Kahdeidra’s Preliminary Project Brief

Religion plays a central role in the lives of many New Yorkers. According to the 2014 Religious Landscape Study of the Pew Research Center, 56% of adults in New York state believe in God with absolute certainty, 45% believe that religion is very important in their lives, and 48% pray at least once daily. While religion and spirituality are important to New Yorkers, African diasporic religions (ADRs) are often marginalized, misrepresented, or left out altogether. There is a need for a unified space where people can find multimedia presentations covering a range of ADRs that are practiced in NY state, and in NYC in particular.

In doing preliminary research, I found a website devoted to NYC religions, “A Journey Through NYC Religions,” but not surprisingly, African diasporic religions are otherized. They literally fall under the category of “Other.” As an afterschool program coordinator, I attended trainings by the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. They were truly inclusive of world religions. The problem is that only a small, self-selecting group of schools and youth development programs will access their trainings. What about the teacher who identifies bullying of students that is rooted in both racism and religious prejudice? What about the youth whose families practice one or more ADRs, but they are scared to mention it in school, hiding a critical aspect of their identities? We need tools that are universally accessible and that can support individuals in navigating complex conversations.

I want to create an internet space that promotes faces, voices, and geographic locations from these communities.  My target audience is teachers, adolescent youth, and college level students. It would include the following:

  • short written articles with links
  • religious songs and music videos
  • video footage of interviews with religious leaders and heads of cultural institutions in each borough
  • data visualization and mapping to illustrate where populations and places of worship are in each borough
  • Interactive educational games based on the content of the website

I envision that the website will be designed for both desktop and mobile access. Users can be at home, in school, at the library, or anywhere where internet access is available. I intend to use Commons software to design the website because WordPress is a common platform. Another alternative platform would be Wix, as it allows for a more engaging interface. I currently maintain a website my own website that was designed on Wix and am somewhat familiar with the tools. I would pay for the yearly hosting of the site through my publishing company, Dimonet Connect Publishing LLC. I would need to look into sponsorships as a possibility.

For the educational games, I am not yet sure of which software to use or websites to use as a model. I will build the basic design for the website and will need to enlist the help of a videographer to record interviews. I had originally planned to produce all of the content, but someone suggested to me that I could find a way to invite community members to submit content, as well. I will need to give this more thought.

Filipa’s Project Brief: Social Annotation

As any English teacher knows, a student’s personal engagement with literature is very difficult to track. In higher education especially, students are expected to complete the reading by themselves and come to class prepared to discuss the texts. But how can teachers gauge the student’s reading experience? And how can they encourage active reading strategies at home? The fact is that reading consists of largely isolated and invisible work, which remains inaccessible to teachers and other students. Furthermore, the habit of responding to text requires thoughtful cultivation through practice and modeling. Many students do not know how to close-read a text, much less to think critically about their responses and questions. How can teachers stimulate the student’s reading process, the moments of insight and questioning that occurs during the act of reading? Building the skills of active and critical reading calls for extensive dialogue between teachers and students, which is difficult to facilitate outside the face-to-face interaction of the classroom.

This proposal explores digital annotation as a solution to making solitary reading practices more visible, and accordingly, social. I aim to modify an existing annotation tool to use in my English 220: Introduction to Writing about Literature class at Hunter College. In general, annotation tools allow students to comment directly on the reading by highlighting the text and typing in their own response. The comments are then indicated to other users by highlighted text, to which they can respond. This tool will be implemented with careful consideration to the intended user, who is a CUNY student in an English class. Living in New York City, this student must make the most of the work spaces available to her, from the library to the subway car. The tool will function on all devices, especially cell phones, to allow accessibility for students on the move. Besides being used to guide independent reading, the tool will also facilitate less vocal students’ responses to texts in the classroom. Overall, the tool will maximize participation from CUNY students, fostering a social reading environment inside and outside the classroom. It will be deployed online, as a plugin for WordPress so that students can use it across all devices (without having to download or configure it) anywhere they have wifi service. Additionally, I hope to make it compatible with the CUNY Academic Commons, which I currently use to teach my English course at Hunter. To build this tool, I will borrow from the existing, open source annotation tools, Annotator.js and Hypothes.is. Though they look slightly different, both tools allow users to comment directly on digital text and to read each others’ comments. The complete code for both projects is on Github, and both Annotator.js and Hypothes.is encourage extension of their work, showcasing how others have customized the tool.

My project will build on either Annotator.js or Hypothes.is, modifying their tool for more flexibility and visibility. Annotator.js is a javascript library that can be added to virtually any webpage. To use the tool, users highlight the desired text and type their response in a simple text box that appears. After saving the response, the original text now appears highlighted, and users may view the annotation by hovering the mouse over the highlighted text. By clicking on this text, users then can add their own annotations, which will appear below the previous annotation. Annotator.js is made to be easily extensible, and Hypothes.is is one of its more popular developments, which is also extensible. Hypothes.is works similarly to Annotator.js, but it includes options for different reading modes and group reading. Users can control the visibility of their annotations by working in “public”,  “private” or “group” mode, as well as making all annotations temporarily invisible, to display a clean interface. Additionally, rather than rendering or “floating” the annotations over the text, Hypothes.is stores them in a sidebar, which can be expanded or minimized by the user. The sidebar allows for threaded conversations, where users can respond to specific comments. Hypothes.is, unlike Annotator.js, is also integrated as a wordpress plugin on the CUNY Academic Commons, and I am currently using Hypothes.is in my English 220 class at Hunter. Using this tool in my classroom has opened my eyes to its drawbacks and potential. My ideal version of the tool would make annotations more visible and interactive. In this version, the only formatting options are for bold or italicized text. My implementation would offer more extensive formatting options, allowing for different sizes and colors, so that students can read the annotations from a projected screen (in a classroom) and use color-coding to indicate different kinds of responses. Also, I would include more social features, such as voting or “liking” buttons, to encourage students to respond to their classmates’ comments.

To build this tool, I will have to familiarize myself with the existing codebase for Annotator.js and/or Hypothes.is, and be comfortable enough with several coding languages to make changes. Though I have implemented both Hypothes.is and Annotator.js in my past teaching and research, I have never built or customized anything with this level of complexity, and I’ve certainly never written code from scratch. From browsing the documentation and Github repositories for these tools, I sense that I would need proficiency in (at least) HTML, CSS, Javascript, and perhaps Python. I feel comfortable enough with HTML and CSS, and have a working knowledge of Javascript and Python. At this point, I anticipate that I would need to focus on strengthening my CSS and Javascript ability in order to carry out this project. I also anticipate that I will be borrowing from existing open source projects and implementations of Annotator.js. In that case, much of my preparation will also be spent researching other annotation tools, and familiarizing myself with the open annotation community.

Zohra Saed Bio

Zohra Saed is the co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press) and editor of the chapbook: Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos and Notebook from Turkestan (Lost & Found, The CUNY Poetics Documents Initiative). Her essays on the Central Asian diaspora and their food history have appeared in Eating Asian America (NYU Press) and The Asian American Literary Review. She co-founded UpSet Press, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit indie press, with poet Robert Booras. In Fall 2017, Belladonna Collective along with Makhzin magazine published my poetry chaplet: Woman. Hand/Pen. (#217). Dissertation: Langston Hughes in Turkestan, 1932-1933.

I am assistant professor at Bard High School Early College, Queens.

Zohra Intro

Zohra here! I’m excited about this class!

I’m currently assistant prof at Bard Early College in Queens. I am interested in learning more about social reading and how to use interactive ways to get everyone in the classroom engaged in the text. I’m also interested in getting students to use games to develop critical reading skills.

I am working with a colleague to develop a Film & Media Lab. We will be working on a grant and on a proposal. This class will be a great way to keep me focused and to give me a strong foundation in interactive pedagogy.

I’m also finishing up edits before depositing my dissertation on Langston Hughes in Central Asia from 1932-1933. I hope to create a digital map of his journey in Central Asia/Turkestan (a project for my DH course this semester).

Preliminary Project Brief

In no more than one thousand words, write a blog post (if public) or upload a PDF to our private group that does the following:

  • describes the problem that you wish to address with your ITP project
  • addresses at least 3 of the 5 Ws and H in Chris Stein’s Contexts and Practicalities
  • identifies one audience that your project is targeting and states how a member of the audience would engage with your project
  • presents a model for your project (first step in a broader environmental scan), describing how yours is different
  • states what skills you have that will enable you to do your project as well as what skills you need to develop

Due date/time: Saturday, February 17 by midnight

Be prepared to present your project in a 3 minute elevator pitch when we meet on February 20.