This is Nelson’s Skillset
Development:
Design/UX: Experience with Graphic design,
Outreach/Social Media:
Documentation:
Research:
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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. .
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.
The Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies workshop session began with an acknowledgment that Manhattan was originally Lenape land, as well as a brief reflection on how to decolonize both online and physical spaces. It was also mentioned that much of Manhattan was constructed by enslaved Africans, performing forced labor on land that originally belonged to the indigenous population.
Manhattan was indeed ceded territory, purchased in May of 1626 for the sum of “60 guilders.” Below you will find an example of a well-preserved guilder from 1682, courtesy of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Estimates of the value of this sum in modern currency vary, but there is a consensus that it was worth no more than $15,000 in today’s USD.
We then read a poem together – “There is an Edge: Ode to Radical Imagination, by Adrienne Maree Brown.” We had a discussion during which we discussed how the edge of our imagination is an internal, imaginary boundary that we impose on ourselves instead of a physical, tangible border.
The workshop leader, Alicia Peaker, explained that this oracle was based on the idea of tarot, and announced that she had already prepared several ‘readings,’ based upon the deck. The deck itself consists primarily of Value Cards, Object Cards, and various Situation Cards.
Some examples of Values include but are not limited to: Resilience, Queerness, Agency, Consent, Diversity, and Decoloniality, in no particular order.
Object Cards include but are not limited to: Wine, Trash Bins, Spoons, Lipstick, Bread, and Bacteria, in no particular order.
Situation Cards are more complex. My favorites? “Use Technology as a Tool for Feminist Resistance,” and “Amplify the Narratives of Women and Queer Persons.”
There is only one Bodies card, and it reads: “You carry the stories of the body and the territories you inhabit.” This card is intended to go along with each and every reading, as a visual reminder to be gentle to ourselves and each other, as well as to take steps to decolonize our spaces and our thinking. It encourages us to think about our bodies, our burdens, and our respective privileges. This card enables us to meditate on the relationship between ourselves, our bodies, and the bodies of land we inhabit. It helps us draw a distinct border between our minds and our bodies, in order to blur and indeed cross that line, or at the very least, become aware of it.
I was placed in a breakout room with two of my colleagues in DH from another college outside the CUNY system. Our reading seemed to stump us at first; our object with which to build was Bacteria, our value was socio-environmental justice, and our situation was “to defend the right to freedom of political, religious, and sexual expression.”
Our Body card was there, a pertinent reminder of the Earth we all share, and our thoughts turned to the literal earth – the soil beneath our feet, teeming with good bacteria and decomposers tirelessly performing the work of renewal and recycling, without any expectation of thanks or praise.
And yet they are vital. They are from the earth, of the earth, and to the earth, they shall return. Rich soil is full of nutrients and natural fertilizers only because of the presence of bacteria. This was fundamental as much as it was foundational.
One avenue of conversation we ambled down was fraught by our situation – how do we ensure freedom of political, and especially religious, expressions, when the idea of the tree of life, evolutionary theory, Darwinism, etc. was so diametrically opposed to the Judeo-Christian worldview, cosmogony, and Creation stories?
We decided the world needed more of what we called “bacterial literacy” – knowledge of how important our microbiome is, teachings about ecology and the role of bacteria in the cycle of life, and environmental microbiology, sometimes known as microbial ecology. We needed to change the narrative that soil is “dirty” and that dirt, and by extension, the bacteria it harbors, is by nature distasteful and repugnant. We needed to re-envision a world where leaves aren’t meticulously raked each autumn, and are instead allowed to rot into the good and giving ground, in order to provide vital nutrients for next season’s vegetation. We needed to reclaim the land that has been lost to lawns, and spread awareness of water waste and bee colony collapse.
In this vein, we called our project “Land Reclamation and Lawn Reimagination.”
You can see more of our thoughts below. We grappled with things like food insecurity, indigenous land wisdom, the Swedish concept of allemansrätten, our shared wariness of our local Homeowner’s Associations, and in the end, the concept of our collective mortality itself.
When we gathered back towards the end of the workshop, I was energized and pleased with what we had thought about, created, ideated about, and accomplished. I think we all walked out of the room with a new perspective on bacteria, but my most important takeaway was and remains this: That together, we can solve problems and build new technologies, find solutions and forge a path towards a brighter, more inclusive future. Alone, we are doomed to travel the beaten path. Together, we can make and take the road not yet built; we can strive to co-create a better future for us all. Together, we are unstoppable.
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.
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:
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.
