A not so terrifying team...
Naila Butt is a Digital Media Specialist and tutor at CUNY City Tech Writing Center. She holds a BS in Professional and Technical Writing and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Digital Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she explores her research interests in play theory, game studies, and pedagogy.
She is the project manager of the Pretty Terrifying Project, which she founded to collect data on recurring feminist themes and structures within the horror video game genre. She builds on feminist and horror/game studies frameworks to examine video games as cultural and media artifacts. Her methods involve web-scraping data from Wikipedia and conducting both distant and close reads to collect and categorize the data. In collaboration with her team, Naila aims to refine the dataset and create visualizations that help translate and interpret its complex findings.
Michael Nieves has been in the education field for approximately a decade. He got his undergrad degree in graphic design and then worked in design, including marketing, UI design, and print design. Eventually, through networking and a bit of luck, he found a position working on accessibility throughout CUNY — using his graphic design skills to have an impact on areas that needed a little more love.
Within this project, Michael works primarily on the visual design, helping to figure out how to best get the message across visually. He seeks to present the project as simply and clearly as possible — and should time permit, maybe push the boundary a bit and put in a little chaos for fun.
Truly Johnson got an undergrad degree in computer science at Hunter College and currently works as a software engineer. They're still figuring out their exact research interests, but are generally curious about the particular mainstream technology and media culture of the present moment — and how people chafe against dominant views through non-standard expressions of identity and queerness.
Their responsibilities on this project are mainly focused on the technical aspects of the work. They put together the website you're looking at right now! In addition, they assist with research and writing documentation and supplementary materials. Truly is excited to both apply existing skills and experiment with new ones throughout the course of the project.