Apparently I missed this prompt and did my own thing for Week 5! So here this is now.

(I’m also writing this in a tone that can be used for the website for our projects so please ignore the weird level of formality atypical of me lol)

Hi! My name is Teddy Manning (any pronouns) and I’m a computational linguist and Master’s student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. I have a BA in Linguistics with a minor in Deaf Studies from Boston University, and am currently doing research in authorship attribution, stylometry, and transgender dialectology on Project Map Lemon through the EVL Lab at Duquesne University. My research interests include quantitative linguistics, the aforementioned authorship attribution and stylometry, and textual analysis. With OB&UP, I’m conducting textual analysis of The Great British Baking Show, naturally.

We’re trucking along with lots of great things in the works. Each teammate has been able to make impressive progress on the various moving parts. Elizabeth nailed down our timeline tech and shared various lay-outs with us, with one very closely mirroring the original wireframes right out of the box. Some extra styling once the visual identity is nailed down and it will tie in nicely with the rest of the site. Estefany has started the visual approach was also able to give our outreach plan shape and start building out what has become a really robust contact list.

We have a database structure thanks to Zelda. They walked us through the basics of database vocabulary and functionality and gave great pointers on naming systems to ensure everything is unique and easy to read. This was especially useful to me as I get familiar with the process of transferring my research into something that speaks to the work that everyone else is doing. 

I’ve been focusing on ramping up the research process using the templates I created to guide with our first activist, Absalom Boston of Nantucket, and his participation in the desegregation of Nantucket schools and ensuring equal access to education of all children in Massachusetts. The more I dug in the sources the more I came across leads on other activists and events. It’s a struggle at times to stay on task and not chase down the new information, but I’m doing my best to just note those paths for future reference and stay on task. I realize, more than ever, that this site will be “alive” with edits rolling in as the net gets cast wider and awareness of the texture of that era emerges even more. I  am feeling good that  the data for our first two entries is captured, and, along with the team’s incredible work, it’s clear we are well on our way to bringing MTS to life.

This week has been very fruitful. We’ve been settling more framework questions, but also starting to move into the actual gathering, and creating that will get us to the final expression of the project.

Ramona Peters joined our last team meeting. Ramona, who has graciously agreed to collaborate with us on the project, is a Mashpee Wampanoag tribal member who served as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer and now focuses on the work of the Native Land Conservancy, an organization she founded 10 years ago focused on putting as much Wampanoag land in trust. Ramona is considered a Firekeeper—a keeper of traditions within the tribe and also has extensive experience managing the complicated relationship between scholarship, institutional frameworks, and Indigenous world views. Her initial feedback on our project framework and wireframes included an important reminder that our language must be as accessible as possible to truly make the project successful. Overall, her encouragement and excitement about the work served as an important reminder that this project will be of longer term use and service. 

For my part, I worked to fine tune some aspects of the project flow in Click Up that the team created together, created templates to guide research capture, wrote a budget to account for the $200 available via CUNY, gathered design inspiration to inform Estefany’s work on the visual identity, and started researching our activists. While visiting the National Park Service’s outpost in New Bedford on Sunday, I, by chance, encountered a mention of Mary J. “Polly” Johnson’s heritage as mixed Native and Black. Based on her place of birth and maiden name I feel confident she is Wampanoag, but will need to do a little digging to verify this. Besides being well respected abolitionists and confectioners (!), she and her husband hosted Frederick Douglas when he first captured his freedom. This discovery amplified my excitement about what else may be brought into the light through the work we are doing.  

Regarding data management, I am thankful for Zelda’s expertise and longview. Their design has captured some of the key questions we have: who has access, how do we ensure perpetual availability and usability of the data, and what tools in particular are needed to make that happen. Data management conversations are the most likely to remind you of the precarious legs that DH projects can stand on, and to be honest, I have been considering in what ways to bring these stories, this data, into the real world to make it perhaps more accessible for some but also tied to a lived experience.

Nuraly Soltonbekov is a Political Economist with a minor in Computer Science and a graduate of Kingsborough Community College, and Columbia University. He is also currently enrolled at NYU for masters in History. He is fond of research and the big questions that involve processes in historical narratives. He is also former service member of US armed forces, and does speak Russian, and Turkish dialects which helped a lot in his military career. He was part of HUMINT team, meaning human intelligence gathering at Fort. Carson, CO. His language skills were essential in research and gathering of information for the Department of Defense and helped to create manuals in disinformation. His coding skills are intermediate and he has not coded in a long time but it is still his passion as is history and economics. His most proud work of research had to deal with disinformation in Soviet Union and he will always talk about it when given a chance. He is an introvert, and that is why he chose his subject that are more conducive to introvert people.

Miaoling Xue is a junior scholar whose research focuses on Japanese women’s/gender history, women in literary narratives, multilingual Digital Humanities, and digital tools for premodern studies. She has studied and taught in China, Japan, Canada, and the United States, and her background shaped her awareness and appreciation of cross-cultural understanding and knowledge-sharing. During the rapid shift to remote research and collaboration in the past three years, Miaoling had the opportunity to acquire new digital competencies while managing many collaborative public-facing initiatives. She led a team launching an educational video project (Exploring Premodern Japan) that guides the audience through the world of premodern Japan; she conducted a pilot study on a seventeenth-century Japanese travel account to test how to harness the power of ArcGIS StoryMaps in understanding travel writing and poetry. These attempts show her passion for dedicating greater effort to acknowledging and utilizing digital spaces and tools in order to improve pedagogical practice and connect expert knowledge in Asian Studies/Digital Humanities to the public.

Miaoling serves as the project manager of the Feminist Markup project. She is responsible for coordinating all aspects of the project, from the initial TEI/XML training to the final delivery of customized tagsets and XML models with searchable features. Specifically, she is working with the team to define the overall goals in this phase (spring semester), allocate technical and content resources, and develop plans to mitigate potential risks generated during the experimental process.

I am a tech nerd with tech skepticism at core, an open source enthusiast, avid bug hunter, a privacy concern citizen of the world trying to manage my digital footprint carefully, always glued to my computer with an attitude to help others not to mention spread knowledge that I possess to anybody who needs it. On top of all these, I am fond of learning new things and stand in solidarity for a cause dear to my heart whenever I can.

I hold a bachelor and a master in Computer Science. Right now I am in DH. I have tons of experience doing projects. I worked as an Android System Engineer a while back. I love fixing electronic devices although I lost touch dealing with electronic circuits. My first android phone is the HTC Hero. I compiled android for my phone. De google my phone!! Last few years I worked mostly as a teaching assistant.

My research interests are computational photography, neural networks, financial market analysis, consumer behavior and human psychology. I am fond of analyzing bad data visualization and designing bad experiments to show everyone what not to do. 

I joined Kristy’s project idea with a goal to find a unique challenge that a creative medium like Zine imposes. I am here to test the limit of my ability and handle challenges. I am hoping to have a lot of fun while producing something scholarly.

Since, just the two of us have been working on this project, I do not hold a specific role. We have tons of shared roles. However, I will be the one who will mostly work on the analysis and putting the results out on the web. In that sense, I am the Core developer. We have progressed a lot in the last few days, Thanks to Kristy for all her outreaching effort to reach out to the experts of the field. She is amazing!!

Right now, I am playing the second fiddle. Soon it will be my time to shine!! I have a lot of exciting ideas. I can’t wait to share all my exciting experiments with Zines with you all.

María Fernanda Buitrago is a M.A. student in Digital Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center completing a certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies. She holds a BA in Anthropology and Spanish Literature from Los Andes University, Bogotá, Colombia. Her undergraduate work had an emphasis on cultural analysis, creative writing, pedagogy, and ethnographic research. María has collaborated with diverse communities, including indigenous groups, urban vulnerable youth facing homelessness in Bogotá, migrant women in New York City and rural women victims of SGBV in Colombia. Professionally she has worked in cultural institutions in NYC in a variety of roles, most recently as a Public Programs and Events Coordinator. Among her current interests are collaborating with rural women from the Global South to understand their distinctive forms of authority, resistance and self-determination. She’s also interested in using DH methods and tools for anthropological inquiry, constructing community archives, folksonomies, dialoguing with Latin American ontologies and epistemologies, and researching Colombian indigenous, women and peasant writers.

María joins the Feminist Markup JWDP as an Outreach Coordinator. Her work focuses on sourcing technical and content support for the development of the tagsets, definitions and TEI/XML structure as well as finding opportunities to collaborate with any interested groups. She also contributes to the encoding of the XML files, like the rest of the members. Her interest in joining the project comes from her desire to learn more about the intersection between TEI/XML and feminist methodologies and frameworks for culturally diverse and non-english materials.

Estefany Marlen Gonzaga was born in Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico, and raised in Queens, New York. She is the program coordinator of the Student Success Mentor (SSM) Program at LaGuardia Community College (LaGCC). She began her academic career at LAGCC in 2014.   In the Fall of 2022, Estefany became a  student in the Digital Humanities program at the CUNY Graduate Center. As coordinator of the SSM program, she recruits, trains, and guides peer mentors to support First Year students taking the First Year Seminar Studio Hour. During the Studio Hour, SSMs mentor and teach students how to create an ePortfolio. Her research interest includes Student Success, Peer Mentorship, digital learning, and technology in the classroom.

She joined the More Than Surviving Team and is excited to learn and support the creation of an archive of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. Her role in the project is Community Outreach Coordinator – (Online Outreach and Social Media Strategy and her secondary roles are UX Designer and Researcher.

Majel Peters is a Mashpee Wampanoag communication designer with 20 years of experience working in marketing and design, and a first-year student in the Digital Humanities MA program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her passion lies in the art and practice of communication in its many forms, with a special interest in visual design, public history and collective memory. Majel’s work has included the development of strategy, messaging, and creative direction of for- and non-profit brand identities and campaigns. Her past clients have included The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, Carnegie Hall, Brooks Running, Digital Peace Now, Ted Turner Reserves, Supermajority, Committee to Project Journalists, and Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Majel is research lead and co-project manager of More Than Surviving, a public history project she conceived that focuses on resurfacing and celebrating expressions of Wampanoag political agency in antebellum United States.

Zelda Marcela Montes is a non-binary Latine software engineer and first-year M.A. student in Digital Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center. After learning how to code in a high school summer program, Zelda continued pursuing their interest in technology, ultimately graduating from Yale University with a B.A. in Computer Science in May of 2022. Throughout their time at Yale, Zelda worked multiple part-time jobs and served in community roles advocating for underrepresented and marginalized folks in tech during the semester, and worked multiple Software Engineering and Data Science internships during the summers. Zelda’s research interests include urban, gender, and ethnic studies, and they are often looking for ways to bring these areas of passion into the work they do in technology.

Zelda joined More Than Surviving as Lead Developer and Data Management Designer. They are responsible for creating the web application in Python and Django, designing the API to handle PostgreSQL database management, and  constructing the interactive map of Wampanoag political events from 1830-1850, using MapBox GL JS and GeoJSON.