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.

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

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.

The People of New York City

Professor: Sarah Bishop
ITF: Anna Gjika
Campus: Baruch College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/bishop17/

Class website to retain course materials (readings, syllabus), student reading reflections, and scaffolded final project assignment posts.

Podcasting the People of New York

Professor: Amy Weiss
ITF: Katherine Logan McBride
Campus: City College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/weiss17/podcasts/

Students created podcasts to address an historical question of their choosing about the inhabitants of New York City.

Oral Histories: Becoming American

Professor: Nancy Aries
ITF: Julie Fuller
Campus: Baruch College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/becomingamerican17/

Students created multi-media oral history stories on each other and also on someone else they know. Their public facing projects integrated long-form text (based on personal interviews) with visual artifacts, audio, moving clips, graphs, maps, and timelines that clarify both the informant's story and the context of the immigrant group which this person represents.

The Peopling of New York

Professor: Stephen Steinberg
ITF: Lindsey Albracht
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/steinberg17/category/oral-history-project/

For the final project in this Seminar 2, students interviewed a member of their family about an immigration experience. They also reflected on the exercise in a brief statement that accompanied the post.

The goal of the oral history was to consider how some of the more abstract themes of the class actually played out in the particular lives of people that students actually knew. In the reflection, they were asked to make the connection between course themes and the interview, but also to reflect on the experience of interviewing itself.

The professor opted to display these projects on the existing course website rather than asking students to create separate sites or asking me to create something new. I think a site which displayed all of the posts at once (in Aesop, though I know that theme has its issues) and allowing the user to navigate to the histories that interested them would have been a better design choice, because the histories of students who posted early are a bit buried. But overall, I think the reflections mostly demonstrate that students met the goal of the assignment.

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.

Becoming American

Professor: Nancy Aries
ITF: Kara van Cleaf
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/aries16/

Students created oral history projects on each other and also on someone else they know.

History Through Objects

Professor: Constance Rosenblum
ITF: Andres Orejuela
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/objects2016/

The students in Professor Rosenblum’s Seminar 2 participated in The Museum’s Your Stories, Our Stories project. For our final course site, students used the assignments they had prepared for that project, and added them to a site with the Aesop story engine, experimenting with different ways to present their stories.

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.

The Peopling of New York City

Professor: Rafael Mutis
ITF: Joseph Pentangelo
Campus: College of Staten Island
URL: http://peoplingofnyc.tumblr.com/

The Seminar 2 class was broken up into groups which each focused on a particular population’s role in the peopling of NYC: Native Americans, Greeks, Italians, Sri Lankans, and Jewish immigrants were covered. The site presents all posts in reverse chronological order, by default as an amalgamation of all groups, but each group also tagged their posts consistently, allowing the site to be navigated by simply clicking on one of the groups’ links. Posts are almost entirely original content, including photographs, interviews, and ethnic restaurant reviews. Students were engaged and posted regularly, and took to the ease of tumblr-use quickly.

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.

The Peopling of Staten Island

Professor: Catherine Lavender
ITF: Kamili Posey
Campus: College of Staten Island
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/lavender2014/

During Seminar 2, Macaulay Scholars investigate the role of immigration and migration in shaping New York City’s identity — past, present, and future. This website documents immigration of various communities to Staten Island. The information discussed includes demographic patterns, history of the community, literature about the communities, and community resources and institutions. This website was created by students in Professor Lavender’s Seminar Two class in Spring 2014 at the College of Staten Island. Students taking this course come from a variety of majors and fields of study including: chemistry, biology, psychology, history, pre-law, political science, engineering, math, physics, education, and the liberal arts.

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.

Yemen Across the Atlantic: Exploring NYC Immigration Through the Lens of Yemen Cafe

Professor: Moustafa Bayoumi
ITF: Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/bayoumi2014/

The purpose of this site was to examine the case of immigration in Brooklyn through the specific example of Yemen Cafe located in Cobble Hill. This site approaches Yemen Cafe from a range of angles: the people (both owners, staff, and customers), the plot of the restaurant, the neighborhood, culture, and food.

While the story of Yemeni immigration to New York is the central immigration story of the site, through examining the site through these various lenses brings into conversation the history of other immigrant communities that have existed in the neighborhood over time, and utilized the building that Yemen Cafe is housed in.

Students drew upon a wide range of media for the various sections of the website.This makes the site not the most consistent in terms of format, but displays how different types of media help tell different types of stories.

Food and Immigration in NYC

Professor: Kim Libman
ITF: Maggie Dickinson
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/libman2014/

Our Peopling of New York Seminar looked at the issue of immigration in New York City through the lens of food and foodways. Each group focused on a particular neighborhood, researching the local history and culture by collecting both qualitative and quantitive data. We also produced menus featuring typical, culturally appropriate foods for each neighborhood based on our research. Each neighborhood group produced their own website, showcased on our collective class site. Take a look at our neighborhood websites to learn more!

Peopling of New York

Professor: Michael Batson
ITF: Stephen Boatright
Campus: College of Staten Island
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/batson14/

During the Spring 2014 semester, the students in Professor Michael Batson’s course researched the diverse ethnicities that call Staten Island home. They visited cultural institutions, studied census data, and used online mapping applications to graphically portray the location of ethnic enclaves. The students also looked at different public schools across the borough sought to see how well the schools reflected its demographic diversity.

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 Peopling of East Broadway

Professor: Ken Guest
ITF: Owen Toews
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/guest2013/

This site displays students’ research findings in a brief, visually attractive way. It allows students to share multi-media creations, such as video, photography, and visual presentations. The site functions as a static, outward-facing exhibition of student work, rather than as an evolving, interactive space for students to share and communicate over time. Because of the way the assignment was structured – students were each assigned segments of the East Broadway strip to research and report back on – gathering their work together on this site conveys an overall sense of place produced by students in collaboration over the course of the semester.

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.

Staten Island Ethnic Foodways and Food Deserts

Professor: Michael Batson
ITF: Kamili Posey
Campus: College of Staten Island
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/peoplingofnycspring2013/

This project marks a collaboration between Michael Batson´s and Catherine Lavender´s Seminar 2 course. This project investigates 12 ethnic food communities on Staten Island and gives individuals familiar with the rich cultural diversity of New York City a chance to see that diversity through the often overlooked lens of Staten Island. The students for the course served as the primary researchers for the site and did firsthand fieldwork in the following communities: Dominican, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Sri Lankan, South Korean, Ukrainian. Some work was done investigating Staten Island´s West African community, but more country-specific work should probably be done here. We hope you enjoy the site!

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.

Hidden Histories

Professor: Grazyna Drabik
ITF: John Boy
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/hiddenhistories/

The aim of this site is to make little-known aspects of New York City history visible on a map. In addition, the site links to resources in the form of books, films, and websites that cover these “hidden histories.” [This project remains incomplete]

The Peopling of New York: Astoria, Flushing, Coney Island, and Washington Heights

Professor: Joseph Berger
ITF: Chris Caruso
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/berger2011/

Overview:
Working with ITF Chris Caruso, Prof Berger’s class at City completed a detailed site with information about four major neighborhoods in NYC: Astoria, Flushing, Coney Island, and Washington Heights. The groups provide comprehensive information about each neighborhood, including histories, demographics, landmarks, entertainment, and food options. The class also included reflections on personal experiences doing the project.

Celebrating Immigration: The Dynamics of Holidays and Festivals in NYC

Professor: David Rosenberg
ITF: Jill Belli
Campus: Baruch
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/rosenbergspring2011/

Overview:
Prof David Rosenberg of Baruch and ITF Jill Belli completed a site that is organized around holidays and festivities as they are traditionally celebrated, and how they have been adapted by different immigrant groups in New York City. The site covers the backgrounds, legal implications, and changes to holidays over time.