Seminar 2 Encyclopedia

The Peopling of New York

Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Caroline Erb
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon13/finalprojects/

During the Spring 2013 semester, the students in Professor Peter Vellon’s Seminar 2 class researched the relationship between immigration and migration, race, and class on the Lower East Side’s identity. They translated their research into websites geared toward the general public with the help of the course’s Instructional Technology Fellow, Caroline Erb-Medina. Students were divided into groups to focus on the history, labor, food, culture, and demographics of different ethnic groups on the Lower East Side. Along with their research, students also learned how to customize a WordPress site. Every student participated in making the main design decisions for their sites. Each group incorporated tools including Google Maps, iMovie, iPhoto, and embedded music on their sites.

Professor: Margaret Chin
ITF: Jesse Goldstein
Campus: Hunter
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/mchin2012/

This site highlights four different neighborhoods with large Asian populations in New York City. Each neighborhood is evaluated according to five different dimensions, and the resulting information has been woven into an integrated design conceptualized and implemented by students (with a little ITF support). It is intended to provide a general introduction to these neighborhoods, their similarities and differences.

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. 

The Peopling of East Harlem

Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Maggie Dickinson
Campus: Queens
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon/

Professor Vellon’s class at Queens College worked with ITF Maggie Dickinson to complete a site focused on the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. They created a photo gallery on the front page, detailed demographic trends, made maps, videos, and timelines to show important institutions and events, and kept a class blog.

Thoughts on the project from ITF Maggie Dickinson

The central theme of this class was the economic, political and demographic transitions that have taken place in East Harlem over the past hundred years. Students were introduced to the history of East Harlem through historical, biographical and sociological texts. But the subject matter really came alive when they got to explore the neighborhood through walking tours of the area. One of the things we emphasized was documenting what they saw as they walked around the neighborhood through photography and video, most of which was shot on Vado cameras provided by Macualay.

What started out as an unorganized mass of photographs and video clips became, over the course of the semester, the basis for maps locating important institutions in the neighborhood, short videos and images that introduce the viewer to the neighborhood’s everyday sights and sounds, and evidence of the changing economic, cultural and political landscapes in the area. Students were generous with one another, sharing their images by uploading them to the website library and allowing all the students in the class to draw on these images to build their particular sections.

This student-generated content was paired up with other kinds of research data that students felt lent itself to the visual medium of a website, including demographic maps made with Social Explorer and documentary and archival photos used for building interactive timelines using Dipity. The site came together by balancing the autonomy of the working groups, who were each responsible for producing the content of one section based on the work they were doing for their research papers, and coming together as a group to create an aesthetic framework that lent cohesion to the website as a whole. The front page, with its gallery of images used throughout the website, showcases the people, politics, culture and institutions that make up the East Harlem community.

Exploring Greenwich Village: Researching what makes the Village a village

Professor: Bernadette McCauley
ITF: Anton Borst
Campus: Hunter
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/exploringgreenwichvillagespring2011/

Overview:
Working with ITF Anton Borst, Bernadette McCauley and her class at Hunter made an intensive study of Greenwich Village. The site includes an index of term papers that students completed, as well as entries on landmarks, the arts, community and social issues, and history of the area.

Thoughts on the project from ITF Anton Borst:

The approach to this website was simple, organic, and student-directed. Towards the end of the semester, students were tasked with creating a website that collectively presented the individual research papers they had by that point completed. Other than that directive, students were free to discuss and decide as a group how to organize the site, what kind of content would be included, and for what aspects of the site each student would be responsible. These discussions were moderated and guided by the ITF and took place in class.

The process, especially in the initial stages, was messy and complicated: there were moments of awkward silence and confused frustration as the class began to wrap its head around cooperatively creating—as a group of 20 people—something as elaborate, interactive, and multi-faceted as a website. But as students assumed editorial, design, and managerial leadership roles and the project became increasingly concrete, the process quickly gained momentum. The class took ownership, working intently in small groups: the editors checked on revisions, the project managers called for progress reports, the map designers consulted with the site designers. The class buzzed like a newsroom; I remember thinking to myself that even if the website turned out to be a total mess it would not matter, that the energy, the coordination, the leadership, and the creativity inspired by the process itself was an achievement of its own.

In fact, the resulting website, Exploring Greenwich Village, is not a mess at all, but a sleekly and simply designed site that effectively brings together a wide range of research topics relating to Greenwich Village. Professor McCauley’s focus on cultural, community, and architectural institutions past and present provided its thematic core. The site was created with an audience in mind: it presents the highlights of students’ papers and sources for further information, incorporates images as well as text, and is easily navigable in multiple ways: by general theme (categories), keyword (tags), an alphabetical list of student papers, and by a map. The latter, appearing in the middle of the introductory text for the site, displays icons over locations related to each student project and links to the relevant website page. The site’s navigation thus balances the more formal research components of the course with the more accessible experiential components, namely the walking tours Professor McCauley led through the Village, which inspired many of the individual paper topics. The map also emphasizes a governing theme of the course and of the site: the actual places—and the stories behind them—that have made Greenwich Village what it is, an idea clearly explained on the homepage.

One City, Many Nations

Professor: Els de Graauw
ITF: Emily Sherwood
Campus: Baruch
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/degraauw11/

Overview:
Professor Els de Graauw of Baruch and ITF Emily Sherwood produced a site with the theme One City, Many Nations. Their site contains information about Dominicans, Chinese, Mexicans, Haitians, Russians, and uses maps, interviews, statistical analysis as well as personal reflections from students about their work and their own family histories. Emily also made use of custom CSS capabilities to tailor the capabilities of the site’s theme.