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.
Caribbean New York
Professor: Jennifer Lutton
ITF: Katherine Logan McBride
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/caribbeannewyork16/
Students in the course worked to understand the transnational connections between the Caribbean (specifically the West Indies and Haiti) and New York City from the early 20th century to the current context, and the influences they have had on each other’s cultural, political, and economic development. We explored theories of transnationalism, mobility, and diaspora to examine the impact of multidirectional flows of Caribbean people, culture, goods, and ideas enlivened by contemporary communication and transportation technologies.
Throughout the semester students contributed scaffolded assignments to a course website, building a repository of notes, data, papers, sources, scripts for their research and worked in small groups to curate a multimedia online exhibition to present what they learned. Group projects explore: political economy; music and dance; gender and identity through art and literature; media in the diaspora; and cultural identity through food.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
Flatbush-Ditmas Ethnography Project!
Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Alexis Carrozza
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/danielacadiadanyelle/
This site explores the large neighborhood(s) of Flatbush-Ditmas in Brooklyn. The strength of this website is the very clear geographic boundaries that help visitors understand the differences in languages, ethnicities, and retail offerings within a single neighborhood.
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.