Category Archives: Skillsets

Skill sets for Praxis Project

Hello!  I have been Felicity since I moved to New York City in the 1970s and started teaching students just a little younger than I. Until then, the name most frequently applied to me was Flip. So now, I’m relaxing into both names. I’m quite a bit older, so I have years of experience, but I’m very new at digital thought and applications. My life background seems to fall into three loose categories:

1) My academic background includes a musicology degree with a focus on 20th century music and a thesis on pianist Art Tatum, a nearly blind, phenomenally creative jazz musician who redefined the meaning of pianistic virtuosity for nearly everyone who heard him. In 2020 I completed a BA in psychology from CCNY, where I studied all that I could learn about sound, music, the brain, hearing, listening, interpretation, perception, neuropsychology, and the therapeutic applications of music.

2) As a musician/pianist, I’ve worked with choirs and ensembles, but mostly as an entertainer in piano bars (old days) or in various situations with elderly people, most often in an institutional setting. I’ve also participated as a pianist in a music therapy group for several years.

3) As an executive assistant for 27 years to a man who co-founded a major conglomerate in the 1950s, and who pursued his dreams (usually just a little too early for success), I sometimes experienced life at the very exciting edge of possibility. During parts of the last seven or eight years of our work together, he dictated his memories, and I typed them into the computer as fast as I could. After we closed the office, I worked for the next two years to produce a two-volume privately published memoir for his family and colleagues.

Attempting to turn these experiences into skill sets for digital humanities applications and labels pertinent to digital projects is a challenge.

Project Management: I’ve been in many situations where I had to keep track of a variety of activities, organize, and maintain order in a timely fashion. I believe I can play a responsible part in this area, although I’ve never led or managed a team. I’ve taught school, so that in some respects represents a team leadership position.

Outreach: I have just been helping in the online promotion of a virtual recital that involved online research, large mailings of a poster with an embedded registration link, and an online letter, customized for each recipient, to transport information in a practical, efficient, and, hopefully, enticing manner. I have joined Facebook and Linked In but rarely go near these outlets. On the other hand, I am very interested in exploring music participation via Zoom, and I believe that such arenas provide opportunities we barely imagined a few years ago.

Developer and Designer: Skills:  At this moment, I have no computer language skills. For a MALS class last year, I created a WordPress web site called “Morningside Heights Reflections 1961-2020.”  For it I created a photographic exploration of three distinctive characteristic of the area:  Historic Designations; Monuments and Statues, and Institutions. To these I applied seven themes from Jane Jacobs’ historic study, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It’s clunky, but it was a solid start in thinking about how to put things together on a site. (Available on the Commons if anyone is interested.)

I’m especially interested in focusing on accessibility, community building for a shared purpose, and simplicity, and I’m happy to play almost any role that would be useful.

 

Nelson’s Skillset

This is Nelson’s Skillset

Development:

  • Github,
  • HTML
  • ArcGIS
  • Tableau online

Design/UX: Experience with Graphic design,

  • Photoshop
  • inDesign

Outreach/Social Media:

  • Various Social Media sites
  • Canvassing
  • Interpersonal communication skills

Documentation:

  • Writing
  • Note taker
  • Organizing

Research:

  • Online research
  • Surveys
  • Presentation

Robin’s skillset

Hi everyone, I’m Robin. I am a librarian by training and currently work as an Open Educational Technologist as part of the GC Digital Initiatives team supporting Manifold, an open-source digital publishing platform. I have an MS in Library and Information Science, with advanced certificates in Digital Humanities and Spatial Analysis & Design. Before joining the GC Digital Initiatives team I worked as an Open Educational Resources librarian at City Tech, CUNY.

Project Management: I regularly manage a least one project, but often two or three, in my current position. Happy to play this role, if needed.

Development: I have experience with Github, html, CSS, Markdown, and mapping platforms such as ArcGIS, QGIS, and Storymaps, as well as Tableau and Gephi (though I have not used them in a while!). I am always interested in adding to my skills in this area.

Design/UX: I think about and work with folks everyday on design and UX so I have a ton of experience here. I am also skilled in accessibility, something I feel should be at the top of everyone’s list when they build a digital project.

Outreach/Social Media: I do a considerable amount of outreach and social media in my current position. I enjoy outreach. I am pretty neutral when it comes to social media. I do it as part of my job, but I can’t say I love it, but I don’t hate it and I know it is important element of many projects.

Documentation: I write up documentation all the time. I am currently part of a team that is rewriting all the documentation, technical and how-tos, for the Manifold application so I have a ton of experience with documentation.

Research: I enjoy research and regularly do it as part of my current job as well as research and writing for journal articles, and book chapters.

Benjamin’s Skillset

Hi everybody.

Nice meeting you all last week. I’m Benjamin and this is my first semester at CUNY so I’m still new to DH, but I’m excited about the pitches and to start working on the projects. I have a background in media production and ethnographic studies with teaching experiences at different levels. I have combined my skills in ethnographic methods and media by working on creating podcasts and video documentaries for different projects, NGO’s and educational material. Before arriving in New York I was working as a campaign leader, where I, together with a team, created educational material and raised awareness about women rights in Ethiopia. As it is my first semester I’m not an expert in DH, but I find it very interesting working with the digital in connection to education, communities and making humanities studies more accessible to a larger group of people.

I’m open to taking on different roles and enjoy working on team projects and a collaborative approach.

Project manager:
This is a role I previously have taken on for several projects, and I could do it again if necessary, but I enjoy working more with the creative aspects of a project and less in managing.
Developer:
Unfortunately my knowledge in developing is quite little, but I’m eager to learn more and this is also one of the reasons why I find this course interesting. I have learned and worked with visual and audio programs like photoshop, adobe premiere and illustrator and have also created content for webpages in those formats.

Design/UX:
As mentioned above I have worked with different graphic and design programs like photoshop, illustrator, and InDesign. I’m not an expert though. I find it interesting to work with visual communications, and would like to explore it more. With my background in ethnographic studies, I have also worked with conducting surveys and researching users’ preferences, needs etc. when creating products.

Outreach/social Media:Through my job as a campaign leader I worked with communication, outreach and social media to engage people in the project and create awareness about the educational material. If nobody feels like doing it, I could take on this role in a group, but I would also be up for a more collaborative role and sharing my knowledge.

Documentation:
I find this an interesting part of projects and a good way to evaluate the process throughout. Most of my documentation experiences come from using visual and audio methods rather than writing.

Research:
I have studied and since worked on ethnographic research projects both in academia and industry. I feel confident in designing, conducting and analyzing ethnographic research, and if it makes sense for the project, I could do that again. I have also worked with researching historical sources though my studies, but primarily in a european context.

Raquel Neris Skillset

As a service designer and learning experience designer, my career involves developing innovative solutions using design as the key for human-centered services for companies and designing and facilitating learning experiences to help people and organizations master the innovation mindset and tools. 

I am currently Student Engagement Coordinator at OpenLab at BMCC and co-founder of Educar 3.0, a startup that develops educational games about financial literacy for students in Brazilian schools.

I have a Bachelor’s degree in Social Communication, a Graduate degree in Interaction Design, and a Master’s degree in Communication and Education.

___

Project Management: Since I have seven years working as a product owner in my startup and mentoring teams in service design projects, I feel comfortable playing this role. I’m good at helping teams work collaboratively and with a focused mindset, enabling them to easily organize tasks and meet deadlines. My approach also involves using agile frameworks, such as Scrum and Kanban. 

Design/UX: My professional background includes 13 years of working in different areas of design, including service and UX design, learning experience design, and graphic design, so I feel comfortable playing this role in the team.

Development: I have a very basic understanding of HTML, and that’s it. However, that is something that I would like to develop during this course.

Outreach/Social Media: Since I don’t have much experience working with inbound marketing, my knowledge of social media algorithms is relatively low. However, I feel comfortable exploring it. I also don’t have any problem with reaching out to people with cold calling, and I like the idea of organizing events to promote community building.

Research/Documentation: I have good experience developing ethnographic research to understand user needs and pain points. I also have good experience in academic research, which includes using coding in qualitative research with tools such as Nvivo and Dedoose.

Brian Millen Skillset

Project management: While I do not have specific experience working in project management, I do have experience in operations coordination, coordinating between different teams at a social media company. My job was to receive common complaints coming from the user’s of the mobile application and work with the tech team to address these issues. This required the skills of organization, communication, and coordinating between different teams’ and individuals’ workflows, making me comfortable taking on a position of project management.

Design/UX: While I did not work directly with design and product management at the social media company, I worked closely with user experiences of the mobile app, giving me insight into user experience on digital platforms. Although I would not be interested in taking on this position directly, I do believe it is something I could provide insight into.

Documentation/Research & writing: Coming from a humanities background, I believe writing to be one of my stronger skills. Furthermore, with my job at the social media company, I was responsible for documenting help articles and FAQ’s for the platform’s Customer Care team. Either of these roles would be my preferred contribution.

Developer: This is the dimension I have probably the least experience in, but it is also where I would like to grow the most in. I would be interested in taking a secondary position in assisting with the more technical aspects of the project.

Faihaa’s Skillset

Hey guys! My name is Faihaa (pronounced Fai as in Hi and then ha). I have a bachelors of arts in English and I am currently working part time at a news company where my duties include desk supervision, customer service and typist work! When I’m not part time at my job I’m here at the GC being a part time student. As a second year in the DH program I’ve had my fair share of time spent working in certain computer programs but I still have so much to learn. With every class taken I hope to broaden my skill set in the world of data and tech.

Project Management– I have had experience in managerial duties at work. I’m good at organizing tasks and keeping up communication with those that I’m working with. With that being said I’m not particularly comfortable taking on a leader role for a project I did not create, however if no one else in the group wants to take this role on I would be happy to accept.

Design/UX–  I don’t have much technical expertise in this field yet (currently learning) but I am definitely a person who highly believes that the visuals aesthetics of the data presented is just as important as the data itself. I can offer ideas on how to present findings and look into art work to help accompany the project.

Documentation- Depending on the scope of the project this may be a rather large role to take on, but I am willing to do it. Because I can’t offer much on data programming and designing, I will be more than happy to keep track of notes, findings, pictures, locations, names etc. I can create and maintain excel spreadsheets and google docs if need be.

Outreach/Social Media- As someone who is right on the cusp between millennial and gen Z… let’s just say I’m no stranger to social media. I am comfortable with taking on this role if no one else wants to do it.

Developer- Unfortunately this is not my field of expertise.

Research– I’m able to look up information to help find valuable resources but I tend to heavily rely on the internet as my main source. .

 

Connie Cordon Skillsets

Design/UX: I studied Communication Design with a concentration in Illustration from Pratt Institute. I have experience as a design assistant at Rizzoli, a publishing company focusing on fashion, interior design, culinary, art, architecture, and photography, and as a design intern for freelance graphic designer Billy Gray. My most recent design position was an apprentice at the advertising agency Ogilvy in the art department as a storyboard artist. I have experience in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator.

Project Manager: A skillset I do not have official experience with. One small example of project management I took on was at my previous retail job, in which I designed the front floral display of the store in coordination with the store manager and the sign maker. Tasks included ordering inventory from vendors and suppliers and securing shipment and arrival times, managing inventory by stocking and cataloging products, reporting discrepancies in inventory that indicate theft or quality issues in products, calculating daily sales, and generating displays for holiday seasons during the pandemic– a time in which sales were at an all-time low.

Developer: I have beginner knowledge of HTML and CSS, but am not proficient. I took my first introductory class to Javascript last semester where I created a website mapping out sites of personal importance to an author in her graphic memoir Fun Home.

Outreach/Social Media: My use of social media is limited in that it has mostly been geared towards using it as a platform for my illustration portfolio.

Documentation: During my undergrad at Pratt, my pieces involved creating collages from photographs found in the photo archive at the Pratt Library or researching old photos on online archives. I believe in this context, documentation skills is something I am interested in expanding further and am eager to get hands-on experience.

Research: My experience with research has been limited to academic papers. Writing is not my strongest suite, but it is something I am eager to improve my skills on. During my undergrad at Pratt, my self-driven illustration projects for senior thesis involved extensive research on sexual trauma during early years, medias interpretation of sexual trauma and how it is portrayed in cinema, censorship laws concerning art, and the morality of advertising.

Hampton’s Skillset

Hi folks! As was established in class last week, my name is Hampton and I’m entering this Methods & Practices course without having taken the introductory portion, so bear with me as I work to quickly patch up the gaps that will inevitably exist in my DH-friendly skillsets. Consistent with this unorthodox approach to class registration is my academic and professional background. After finding myself unemployed due to the pandemic after years spent in management roles throughout the food and beverage industry, I set to work wrapping up a long-overdue Communications & Media degree and finally graduated this past semester. Throughout my grand return to undergrad, my work primarily focused on surveillance technologies, algorithmic accountability, and general “Big Tech” criticism, with each typically explored through the theoretical lens of neo-Marxist thought associated with the Frankfurt School and its contemporary Digital Age derivatives (e.g., my capstone project was titled Physiognomy, Facial Recognition Technologies, and Biopower). It is through the amalgamation of these interests that I came across the Digital Humanities field and though I don’t have a hyper-focused project of my own to pitch at this point, I’m ecstatic to begin work on one of the many excellent pitches I’m seeing here on the Commons.

Project Management: Though my history of project management has been confined to such environments as coffee roasting operations and restaurants, I’m fairly confident in the transferability of this skill into an academic setting. While I would assume the person who pitches the project would prefer to take on this role, I’d be happy to do so in the event that they would rather focus on research, design, etc. That said, I recognize that my inexperience in all things Digital Humanities has the potential to cause some hiccups here.

Design/UX: One of my main hopes in joining the Digital Humanities program was to acquire a technical skillset that would allow me to contribute to projects in this way but seeing as it has only been two weeks, I, unfortunately, have little to offer here. Though it may be irrelevant, I’m a decent digital artist and have used my illustrations for research projects in the past.

Outreach/Social Media: I haven’t been on social media in almost 4 years and am not wildly eager to return. But, for the sake of the project, I’ll take this role on if need be.

Documentation | Research & Writing: I chose to lump these two skills together because I feel equally prepared and thrilled to take on roles relating to either. Even outside of an academic setting, I’m a massive sitting-in-silence-reading-and-taking-notes enthusiast so I feel as if, at this point in my fledgling DH career, this is the area in which I could offer the most.

Kai’s Skillsets

Hi! I’m Kai. I work as a Data Engineer, which is a very specialized software engineering that writes code to replicate and ingest data, transforms data semantically,  orchestrates repeated processes, and provides the DevOps/SysAdmin support and automation for all those activities. I am a recovering product manager. My academic background is in literature, especially the transatlantic 18th and 19th century sort, and medieval literature. My enrollment in the Digital Humanities program is done in the spirit of mashing up my technical skills and humanistic topics of inquiry.

In general, if any project group wants an opinion on tradeoffs between multiple technical solutions, I’m happy to provide it, as I’m generally literate in this way. Throwing that out there.

Design/UX: This realm is not really my strong suit. I would not enjoy contributing to this facet of a project.

Development: I’m a SQL expert. Although I consider myself a hacker, I can write professional data pipelines in Python (and on the JVM), and have orchestration experience with Apache Airflow to refresh and ingest new data from defined sources, and monitor that process. Fairly decent at scrapping data from API/websites too. I am interest in expanding my skills in two areas if the project I’m on allows for it:

  1. Text analysis/natural language processing, including sentiment analysis, topic modeling, word2vec and potentially machine learning to aid in the above, that would be something I’d like to help with. Python (e.g Gensim) for medium to large corpora, or Scala (e.g. Spark) for very large corpora (unlikely I think for these semester projects I think).
  2. I’ve had a recent but abiding interest in learning Ruby on Rails 7 because of its reemphasis solo developer web applications and quick time from idea to prototype. It would also be entirely new to me. If you’re project needs more features and flexibility than what CBOX offers, let’s discuss.

Documentation: I love reading and writing documentation. I’d be happy doing this for almost any project or subject matter.

Outreach: I do not have an active social media presence, having deleted my accounts years ago. That said, if it benefits the project and there’s no one suitable to do the work, I’m fine helping out in this way. Just don’t expect a large network to come in tow.

Project management: I have quite a bit of professional experience in this for go-to-market and software projects. If it’s important to track project status, I can help out in a pragmatic way by adding just enough process to help out teammates and throw off enough info to report how the project is coming along. I don’t particularly want to do this, but it’s fine if it helps out the team I’m on.

Research: I would like to become better at this. I can use Google, and backtrace through bibliographies and works cited. But I’m fuzzy on resources, and I’ve never engaged the GC library, so I feel a bit behind and rusty in terms of my research skills.