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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here to Stay NYC

Professor: Lina Newton
ITF: Tommy Wu
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/heretostaynyc/

This is a public-facing site for the class (in addition to a class site for administration). I'm using the Kerouac theme here and I have mixed feelings about it. Aesthetically, I think it looks great but there are also some bugs and limitations (if students don't want to use CSS). Overall, I would recommend it because the student groups took ownership of the site and spent a lot time perfecting their profile pages. They seemed to be proud of what they have produced. I think this would be a good example for future students.

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.

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.

Astoria: The Falafel Squad

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

This site explores Astoria by documenting the sites, sounds, scents, textures, and tastes that the students experienced while visiting the neighborhood. The site’s organization and content reflects the course’s emphasis on ethnographic research using the five senses. The group put together a brief but informative history of Astoria and the inclusion of demographic data is especially helpful. One suggestion to improve on the site’s exploration of Astoria might be a comparison between the quantitative data about the demographics and the students’ qualitative data (field notes, reflections, etc.). How do their experiences reflect, refute, correspond, etc. to the data?

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.

Weddings of New York

Professor: David Rosenberg
ITF: Anna Gjika
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/weddingsofnewyork/

This site focuses on weddings in Jewish, Chinese and Indian subcontinent immigrant communities as a way of examining the experiences of these groups with assimilation and acculturation in New York City, and American culture more broadly.

The Astoria Project

Professor: Christos Ioannides
ITF: Caroline Erb
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ioannides16_astoriaproject/

Professor Christos Ioannides’ students created a site to highlight the demographic changes, cultural outlets, institutions, and commercial ventures of Greeks in Astoria, Queens. The website showcases the highlights of the Greek community as Astoria rapidly gentrifies. Each student authored a page for the site and the entire class revised different portions of the website.

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.

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.

Astoria Project: A Brief Overview of Life in Astoria, Queens

Professor: Christos Ioannides
ITF: Caroline Erb-Medina
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ioannides15_astoriaproject

Welcome to the Astoria Project, a website completed by the Macaulay Honors College students of Dr. Christos Ioannides’ Seminar 2 course, The Peopling of New York. Students used WordPress and custom CSS coding to create an in-depth view of the cultural, historical, and social aspects of one of the most important ethnic enclaves in New York City. These aspects, as you will see as you explore the site, range from the influence of the Greek Orthodox Church to the importance of soccer in the area. The class hopes that their efforts and the website will give you an insight into how important and amazing Astoria, NY is.

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

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.

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!

The Peopling of Astoria, NY

Professor: Sofya Aptekar
ITF: Fiona Lee
Campus: Hunter College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sa14

This website showcases the work of Macaulay Honors students at Hunter College in Seminar 2: The Peopling of New York in spring 2014. Focusing on the neighborhood of Astoria in western Queens, students investigated the role of immigration and migration in shaping the New York City’s identity— past, present, and future. Students maintained a Class Blog, discussing issues such as immigration, diversity, public space, gentrification, segregation through analyses of current events. As a supplement to their final research papers, they also created short documentaries that showcased a selection of their findings about the neighborhood.