Seminar 2 Encyclopedia

Neighborhoods of New York

Professor: Joseph Berger
ITF: Madison Priest
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/neighborhoodsofnyc/

Neighborhoods of New York is the result of research project undertaken by first year Macaulay Honors students at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY) under the supervision of Professor Joseph Berger and Madison Priest. This website showcases student groups' profiles of New York City neighborhoods. Students integrated images, video and sound, created timelines, and left room for "surprises and serendipities."

The Peopling of New York City

Professor: George Gonzalez
ITF: Hamad Sindhi
Campus: Baruch College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/gonzalez19/

Class site for Professor George Gonzalez's IDC 3001H The People of New York. Site was used mainly for hosting the syllabus and reading materials, as well as for student essays on the readings.

Seminar Two

Professor: Grazyna Drabik
ITF: Andres Orejuela
Campus: City College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/20crossroads/

Students visited 20 crossroads on Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The stops began in lower Manhattan on Wall Street, and arrived at 181st Street in Washington Heights. The stops are arranged in order on the homepage of site, including the name of the street and neighborhood. For each entry, students wrote up a short post about their experience of the location and about the location itself.

Hispanic/Latino Nueva York

Professor: Francisco Soto
ITF: Joseph Pentangelo
Campus: College of Staten Island
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/soto2018/

Each student was randomly assigned a topic pertinent to the Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican communities in NYC, including subjects as diverse as Avenue of the Americas and Santería. Each student made three posts on these topics, as they focused their attention from a general overview to a specific aspect that they found particularly interesting.

NYCROPOLIS

Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Amanda Matles
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon18/

New York is dying. “But wait,” you say. “New York is dying? Impossible.” Sure, a visit to the Big Apple on any given day will yield sights of glass high-rises, bustling crowds of tourists and professionals, and shops with bedazzling variety: from classic bodegas to swanky yoga studios. But look closer. How can there be so many new skyscrapers and yet so many homeless? Why are trains on-time in Yorkville but not in Van Nest? And what on earth happened to the rent in Chelsea?

A visit to NYCropolis might leave you angry and frustrated with the current state of affairs. Good- that’s why we made it. The issues we researched relate to deep, unsolved problems in New York’s physical and social architecture. But our city is an amazing city, a feat of history that’s constantly reinventing itself. And we need you to be a part of its resurrection. Today, New York’s development conceals its death in essential areas. New life only comes when we stop treating the symptoms and start honestly working toward a cure. The more of NYCropolis you read, the more you will find that solutions to these problems don’t lie with the powers that be, but with the power of the people. Call your council member, join an advocacy group, and participate in Community Board meetings using your informed opinions. Turn this dying city into bright lights that inspire you and streets that make you feel brand-new.

-From the students of Honors 126, “The Peopling of New York,” Professor Vellon, and Amanda Matles

Macaulay Honors College and Queens College
Spring 2018
*With apologies to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys

A People's Guide to NYC

Professor: Arianna Martinez
ITF: Lindsey Albracht
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/peoplesguidetonyc/

Inspired by the recently published book, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, this assignment asked students at Queens Macaulay Honors College to construct an alternative tourist guide to New York City: a guide that highlights immigrant stories, prioritizes contested spaces, and creates a geographic record of sites of social movements and political struggles within the city.

Students selected a site in their own neighborhood or a neighborhood that was familiar to them, conducted research on the site, visited it to take photographs, and crafted a story about the site using excerpts from A People’s Guide to Los Angeles as a model.

The Peopling of NYC through Film

Professor: Robert Tutak
ITF: Frieda Benun
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/tutak18/category/documentary-projects/the-community-i-dont-know/

For the final project, students were assigned to make a documentary film on the topic: "Their Community: The Community I Know the Least or Fear the Most"

The prompt:
Using journalistic, photojournalistic, and filmmaking tools, document the community that is most alien to you:
(1) Learn about the community and its members first hand; hear their story
(2) Confront your stereotypes, challenge your reservations & prejudice or confirm your fears

The students were encouraged to confront their own fears and/or prejudices by venturing out and delving deep into the feared/unknown community through interviews.

Note: A few of the interviews were secured with the promise that they would only be shown to the closed room of students in our class, as they feature incriminating (e.g. drug or crime-related) content. Those are password-protected.

Chronicles of a Changing New York

Professor: Grazyna Drabik
ITF: Andres Orejuela
Campus: City College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/yesterdaytodayny/

A number of sites throughout New York with historical changes detailed in text and image.

Their New York

Professor: Mike Benediktsson
ITF: Christina Nadler & Madison Priest
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/theirnewyork/

This website is the result of a unique research project undertaken by first year Macaulay Honors students at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY) under the supervision of Mike Owen Benediktsson, Madison Priest and Christina Nadler. The interviews, images, and research collected here were collected entirely by students, as part of their coursework for the People of New York City seminar, or Seminar II, an interdisciplinary class on the past and present of the city’s neighborhoods, with a focus on migration and immigration.

Contested New York

Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Amanda Matles
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon17/

This website is the hub for a collection of six digital projects that focus on several key points of socio-economic conflict, struggle, and tension in New York City from the post World War II period to the present.

It would have been great to coordinate link-backs to the hub site from each of the group project sites, but not all of the groups included one.

Reading Between the skyLines

Professor: Moustafa Bayoumi
ITF: Kelly Eckenrode
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/skylines/

Students divided into 7 groups and choose a language generally based on their ease with the language. The 7 groups included: Spanish, Japanese, Hebrew, Russian, African American, Arabic and Korean. Each group went to a bookstore that specializes in that language of literature. Students quickly learned that these stores are much more than deposits for books. Typically, the serve as a culture refuge to preserve culture of immigrants groups into the city. I thought it was a successful project.

For myself and the students, it was interesting to learn how different language prompted different interviews. Our most extreme example was the Arabic bookstore. The manger did not give consent to share their interview on the internet. What seemed like a snag initially–gave the students a moment to pause and reflect on seriousness of sharing stories of people. The students decided to re-frame their work to discuss Trump era problems.

Storefront Survivors

Professor: Mike Benediktsson
ITF: Christina Nadler
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/storefrontsurvivors

This website is the result of a unique research project undertaken by first year Macaulay Honors students at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY) under the supervision of Mike Owen Benediktsson, Marnie Brady, Caroline Loomis, Christina Nadler, and Tommy Wu. The interviews, images, and research collected here were collected entirely by students, as part of their coursework for the People of New York City seminar, or Seminar II, an interdisciplinary class on the past and present of the city’s neighborhoods, with a focus on migration and immigration. In the last few years, elected officials and the media have begun to acknowledge the plight of small, independent businesses in the city. Blogs like Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York have called attention to the loss of valuable landmark institutions due to unregulated commercial rent markets and municipal rezoning. Local elected officials, including Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, have put forth competing legislative measures that would seek to relieve some of the economic pressure faced by small business owners in the city. Attention to the precarious position of small business is growing. But is it enough? Explore our website to find profiles of small business owners across the city who are conducting their own individual struggles against the crosscurrents of economic, social, and policy change in the city.

Caribbean New York

Professor: Jennifer Lutton
ITF: Katherine Logan McBride
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/caribbeannewyork16/

Students in the course worked to understand the transnational connections between the Caribbean (specifically the West Indies and Haiti) and New York City from the early 20th century to the current context, and the influences they have had on each other’s cultural, political, and economic development. We explored theories of transnationalism, mobility, and diaspora to examine the impact of multidirectional flows of Caribbean people, culture, goods, and ideas enlivened by contemporary communication and transportation technologies.
Throughout the semester students contributed scaffolded assignments to a course website, building a repository of notes, data, papers, sources, scripts for their research and worked in small groups to curate a multimedia online exhibition to present what they learned. Group projects explore: political economy; music and dance; gender and identity through art and literature; media in the diaspora; and cultural identity through food.

Contested New York

Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Amanda Matles
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon16/

Contested New York is a collection of digital essays that focus on several key points of socio-economic conflict, struggle, and tension in New York City from the post World War II period to the present. Our guiding questions were: Does NYC always “work,” and what happens when it does not? Our project was created during the Spring 2016 semester by students from the Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, Class of 2019, as part of the seminar course The Peopling of New York City.

Conflict and Coexistence in NY

Professor: Grazyna Drabik
ITF: Andrew Lucchesi
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/drabikgallery

This website focuses on the connections between personal storytelling and the deep repository of history connected to the New York City region. It is broken into three interrelated galleries: one contains objects from each author’s family history, as well as their personal reflections on how they see their relationship to history. The second and third galleries focus on New York City history, on iconic historical sites (which are mapped on an interactive Google Map) and on the historical and present-day figures associated with those sites. Readers of this website will see a complex, multi-layered representation of New York City, past and present–full of people, stories, objects, and an ever-changing urban background.

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.

The Peopling of Flatbush

Professor: Paul Moses
ITF: Maggie Galvan
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/moses2015

In Spring 2015, Paul Moses, both a Brooklyn College English Professor and journalist, led students to deeply analyze the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush through a variety of methods including oral histories and archival research. Their website, The Peopling of Flatbush, featured original research from the precolonial through the contemporary era. ITF Maggie Galvan taught students methods for recording their oral histories, how navigate an array of digital resources and work with demographic databases, and worked with groups of students over a series of classes as they organized their research for presentation on the class website.

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.

NEW YORK: A CITY WITH NO LIMITS

Professor: Grazyna Drabik
ITF: Katherine Logan McBride
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/conflictandcoexistenceincosmopolis/

New York City is the city that never sleeps: its inhabitants run on the coffee served by cafes around every corner, but more than that, its history never sleeps. This city is the madness that courses through its veins. But it is also a single tapestry woven by diverse ideas and people. This is how we change throughout the course of hundreds of years: building, deconstructing, rebuilding. Today, this is our city.

This site represents both the discovery of NYC and its history by MHC CCNY First Year students in Professor Drabik’s class and also their reflections of their coursework, themselves as New Yorkers and the city they study in.

The Peopling of New York City: Neighborhood Stories

Professor: Ellen Scott
ITF: Andres Orejuela
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/neighborhoodstories14/

This site conglomerates the individual sites that each student group made. One of the strengths of this approach was that students were not only able to design and think about their site’s organization, but also worked with tools that were new to them.

NYC’s D Train

Professor: Nancy Aries
ITF: Owen Toews
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/aries2014finalproject/

In Spring 2014, professor Nancy Aries’ CUNY Baruch/Macaulay Honors seminar studied the diverse neighborhoods linked by New York City’s D Train. The class broke into small teams, each researching one of seven neighborhoods. The primary purpose of the site is to bring together the seven neighborhood studies, with links to individual sites for each neighborhood (students decided to use the same theme for each of their sites, which gave them the united aesthetic they wanted, but limited some groups in what they could do). The secondary purpose of the site is to host a map displaying the seven stops along the D train. The map includes bubbles displaying photos and basic information for each stop, giving a nice overview of the entire project. However, the way the Google map embed displays makes it a bit difficult to see all this information at once. Students chose the ever-popular sliding doors theme to create a colorful, engaging snapshot of human life on the D train.

The Peopling of New York City

Professor: Ramona Hernandez
ITF: Aaron Kendall
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/hernandez2014/

This Seminar 2 website compares various aspects of two unique neighborhoods in New York City, Flushing and Washington Heights/Harlem. Several topics are discussed, including transportation, food, music and health.

Although the site was envisioned as a comparison between two neighborhoods, since groups were free to choose any topic from either neighborhood, instead of both neighborhoods, the result is more of a summary of various cultural aspects of each neighborhood.

The website is organized in a clear manner, with introdctory text and the option of choosing which neighborhood and topic the user would like to explore further. The use of media is somewhat limited, with a lot of very small images, and is lacking in video/audio that might help the user get a better idea of the feel of the neighborhoods.

Overall, the students did a fine job of researching their topics and presenting the information in a clear and concise manner.

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.

Neighborhood Projects

Professor: Angie Beeman
ITF: Amanda Licastro
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/beemanneighborhoods/

This site is the final project for Dr. Angie Beeman’s Seminar 2 course on the “People of NYC.” This site was created completely by the students in this course and the content was generated by their research.

Seminar 2, Professor Sharman

Professor: Russell Sharman
ITF: Maggie Galvan
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sharman2013/

Three groups of students investigated the ethnic diversity and immigrant populations in three neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn. These students identified cultural points of interest and put together an audio walking tour and map guide using the Leaflet Maps Marker plugin.

Staten Island: Ethnic Foodways and Food Deserts

Professor: Catherine Lavender
ITF: Scott Henkle
Campus: College of Staten Island
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/peoplingofnycspring2013/

Most people don’t think of Staten Island as part of NYC, or associate it with the rich cultural diversity commonly associated with the “Big Apple.” However, just a ferry ride across the harbor, Staten Island resonates with the culture of the city, and in its own unique way. Staten Island also has a rich food history. Each immigrant group has brought with it unique tastes and flavors from around the world. This site explores the foods of Staten Island, and the way in which its islanders eat, giving special attention to food deserts in the past twenty years.

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.

The Peopling of New York City

Professor: Gabriel Haslip-Viera
ITF: Aaron Kendall
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/haslipviera2013/

Students investigated the role of immigration and migration in the shaping of New York’s identity – past, present, and future, through oral history interviews and neighborhood research projects. The projects were carried out individually and with little structuring, which made the website content too broad in my opinion. Next time around I would suggest the students do the project in groups and focus on a few particular issues related to immigration and migration.

Seminar II: The Peopling of New York

Professor: Mike Benediktsson
ITF: Jesse Goldstein
Campus: Hunter College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/benediktsson2013

Our public facing work consisted of short video documentaries produced by small teams of students. Our website has a page in which all of these videos are embedded, though this site was not a focal point of our work. All of the videos are on vimeo and students are encouraged to link to them, add them to their personal eportfolios, etc.

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.