Seminar 2 Encyclopedia

Our Top 20 NYC Albums

Professor: Chris Bonastia
ITF: Rachel Bogan
Campus: Lehman College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/twentymostnycalbums/

Students in Chris Bonastia’s class examined social and political changes in NYC’s neighborhoods via NYC’s shifting music scenes. Using the 2014 Village Voice article, The 50 Most NYC Albums Ever, as inspiration, students chose one album and researched not only the artist/album, but also the space(s) the artist wrote about and where the artist performed.

The site’s purpose is to showcase each student’s artist/album analysis + to provide some collaborative aspect (the timeline!). Students wrote final papers and then turned their papers into blog posts, adding digital components. Good stuff: a few students created a timeline, showing the progression of albums. While they didn’t end up using TimelineJS, the timeline is the homepage’s focal point and is well-made and a strong asset to the site. Another student activated the plugin, Soundy Background Music, which allowed students to attach song(s) to their posts — this really added to the flavor of the site.

Rhythm, Identity, and Turf

Professor: Chris Bonastia
ITF: Ben Miller
Campus: Lehman College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/bonastia15_turf/

The site gathers together individually researched and written multimedia-enhanced research essays by all the students in the class. These projects clustered into three themes related to the peopling of New York City: the role of musical scenes (“rhythm”), the relations among ethnic or cultural groups (“identity”), and the changing faces of particular neighborhoods (“turf”).

Each student was able to customize a “cover” image, which displays in a grid on the list of posts as well as in a parallax splash screen within each post.

Uses the Jorgen theme, with five active plugins: Aesop Story Engine, Aesop Story Front, CMB2, Co-Authors Plus, Jetpack, and Subtitles.

Sounds and Scenes of New York City

Professor: Chris Bonastia
ITF: Ben Miller
Campus: Lehman College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/musicalnyc

A central landing site connects four subsites dedicated to musical “scenes” within NYC: Jazz, Latin, Disco, and Hip-Hop. All of these subsites share the same theme (Bushwick) and navigation, with pages for History, Music, Places, People, and Credits; the Genres tab and an image-mapped map allows for travel between them.

To create the site, students divided into five groups: one for each of the musical scenes, and one to work directly with the ITF on site-building skills like plugins, menus, iframes, and CSS. Members of the site-building team then acted as liaisons to the content groups; each group chose their own internal division of labor to produce or procure text, images (including maps), and sounds.

Food and the Peopling of New York City

Professor: Cindy Lobel
ITF: Edwin Mayorga
Campus: Lehman College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/lobel13communities/

This site is for the Macaulay Honors College @ Lehman College students in Seminar 2, Food and the Peopling of New York City. This course will study the peoples and peopling of New York City through the lens of food and eating. We will look at a number of themes that relate to migration and settlement in New York City, including historical and contemporary immigration and migration; work experiences; settlement patterns and assimilation; community and neighborhood; commerce and business; and conflict and cooperation.

Our sources will include a variety of readings and films, our own experiences and memories and those of our families, visits to sites in New York City, and guest speakers. Assignments include in-class and online discussions and formal writing assignments throughout the term, and our culminating project – an interactive map of food and migration sites in the Bronx, which will be included in the 2013 Macaulay Encyclopedia.

The Food Communities of New York

Professor: Cindy Lobel
ITF: Sam Han
Campus: Lehman
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/lobel11neighborhoods/

Cindy Lobel’s class at Lehman made a food-focused site with the help of ITF Sam Han. Using the idea that food is central to community identity, the class gives a history and demographic overview of several neighborhoods before delving into the culinary offerings of each area. They covered the neighborhoods of Belmont, Bushwick, Woodside, Harlem, and Jackson Heights.

Thoughts on the project from ITF Sam Han:

The central focus of this class was the peoples and peopling of New York City through the lens of food.  At the heart of it was the idea of community – from the nuclear family to the entire city – and the role food plays in building, sustaining, symbolizing, and governing communities in New York. We do so by studying five neighborhoods across NYC–Belmont, Bushwick, Jackson Heights, Woodside, and Harlem. Through a variety of sources, including films, culinary journalism and historical and sociological scholarship, and numerous walking/tasting tours, led by Professor Cindy Lobel, a former tour guide herself, the class sought to gauge the diverse and rich culinary histories of the waves of peoples in New York City. 

Divided into five groups, the students explored the demographic and culinary shifts of the five neighborhoods across New York City. This was achieved by not only researching the institutional histories of these neighborhoods but also doing a “Food Stops,” which consisted of visits to local businesses that exist today. For this particular website project, the students made use of a variety of technologies, most frequently the Vado cameras provided by Macaulay, used to document their experiences in group-based explorations of certain neighborhoods in NYC, as well as mapping software such as Social Explorer and Google Maps, to visually represent the routes they took to explore their neighborhoods.