship, she was a composition instructor at Gloucester Community College and the Community College of Philadelphia.

She holds a BA in English and Spanish and and MA in English, both from California State University, Chico. Her Master’s thesis, “Coleridge’s Christabel and the Ballad Tradition: Ambiguity, Genre, and Geraldine,” examines the role of gender in Christabel and how Geraldine steps insidiously into the hero’s role. She also holds a master’s degree in Library Science from Drexel University.

Her research interests include open access, the relationship between reading and technology, and information literacy pedagogy. Publications include:

Contribution Statement:

For Project TRIKE, my role is content strategy and development. Hannah, Natasha and I are responsible for identifying appropriate datasets, performing and documenting data transformations. We will be writing critique and commentary to explain the decisions made for each dataset. In the early part of the project — now, and next week — I am focused on identifying and selecting the right kinds of data and the right kinds of transformations, with help and feedback from my fellow group members. Once we have settled on the datasets to be used, each of us will focus on one and work to elucidate the process.

I also represent the OER perspective in this project. Although I am interested in OERs and am looking forward to working with them in several contexts, I’m still somewhat of a novice. Thus, I hope to learn more about one process by which a strong OER may be built.

Since I’m knowledgeable about author’s rights and licensing, I am taking the lead on licensing and will be discussing with each group member how we will license the materials we produce. I will also be involved in discussions about any materials we decide to reuse that we didn’t create ourselves.

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Detailed Work Plan: Project TRIKE

By Hannah House | Published: February 24, 2019

Our detailed work plan is a living Google Slides doc.

Anyone may view it and leave comments anytime at the link below:

Project TRIKE detailed work plan

 

Best,

Team TRIKE

Posted in Group Project Reports | Tagged | Authors: | 1 Response

Immigrant Newspapers

By SC Lucier (Luci) | Published: February 21, 2019

Group Project Report and Updated Work Plan

Timeline of Deliverables

  • Week 4:
    • Reach out to NYPL research librarian and possibly other individuals
    • Finalize domain name 
    • Explore WordPress platform and possibility of Omeka and Neatline
  • Week 5:
    • Finalize online research of newspaper databases
    • Determine whether to drop any languages
    • Contact ethnic organizations, university departments
  • Week 6:
    • Draft wireframes for design of introductory page: search tool + layout of newspapers
  • Week 7:
    • Visit NYPL and NYHS
  • Week 8: 
    • Start social media outreach
    • Determine based on data what visualizations will be feasible: animated timeline, Carto time series map, histograms, ArtMaps
  • Week 9: 
    • Finalize layout of main page and start implementing design and inputting data
  • Week 10:
    • Sketch logo ideas
  • Week 11: 
    • Finalize logo
    • Finalize main page of digital collection
  • Week 12:
    • Write up pages for website: about, team, FAQ, contact form, additional links

Answers to Pressing Questions

  1. Who is the primary audience?
    • People with an interest in immigration and/or media history, particularly in NYC
    • People with and/or interested in European ancestory
    • Students, educators, scholars of urban/immigration/media history
  2. What are the research questions that will be asked of and facilitated with this database?
    • Can immigration trends and patterns be reflected in the number and/or “activeness” of the immigrant newspaper sector?
    • How do newspapers reveal similarities between immigrants today and in the 19th century?
  3. Clarify the scope: 
  • Why did we select these particular immigrant communities?

These immigrant communities had at least several active newspapers during the time period, reflecting their sizable population at the time. We also wanted a diversity of languages; in this case, of European languages.

  • Why did you select this particular timeframe (1860-1890)?

We settled on a 30-year timespan of newspapers that started in 1860-1890 because of the increasing diversity of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in that period, according to this visual. That way, we could also factor in Italian, Swedish, Czech and Yiddish papers on top of the German, French, Spanish and Irish publications. There were not very many Russian and Polish papers, so we did not include them in the database.

  • What was happening in this time and to/with these communities that make them worthy of study?

While immigration from German-speaking countries and Ireland reached its peak during these decades, people started arriving in increasing numbers from other parts of Europe as well, such as Italy and Eastern Europe. These communities had established enough of a presence in New York in terms of population numbers and familiarity with the city that members could establish newspapers. This trend, in turn, would help immigrants adapt to their new country.

  • Are there any parallels to be made between that period and now?

Today, while newspapers in the metro area still exist that serve the Irish, Italian and of course French- and Spanish-speaking communities, numerous other languages and immigrant groups also have their own papers, particularly people from Asian and African countries and parts of Latin America. While the majority of immigrants today speak different languages and come from different cultures, their means of survival in a new country parallel the efforts of the immigrants who came before them. Those efforts include relying on newspapers, now also found online, in their native language that is relevant to the city in which they live. Immigrants, whether they arrived in 1865 or 2006, found comfort in their enclaves and their languages as they attempted to make a life for themselves in a new home. And knowing that, community members start newspapers today as they did 200 years ago.

  • Will one particular group be used as a test case, or are we working on all of them simultaneously?

We are working on all of them simultaneously, but some communities, like German-speaking communities, will have more to work with, so down the line, could become a point of focus in some regard.

  • What is the advantage of doing either?

If we focus on one community, we could narrow our search in terms of which organizations and people to reach out to and perhaps find more detailed and in-depth information, as opposed to spreading our efforts across numerous groups. This would certainly be easier to organize and manage.

On the other hand, that would limit not just the amount of data we have to work with, but it would also limit our ability to discern trends and patterns across different immigrant groups of the time period. Plus, a digital collection of immigrant newspapers would end up with just one or two immigrant commnities.

  • Which elements are absolutely necessary for the digital collection, and which can remain null?

(A database with too many null entries can be problematic and make searching difficult, but it also offers useful opportunities for conversations about what information gets preserved.)

Antonios had brought up ordering the columns in our database by importance. We decided on:

    1. Year founded and year ceased
    2. Frequency, language(s)
    3. Address (if possible)
    4. Community, as in the immigrant group

The rest, while helpful to have, will not be as crucial.

  • What particular tools or platforms are ideal for the project? What precisely makes them user-friendly?
    • WordPress: members have familiarity in building a site using the platform
    • Omeka: none of us have used the platform before but we are looking into it
  • What are your outreach plans?
    • We will contact the NYPL to get in touch with a research librarian. We’ll also visit the library, as well as the New-York Historical Society, to look at some of the actual newspapers and try to find addresses and other potentially interesting information.
    • We’re compiling ethnic organizations to see if it’ll be helpful to reach out to them.
    • Also contacting Chronicling America, whose data we are using to compile the database.
Posted in Group Project Reports | Authors: | 1 Response

Freedom Dreaming Work Plan

By Brittany Ann Hamilton | Published: February 20, 2019

The requirements for the Work Plan assignment are not clear on the course syllabus or schedule, so I did my best to put together our group work plan for this assignment based on how we’ve been organizing our workflow. As a group, we’ve decided to do a mixture of two different styles of a work plan; tasks that need to be completed and a calendar timeline.

Roles:

Kiana: Outreach & Content, Social Media

Brittany: Project Manager, Research, Social Media

Anthony: Social Media Network Analysis, Data Collection, Outreach

Raven: Research, Outreach

Andrea: Design, Website Development

Platforms:

Google Doc’s

CUNY Common’s Group

Tentative Sub-Groups:

Programming

  • Anthony (Social Media Network Analysis/Data Collection)
  • Andrea (Website Infrastructure/Design)

Content

  • Kiana (Website Content, Research)
  • Brittany (Website Content)/Work Plan
  • Raven (Website context/Sample Work)

Outreach

  • Raven (Futures Initiative & Hastac Blog Platform)
  • All (As the project progresses)

Where Do We Want to End Up? (Inspired by yesterday’s project management speaker)

  • An interactive website with submissions (in variety of forms), information and goals, and resources surrounding the “Freedom Dreaming” concept and prompts
  • A dominant and interactive social media presence with active participants surrounding the “Freedom Dreaming” concept and prompts
  • Raised awareness amongst our student audience of structural/institutional oppression and the ways it impacts individuals daily lives
  • A collection of resources (websites, zines, guides, organization info) that people can use for more work beyond the site

Phase 1: Build

Weeks 3-6 (February 12-March 5):

  • Complete basic content creation for the website.
    • Mission, Goals, Privacy, Vibe etc., Resource Collection
  • Obtain a basic infrastructure for website
  • Establish a working design
  • Begin building a social media account and establish an online presence

Phase 2: Launch

Week 6-9 (March 5-26):

  • Create a finalized website and Instagram page
    • Includes design, website infrastructure and website/Instagram content
  • Create Outreach Materials
  • Locate applicable resources to add to website content
  • Establish a social media and outreach plan to publicize and implement the project.
  • Determine network analysis plan for data collection.

Phase 3: Maintain and Collect

Week 9-12 (March 26-April 16)

  • Maintain social media and outreach plan to raise continued awareness.
  • Monitor and collect data from website and social media
  • Begin preliminary data analysis

Phase 4: Analysis and Prepare Findings

Week 12-14 (April 16-End)

  • Analyze data and draw conclusions from findings
  • Reflect on the project and process
  • Create final presentation on project
  • Write final paper to meet class requirements
Posted in Group Project Reports | Authors: | 1 Response

“Are we a Team?” checklist

By Hannah House | Published: February 18, 2019

I like this a lot. Sharing with the class in case it can be of help or interest.

I’d also love to hear reactions in the comments! Do these seem like good principles to you? Why or why not? Are there any with which you particularly agree or disagree?

“Are We a Team?” checklist (Levin & Kent, 2001)

Check off the statements that accurately represent your group. Be prepared to discuss your choices afterwards with your group. Also consider ways to improve your group’s functioning, especially as it relates to the statements you did not check off.

  • We all show equal commitment to our objective.
  • We all take part in deciding how work should be allocated.
  • We are committed to helping each other learn.
  • We acknowledge good contributions from team members.
  • We handle disagreements and conflicts constructively within the team.
  • We are able to give constructive criticism to one another and to accept it ourselves.
  • We all turn up to meetings and stay to the end.
  • We are good at making sure that everyone knows what’s going on.
  • When one of us is under pressure, others offer to help him or her.
  • We trust each other.
  • We remain united even when we disagree.
  • We support each other to outsiders.
  • We feel comfortable and relaxed with one another.

 

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Personal Reflection Feb 17

By SC Lucier (Luci) | Published: February 18, 2019

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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Journal Entry February 17th to 18th

By Antonios Liamis | Published: February 18, 2019

This week has been hectic and frustrating on a personal level for me, but at least I was able to learn something new from a technical point of view. My team had some very interesting suggestions on the presentation of the data which we currently acquire and process for our project.
The methods for presentation included for example a platform which uses a map of New York (Artmaps) with point representations for the data clusters. The design was very appealing, the interaction seemed quite intuitive and the concept would fit perfectly for our project (if we will be able to find at least nearly as many data clusters in order to make a meaningful use of that kind of representation).I try to get the code and started immediately with “obtaining” it and tried to get a compiled version to run. The entire procedure was really an eye-opener for me since I was able to use what we learned about GIT-Hub and the GIT tooling, and it was the perfect showcase for me to understand the (for me hidden) potential of GISs.  I also had to learn that some people are not strict enough with the documentation of their code, which is a real set-back for me and slows the entire process quite down.I also managed to work on data German Newspapers and fill out many of the required fields we need to.

The reason which caused my frustration in this week stems from the fact, that one of my team members literally implied that I am dumb and lazy. (The post was deleted after a while for unknown reasons)The story goes like this in short:In our project (Immigrant Newspapers Archive) we have newspapers of eight different languages and each group member shall take on newspapers of two different languages.
Regarding the implied being dumb:
One week before the decision on which languages we have to focus on, I had a very constructive and productive discussion with Jennifer, after I met her in one of NYCDH workshops in Fordham University. We have discussed the possibility ,among other countries , to use also Greek newspapers since I’m Greek and work in an American -Greek Newspaper as a Journalist.
Accordingly, Greek newspapers were listed in a Google Docs document for further planning. After that, an Airtable was compiled in which Greek newspapers were not listed anymore (I guess no Greek newspapers were available in our focused time period). Being not aware of this I wrote in Slack that I wanted to cover the Greek ones (maybe they have been forgotten?) and asked again in order to be sure which countries are left so that I can take over my responsibility. So sentences like “we have to tell him what to do, and he can’t figure it out by himself even if it’s just a simple process of elimination” are simply offensive.
Regarding the implied being lazy:
Since German was left and since I speak German I suggested that I will cover those newspapers.
Also, the amount of data for the German newspapers is significant higher than the data amount of the other languages, even if in some cases you combine two countries together.So sentences like “[I] was surprisingly quick to reply … [and] interestingly enough, he wanted to do German (“since I speak German”)” seems also rather unfair and not objective.

I hope that I will find ways to work out on this matter and simply forgot all these kind of trivialities. The most important is to work collaboratively in team to produce all aspects of our chosen project.

Posted in Personal Blogs | Authors: | 5 Responses

First Journal Entry

By Sabina Pringle (she/ella) | Published: February 18, 2019

Working with Project TRIKE is a real pleasure as well as an exciting opportunity to engage in thoughtful, meaningful digital humanities work. Hannah, Nancy, Natasha and Rob are awesome. They are super organized and have a very clear idea of what they – we – want to do. I was given the role of technical project manager, which is great because I am to “manage” Rob, who has far more technical expertise than I. I’ll really be following his lead, and also staying on top of deadlines and the getting of things that we need. We decided that we will publish the project on WordPress and GitHub.

We’re collaborating through Slack, which I had never used before, and which I like a lot. We have a number of channels and use Wordast to set tasks. Hannah’s organizational skills are inspirational, her time line is excellently thought out and I feel confident that we will work really well together as a team. Nancy’s work in content development is keen and insightful, and it’s fascinating to see the content collection take shape and grow. Natasha keeps the channels ticking with her timeliness and her well-written texts seem to arrive exactly when I need something to experiment with. It all feels seamless.

I built a wire frame demo of the site in WordPress, just to see what it might be like. Rob and I chose Sydney as a theme, and Rob says that we should use WPBakery Page Builder, so I spent quite a few hours familiarizing myself with this plugin. For me this is taking WordPress to another level, so I’m thrilled. I can’t say what I think of WPBakery Page Builder yet. Now it feels a bit restrictive in the sense that its default settings are determining what I do, but I think that’s because I don’t know it well yet.

So as to make the most of the CUNY Academic Commons WordPress community, I asked Matt if he could refer us to someone in the Commons for help, which he did. He sent us a load of documentation on how the Commons works, which I’ll have more to say about next week.

Long live kindness and collaborative work!

Earth’s increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty,
Vines and clustering bunches growing,
Plants with goodly burthen bowing;
Spring come to you at the farthest
In the very end of harvest!
Scarcity and want shall shun you;
Ceres’ blessing so is on you.

– Ceres, The Tempest, 1.1

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