About Us
Team Bios, Methodologies, and ResearchSandy Mui
Sandy Mui is a communications associate at WITNESS. She is currently pursuing her M.A. in Liberal Studies on the digital humanities track at The Graduate Center. Following the Spring 2019 semester, she will also complete her B.S. in Journalism and Media Studies in the Macaulay Honors program at Brooklyn College. Her background and research interests lie in journalism, digital media and advocacy.
Sandy contributed to the Immigrant Newspapers project as a Developer, overseeing the conception and composition of the website that houses the digital collection of newspapers, based on her experience with WordPress and website management. Like other group members, she also contributed to research about immigrant newspapers.
Antonios Liamis
Antonios Liamis is an employee of The Graduate Center, where he works in the Digital Disability Student Services Department. He is currently studying in the M.A. program in Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center. He works as an outsourcing journalist at The National Herald. Antonios has 15 years of experience working as a Senior UI/UX Designer in the digital media and communication market, a front-end developer in e-commerce platforms, an Art and Photography Director in fashion magazines in Europe, and in image archive license agencies.
In his role as UX Designer and User Interface Developer, Antonios visualized and set up a layout for the website through back- and front-end development work, wireframing, debugging, research and UX design. In terms of the initial database for collecting newspapers titles and information, he also gathered lists of existing databases for the collection of publications and extracted useful data from those online collections and archives.
Jennifer Cheng
Jennifer Cheng is a student in the M.A. program in Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center. She works at the Center for Community and Ethnic Media at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Her research interests include data visualization and analysis.
In her role as a Developer, Jennifer helped set up the initial database for collecting newspaper titles and information from Chronicling America and also gathered additional details from other sources. She also managed the data cleaning and put together the map.
S.C. Lucier
S.C. “Luci” Lucier is the administrator of the soon-to-be American LGBTQ+ Museum in Manhattan, the career archivist for the Choreographer Sally Silvers, and a captain of New York City’s World Championship Roller Derby Team. She graduated magna cum laude from the Marymount Manhattan College Theater Directing program and received the department’s Gold Key of Excellence. Luci is currently pursuing an M.A. in New York Studies (History) at The Graduate Center. Favorite career credits include Kerrigan-Lowdermilk’s The Bad Years Immersive House-Party Musical, Held: A Musical Fantasy at Fringe & NYMF 2018, Achilles’ Heels by Richard Move with Martha Graham Dance Company + Debbie Harry at Joyce Theatre, Louis Vuitton Museum (NYC).
Luci was the Project Manager of Immigrant Newspapers and also headed outreach. She was excited to be building relationships with other databases and libraries for this project, especially due to her studies of museum science and future interest in interactive archival exhibit-building.
New York City
Learn about what is now New York City in the historical context of our time period and geographical location.
1893 Map
Our map is a geo-located, historically accurate illustrated atlas of the city in 1893, which at the time comprised of Manhattan (considered New York City) and the neighboring regions of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island.
76
Newspapers
8
Languages
12
Communities
30
Years
5
Boroughs
Methodology
Basis of Research
To begin our research, we compiled the newspaper titles in our collection from the Chronicling America database, with a narrowed scope: newspapers founded between 1860 and 1890 in the New York City region that served Irish immigrants and immigrants who spoke Czech, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Yiddish.
Data Visualization
The decision was made to present this data through a historical map. We felt that a map would most successfully visualize how many newspapers existed for immigrant groups and in various languages. It would provide geographical context while incorporating the important historical aspect of our project.
Microfilm and Directories
To create map data, we obtained addresses associated with the newspapers through the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) and any online database we could find. These microfilm archives, online digital editions and city directories from the time period helped us to identify addresses of the editorial office or the publisher.
Collection
These sources also gave us visuals to use on the map and in our gallery: either pages of an issue of the newspaper, an advertisement for it, or its listing in a directory. Knowing that our collection of newspapers was not going to be comprehensive, we eliminated several newspapers for which we could not find an address and thus no visual.
