Welcome to Our Virtual Notebook
Over the course of a semester, we have used this website to document our observations in Downtown Brooklyn, focusing on Barclays Center and surrounding areas. Exploring the site should offer you an idea of what it might be like to stroll through the streets of Fulton Mall or admire the architectural magnificence of the US District Bankruptcy Court. As there were five of us working on this project, we each covered a separate sense – sight, taste, touch, sound, or smell – and focused our energies on representing the Brooklyn experience through that sense as vividly as possible. Take a minute to nibble at treats with our food critic. Gaze through the camera lens with our photographer. Let your emotions overtake you as you sniff familiar city smells.
We are here to guide you through a trip you’ve always wanted to take.
In case you get lost, we prepared a couple routes for you to follow, whether you plan on walking by foot or exploring through our website.
Help… Your Site is Confusing and I Need a Tour Guide!
Have no fear! We five musketeers are here to help you in your quest. Simply follow the site map outlined below to easily navigate your way.
You will begin on the front page, consisting of scrolling photos and four tabs above. You can either scroll to reach the content of the four tabs, or click on each one individually. If you choose to scroll, you will encounter a couple of surprises presented in bright orange rectangles. The first is a short documentary about Jay Z and his influence on Barclays Center and the second is an external website (sadly we did not have time to offer as much content as they have) about Downtown Brooklyn and the attractions you might be able to find there, should you choose to visit. We thought we’d turn you over to the experts for additional information. Now, for the tabs. You will be directed to the same pages whether you scroll or click, so here goes:
ABOUT: information about us and our project
Read more tab will allow you to continue reading about the people behind this website, the people who typed the very sentence you are currently reading. We just wanted to say hello and introduce ourselves.
About Our Project tab will redirect you to a separate page (this one) so you can understand why we decided to create this website and what you might be able to find on it
EXPLORE: observations of the area
Notes from the Field offers raw field notes that we took while visiting Downtown Brooklyn. Each note focuses on a separate sense (sight, sound, taste, touch, & smell), so they are simpler to follow.
The following five pages, Touch, Smell, Taste, Listen, & Look, each offer a more in-depth, multimedia exploration of the sense they claim to cover. They also each contain more complete, grammatically correct field notes compiled from the raw notes.
READ: summaries of sources you may want to read
This section contains ten annotations of sources pertaining to Downtown Brooklyn that we found interesting. Their topics range from education to parking feuds to art – a fairly wide rand interesting range. Each page contains a short description of a source, be it YouTube clip, newsletter article, or documentary, and a link for you to examine the source on your own terms.
REFLECTIONS: our thoughts and experiences
Here we turn inwards, reflecting on the experience of acting as ethnographers for a semester. There are five pages, each dedicated to the thoughts of a group member – food critic, photographer, texturalist, perfumist, and audio engineer. They are labeled as such to indicate the portion of the project we focused on, which sense we utilized to experience our surroundings.
We hope this is a helpful guide, enjoy!
