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."

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.

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.

An Expedition into Chinatown

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

This site explores the transformation and gentrification of Chinatown. Includes a history of the neighborhood in the form of an interactive timeline and textual and audio-visual accounts of the neighborhood through the five senses

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

People of the Ridge

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

This site explores Bay Ridge from the perspective of three student residents. They walk through the neighborhood and provide a visual and textual demonstration of the "surprisingly linear wealth gradient"

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.

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.

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?

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.

Five Dudes Walk Into Brighton

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

This site provides a comprehensive introduction to Brighton Beach as told by the five group members. This class focused on the “five senses” as a lens to understand the neighborhood and the site content reflects this approach: audio of sounds, video interviews with residents, and field notes from the trips taken to the neighborhood.

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.

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.

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.

From Residences to Retail: The Commercialization of 57th Street

Professor: Richard Ocejo
ITF: Kevin Ambrose
Campus: John Jay
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/57thstreet/

57th Street is a very dynamic street in New York City representing decades of architectural and commercial developments. As we make our way from the West Side of Manhattan towards the East, take note of the inherent differences that come to light, not only in the buildings along 57th Street but also in the people who make up the society of the area. The phases of New York City over the years can be found on this single street in Manhattan.

Clash of Cultures: Fort Greene

Professor: Richard Ocejo
ITF: Kevin Ambrose
Campus: John Jay
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/clashofculturesfortgreene/

In this website you can learn about the neighborhood of Fort Greene, the process of gentrification it is undergoing, and the issues occurring as a result of it.

Walking Wall Street

Professor: Richard Ocejo
ITF: Kevin Ambrose
Campus: John Jay
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/walkingwallstreet/

A virtual tour of a changing neighborhood

The changing colors of williamsburg

Professor: Richard Ocejo
ITF: Kevin Ambrose
Campus: John Jay
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/williamsburggraffittiart/

THE GENTRIFICATION OF STREET ART

Exceptional NYC

Professor: Lina Newton
ITF: Christina Nadler
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/exceptionalnyc/

This is a site created by Prof Lina Newton’s Seminar 2 course–the Peopling of New York City.

Students worked in groups throughout the semester to undertake research on 5 immigrant groups–Chinese, Haitian, Dominican, Russian and Mexican. In these posts you can find the key findings of the research, statistical profiles, and researched narratives on the history of the immigrant group’s migration & settlement.

Enjoy exploring the projects on the exceptional histories of NYC residents!

A Tale of Two Coney Islands

Professor: Richard Ocejo
ITF: Scott Henkle
Campus: John Jay
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ocejospring2014coneyisland/

This was one of three sites created for the course. The other two were: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ocejospring14chinatown/ and http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ocejospring14chelsea/

Gentrification* In Chelsea

Professor: Richard Ocejo
ITF: Scott Henkle
Campus: John Jay
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ocejospring14chelsea/

This site was one of three created for the course. The other two were: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ocejospring14chinatown/ and http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ocejospring2014coneyisland/

Exploring the Gentrification of Chinatown Through Eateries

Professor: Richard Ocejo
ITF: Scott Henkle
Campus: John Jay
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ocejospring14chinatown/

This site was one of three created in the course. The others include: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ocejospring14chelsea/ and http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ocejospring2014coneyisland/

The Peopling of New York

Professor: Prabal De
ITF: Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/de2014/

This is the full course site for Professor Prabal De’s Spring 2014 Seminar 2 course. There is another site on the encyclopedia that belongs to his class – “Surviving Sandy’ – which can be accessed through this site. This site is focused on a collection of each student’s personal immigration stories, and their reflections on the content of the course. It features blog post reflections on their field trips and assignments, as well as personal immigration story videos that they recorded either alone or in groups. These videos can be found under the “our stories” tab, as well as by clicking each student’s name on the home page.
The site contains reflections on as many ethnic groups and neighborhoods as there are represented in the students of this class.