This set of tabs link to the excellent resources provided by Brooklyn College Library including subject guides, a handout, and contact info for the New York City reference librarian, Beth Evans

Homepage: Brooklyn College Library

NYC Reference Librarian: Beth Evans

Two excellent subject guides to get you started studying various topics related to New York City, prepared by reference librarian Beth Evans.

Link: New York City – Gentrification

Link: New York City Demographics

Here is an excellent handout about NYC Demographics research prepared by BC Library.

https://files.eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6075/2018/02/16170311/BC-Library_NYC-Demographic-Information.pdf

These resources include digital archives (great for primary sources!), a list of digital tools to make cool stuff, various online sources including newspapers, websites, blogs, and online archives. Specific tabs about the return (and demise) of Gothamist and DNAInfo have been added and updated.

What is an Instructional technology Fellow (ITF)?

An ITF coaches student ideas and visions into reality through tech tools like multimedia production, data analytics and more.

Source: Instructional Technology Fellows – Personalized Tech Guidance at Macaulay Honors College

Links:

• Email: Alexis Carrozza, ITF for Seminar 4
• Brooklyn College ITFs

Put together a timeline, an annotated map, or photo narrative using these free sites. These digital tools often combine mapping with images, demographics with cartography, media with historical narrative. Click the links to see examples, demos, and how-tos!

If you want to learn more about any of these tools and/or how to incorporate the content or tools into your research, please make an appointment with your ITF, Alexis!

• Story Maps:  Esri Story Maps let you combine authoritative maps with narrative text, images, and multimedia content. They make it easy to harness the power of maps and geography to tell your story.
  • View an ITF project created using Story Maps for Seminar 1 : Patti Smith & Just Kids, a story map created by Alexis Carrozza
• Social Explorer: Provides easy, visual access to demographic and economic data using maps, reports, and data downloads.
  • Login via Brookyn College Library for premium access to all features for free 
  • View an ITF project created as an example of using Social Explorer: Social Explorer & Paris Is Burning
• TimelineJS: Easy-to-make, beautiful timelines.
• History Pin: Historypin is a place for people to share photos and stories,
  telling the histories of their local communities.
• Palladio: Visualize complex historical data with ease.
• Chronos Timeline: Chronos allows scholars and students to dynamically present historical data in a flexible online environment.
• New York Public Library: Map Warper: The NYPL Map Warper is a tool for digitally aligning (“rectifying”) historical maps from the NYPL’s collections to match today’s precise maps.
• Twine: Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

• Vanishing New York
• Brownstoner
• New York YIMBY
• Curbed NY
• http://gothamist.com/
• The Real Deal
• Gotham Gazette
• Brooklyn Daily Eagle
• http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/
• POLITICO New York
• City Journal
• Governing Magazine

WNYC Statement: 

In a deal largely funded by two anonymous donors, WNYC is acquiring the news site Gothamist, including its archives, domain name and social media assets. The move comes as part of a larger deal involving two other public radio stations and Gothamist’s network of local news sites. KPCC in Pasadena, Calif., will take over LAist, while WAMU in Washington will acquire DCist.

Read the rest of WNYC’s statement: “WNYC, Two Other Public Radio Stations Acquire Gothamist and Sister Sites”

From NYT:

Three months after being abruptly shut down by its billionaire owner, the New York City news site Gothamist has been bought by New York’s public radio station, WNYC, and will begin publishing again in the spring, WNYC officials said on Friday.

The acquisition, funded by anonymous donors for an undisclosed price, was part of a group deal that will integrate Gothamist’s satellite sites in Los Angeles and Washington with public radio stations in those cities.

But Gothamist’s sister New York news site DNAinfo, which had a more straight-news focus than the often irony-laced take of Gothamist, is not coming back, said the head of WNYC’s news division, Jim Schachter.

Link: “Gothamist Will Publish Again in Deal with WNYC” at NYT

This course asks you to think about who has the power to shape New York and by what means and mechanisms that shaping the city’s spaces might occur. Related to that question is a matter of access to information or even the sources of information.

Recently two of the best local news sites, Gothamist and DNAInfo New York, were purchased by billionaires and closed when the employees agreed to unionize. New York has lost two very popular and essential sources of news about neighborhoods and boroughs as well as the city at large. You can read more about the closings of these sites here:

• NYT: “DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shut Down After Vote to Unionize” (Nov. 2, 2017)
• NPR: “Billionaire Owner Shuts Down DNAinfo, Gothamist Sites A Week After Workers Unionize” (Nov. 3, 2017)
• CityLab: City Lab: “Everyone Should Fear What Happened to the Gothamist Sites”
• New Yorker: “The Story Behind the Unjust Shutdown of Gothamist and DNAinfo” (Nov. 14, 2017)

Excellent sites to find primary sources for your research and/or learn more about pretty much anything!

Ubuweb – avant-garde digital archives, video, music, interviews, etc.

New York Historical Society Museum & Library – includes Research Guides, archives, library help

OpenCulture.com – “the best free cultural & educational media on the web”

A Twitter list is a curated group of Twitter accounts. Viewing a list timeline will show you a stream of Tweets from only the accounts on that list.

Source: Twitter. 

Twitter List: Archives & Open Access – ITF-curated list of accounts dedicated to open access and digital archives available online. Click on the link to view which individuals and organizations make up the list and to read their latest tweets.

ITF-curated list: Archives and Open Access

Twitter List: NYC Urbanism – ITF-curated list of Twitter accounts related to our seminar’s themes with tweets from urbanists, planners, city departments, and more.

ITF-curated list of accounts related to the city and urban studies

Aaron M. Renn, Urbanophile’s New York archives

Jim Russell – articles at PSMag

Pete Saunders, The Corner Side Yard

Jeremiah Moss, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York

Krystof Wodiczko (Polish, b. 1943), Public Projection At The Telephone Building Located Between Worth, Broadway, Thomas and Church Streets (AT&T Long Lines Building), New York, November 3, 1984.

Three days before the presidential election in 1984 Ronald Reagan’s disembodied hand was projected onto the AT&T Building, positioned as if the building was his body and his hand was over his heart as one would do if reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Earlier that year, AT&T had been considered a monopoly and broken into seven but still very powerful Regional Bell Operating Companies. (Note: due to mergers, only four of the seven RBCOs still exist.) Why Reagan and why the AT&T Building? As noted by the libertarian think tank, The Cato Institute:

Initially there was considerable speculation that the Reagan administration would either drop this case or settle it with relatively little damage to AT&T-much as the Eisenhower administration had settled an earlier suit that sought to break up AT&T. The “Reagan revolution” was not built on a platform of trustbusting. Several attempts were made to settle the AT&T suit, but each failed, including an attempt in 1981 by the Reagan Justice Department.

Given Wodiczko’s history as an artist, the project might be understood more generally as a critique of the lack of transparency between business and government interests particularly if one considers the building’s lack of windows. One might also consider the project in relation to public-private sponsorship of public art works that, according to Wodiczko, “function at best as liberal urban decoration” (Wodiczko, “Avant-Garde as Public Art: The Future of a Tradition,” 1984) and – given the public-private attempts to gentrify parts of downtown New York in the 1980s – an attempt to reveal architecture’s role as an ideological instrument of power (See Wodiczko, “Public Projection,” 1983).

Read more about Wodicko’s project at The Kitchen’s blog here. Learn more about Wodiczko’s art at art21