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.

NY State of Mine: We Are From New York

Professor: Charlene Floyd
ITF: Julie Fuller
Campus: Baruch College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/nystateofmine/

Charlene Floyd's class set out to learn about the ways in which New York public schools shape the lives of middle and high school students–their connections to the city in which they live, and their identities as New Yorkers. Her students collaborated to produce this digital book which reflects their ideas about what it means to be a New Yorker. They concluded the semester by visiting the Computer School in Manhattan to present the book to a group of middle schoolers.

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.

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.

An Exploration of Midwood

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Ben Haber
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/midwoodneighborhood/

This site looks at the Brooklyn neighborhood of Midwood, focusing in particular on the Jewish community.

Downtown Brooklyn

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Ben Haber
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/downtownbrooklyn2017/

This site gives a good overview of the things to do, see and eat in Downtown Brooklyn. Contains lots of audio and pictures to highlight the transformation of Downtown into an expensive entertainment and transit hub.

Freaks on a Ferris Wheel

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Ben Haber
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/freaksonaferriswheel/

This whimsical site explores the history and present of Coney Island. Working through the five senses, the students paint a rich portrait of this entertainment center.

Brighton Beach Bro

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Ben Haber
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/bbbb/

This site uses the five senses to explore Brighton Beach. Well organized and aesthetically pleasing, this site includes student made videos, thick description and an interactive timeline of the neighborhood

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.

Halal Carts: Behind the Scenes of a New Yorker's Lunch

Professor: David Rosenberg
ITF: Jacob Cohen
Campus: Baruch College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/halalcarts/

This site examines many of the issues that involve halal carts in New York City, with a focus specifically on the lives and work of the cooks, the owners and product suppliers, the customers, and the city bureaucracy that governs the carts. Students composed articles highlighting different issues related to these topics and immigration, and utilized the Himalayas theme with its one-page menu feature. Entries include photographs as well as recorded interview clips.

Immigrants in New York City

Professor: Jessica Siegel
ITF: Laurel-Mei Turbin
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/siegel2016/

This site was created for Prof. Jessica Siegel's Seminar 2 course, Spring 2016, Brooklyn College (ITF Laurel-Mei Turbin). The students contributed the following to the site: oral histories, neighborhood tours, and personal immigration narratives.

The Peopling of New York

Professor: Robert Viscusi
ITF: Jennifer Corby
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/viscusi16/#

This site was mostly used for students to submit written work regarding the course readings, as well as to submit travel notes from field trips around the city. There is the most potential in the concept of the Travel Notes section, and this could be fruitful in another class.

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.

Bensonhurst: Two Albanians and a Jew go to 86th Street

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Alexis Carrozza
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/peoplingofbensonhurst/

This site reflects the course’s emphasis on the five senses as an means of ethnographic research. The site does not focus on a particular ethnic group though the annotated bibliography in the Resources section offers insight into the changing demographics of Bensonhurst.

A Day in Downtown Brooklyn

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Alexis Carrozza
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/barclays/

The students conceived their audience as visitors unfamiliar with downtown Brooklyn and as a result created a site that is easy to navigate, informative, and dynamic. Content hosted at the site includes social media, video, audio, photographs that fulfill the course’s focus on ethnographic research using the five senses. The reflection papers from the students demonstrate a thoughtful approach to the project while the site’s functionality reflects the students’ determination that this site be useful to anyone who looking for information about downtown Brooklyn.

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.

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

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.

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.

Cornucopia of Cultures: Welcome to New York City

Professor: Jessica Siegel
ITF: Maggie Galvan
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/siegel2014/

In this course, students investigated certain neighborhoods and ethnic groups with a journalistic eye. Over the course of the semester, they wrote about their own immigration narratives and completed walking tours, interviews, and worker profiles that drew from their chosen neighborhoods and ethnic groups.

The following groups and neighborhoods were the objects of focus in this class:
Pakistanis/Bangladeshis in Kensington, Brooklyn
Jamaicans/Caribbeans in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Russians in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn
Mexicans in Corona, Queens
Ecuadorians in Jackson Heights, Queens
Chinese in Sunset Park, Brooklyn
Haitians in Flatbush, Brooklyn

Religious Life on Staten Island and New York City

Professor: Melissa Borja
ITF: Kamili Posey
Campus: College of Staten Island
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/borja2014/

This spring, the students of Prof. Borja’s Macaulay Honors College seminar studied “The Peopling of New York City,” with a special focus on Staten Island. By conducting original research with archival sources and multilingual oral history interviews, we endeavored to document the rich diversity of religious practices and institutions on Staten Island, the most understudied borough of New York City. Ultimately, our research and our website were motivated by a public-minded commitment to Staten Island. Our goals were to deepen understanding of Staten Island’s changing population, to share stories of religious life on the ground, and to create a public archive in the service of preserving the collective history—and diverse histories—of our community.

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.

New York Dreams

Professor: Constance Rosenblum
ITF: John Boy
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/nydreams/

An immersive storytelling site. The stories presented on this site tell of New Yorkers who chased their dreams — sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. These people traveled very different paths, but they have one thing in common: All of them sought to make a place for themselves in a big, complicated, challenging but often profoundly rewarding metropolis.

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.