Seminar 2 Encyclopedia

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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 Peopling of New York City

Professor: Phil Napoli
ITF: Amanda Licastro
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/napoli13/

On this site, you can find a collection of four wikis about the history, demographics, and current issues of four prominent New York City neighborhoods: Chinatown, Midwood, Flushing, and Jackson Heights. After exploring these neighborhoods on your screen, be sure to check out the fun and informative audio walking tours, complete with interactive maps.

The Peopling of New York: There's An App For That!

Professor: Catherine Lavender
ITF: Scott Henkle
Campus: Staten Island
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/lavenderspring2011finalproject/

Overview:
At CSI, Prof Catherine Lavender’s class divided into groups to study different ethnic communities in NYC. Working with ITF Scott Henkle, each group completed a site, and they were all collected on a main class site. Groups studied Egyptian, Polish, Ukrainian, Caribbean, Korean, Sri Lankan, Dominican, and Mexican communities. Groups took different approaches to their material, but most focused on the experiences of immigrant groups in Staten Island and included maps, interviews, and visits to restaurants.

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.