Category Archives: Spring 2015

Final Update

Dear Team #dhpraxis14,

We could not have gotten here without each and every one of us. This class has been a great challenge, and I like to think that rather than a Big Brother/Survivor style show, we have kicked no one off the island, but have come out of this challenge as a team.

Back when I was unsure of the name “TANDEM”, I made this video to get myself on board. Sometime musical theater is all you need to bring it together.

I am sharing it here in the event that it might bring any one of you some positive spirit moving into our presentations.

 

Thank you all.

Team Tandem.

Final presentations

We were happy to have the chance to see everyone’s presentations last week. Over the course of the semester we’ve all been working so intently on our own projects, it sometimes felt like we didn’t have enough opportunity to fully appreciate what everyone else has been working on.

Not surprisingly, all of the projects are awesome!

This has been an amazingly group of classmates, and we would like to thank you all for your support and input over the last few months. We’re excited to see where things go from here–not just for the projects, but for everyone individually as well.

Looking forward to Tuesday, you’re all rockstars!

XOXO,

Gossip Girl Team Digital HUAC

CUNYcast last week

We are excited to end the year with a great presentation! and great group of classmates!

During the semester we:

  • Successfully changed project direction
  • Negotiated group schedules
  • Created our own work flow communication process
  • Learned from project complications

Our group was interested in how to work with audio in a DH capacity and we have created a process to work with audio with a community of users!

This last week has concluded work on final paper and presentation and continued touch ups to the websites functionality.

guh

With continued help from from prof Hickman we continue to step further and further forward with web functionality.

guh2

And with some helpful class members we move forward with a better more mobile site.

A warm thanks to everyone!

See you all Tuesday.

The last report

python script

 

This week, everyone rehearsed at the Sky Lounge and got feedback for the showcase. which will be held next Tuesday. Our group’s running time was properly set. The speech would take approximately 8 minutes. We will show the running Python script (attached in the About section) and cover theories, progress, and future aspects of the studies.

 

 

 

CUNYcast #ShoutItOut

Every week is an adventure in DH-land. This week was no exception. As our team scrambled to put the last minute touches on our presentation. We continued to quibble over gorilla suits, guerrilla radio, and whether or not a sense of humor should be included in presentations to the provost? The jury is out on this.

So, all the more reason to attend events on May 19th and see for yourselves. Many people in the Graduate Center community have told me they read these posts on the blog. So, if that’s true and this is a place to reach out (in addition to report) — here goes:

Digital Praxis Project Launch at the Graduate Center, CUNY

New York, NY- On May 19, 2015, students in the Digital Humanities Praxis course at the CUNY Graduate Center will launch four new projects. The evening will also include presentations from the Graduate Center’s Digital Fellows, the Provost’s 2014-15 Digital Innovation Grant Winners, the Futures Initiative, the New Media Lab, and the Graduate Center Library.

Digital Humanities Praxis is a two-course sequence that introduces students to the landscape of digital humanities tools and methods through readings, discussion, lectures, hands-on workshops, and culminates with students collaborating in groups over a single semester to build and launch working prototypes of Digital Humanities projects. The instructors for DH Praxis are Stephen Brier and Matthew Gold (Fall, 2014) and Amanda Hickman and Luke Waltzer (Spring, 2015).

This year’s DH Praxis projects are:

@DigitalHUAC: http://digitalhuac.com
Consolidating thousands of hard-to-find #HUAC testimonies into a single, searchable, interactive archive. http://digitalhuac.com

@CUNYCast: http://cunycast.net
Broadcast classes, conversation & controversy with online radio at @GC_CUNY. Shout it out http://cunycast.net #CUNYcast

@dhTANDEM: http://dhtandem.com
Simplify text & image data generation with @dhTANDEM, a unified #Djangoapp that combines #OCR, #NLTK, and #OpenCV.

@NYCFashionIndex: http://nycfashionindex.com
NYCFashionIndex scrapes fashion imagery from @instagram for tagging and analysis, building a real time social index of fashion. http://nycfashionindex.com/

This event is sponsored by the Graduate Center Provost’s Office and the GC Digital Fellows Program.

Event details:
Tuesday, May 19, 2015, 4:15 pm
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue between 34th and 35th Street
Room 9205

Open to the Public

Contact: Matthew Gold
Contact email: mgold@gc.cuny.edu
Public course blog: https://dhpraxis14.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
Course Hashtag: #dhpraxis14 @DigitalHUAC @CUNYcast @dhTANDEM @NYCFashionindex

SEE YOU THERE!

Fashion Index Weekly Update

The presentation date is getting closer. It is almost ahead of time.

We already planned out what to cover during the presentation on 19th. We will majorly discuss theory, demo, and future aspects. Only two will speak and haven’t decided the speakers yet.

Also, we made few changes on the website. We interconnected 3 section in the website; select an image→ Index the image → See the results. Basically, this content puts more emphasis on tagging and mapping.

We finished editing theory and about sections. The next stage is working on the final paper. We already divided sections to work on.

The Gorilla in the Room at CUNYcast

This week CUNYcast went from 12 followers to 43. We broadcast live on April 30 and May 1st from the 10th Annual Academic MOM Conference at GC and Manhattan College. I organized the broadcasts on my cell phone using KoalaSan with minimal interruption with Julia listening online and testing audio quality. Outreach included my personal FB, newsletters, and The Graduate Center electronic signage. Additionally, WGS put up a link on their page advertising the MOM Conference would be broadcast by CUNYcast.net. We do not know how many people tuned in to listen, but the experiment went well.

We are preparing for our final presentations, James is putting the finishing touches on the tutorials and Julia will update the website pages. We aim to have these tweaked by the end of next week.

Since our experiment began, we’ve been fond of saying that CUNYcast is a good platform for “Guerrilla Slamming,” meaning an audio ambush of sorts. We envision tagging interesting people mid-conversation for a broadcast on campus. I even went online to Amazon.com to order a mask for our year-end presentation.

GorillaHowever, as soon as I began to research “Guerrilla” based on the “Guerrilla Girls,” an arts activist group that seeks to bring awareness about social inequity to the broader public discourse, I realized that “Gorilla” mask and a “Guerrilla Slam” have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Which begs the question, why do the Guerrilla Girls wear Gorilla masks? As of this writing, I do not know. But, we do have one frightening gorilla mask droning its way to us as I write.

Is this a problem, or should we just ignore it? Write me with your opinion at CUNYcast@gmail.com

For more on Gorilla vs. Guerrilla read on:
Gorilla and Guerrilla are completely different from each other. Gorillas are basically great apes, whereas Guerrillas are members of a group of irregular soldiers.

http://www.differencebetween.info/difference-between-gorilla-and-guerilla
http://guerrillagirlsontour.com/
http://www.guerrillagirls.com/

#CUNYcast #DHpraxis14

DHUAC Update

This week, we’re polishing up our website and writing content for our presentation & paper. We are thinking about how to best showcase the work we have done and how to demonstrate the need for and usefulness of a full scale project. So we’re working on plans for next steps. In a way, thinking about the future helps us reflect on where we are and how we got here, which is useful as part of the praxis element of this project.
 
As part of this process, we’ve been asking around about HUAC testimonies–to see if we can figure out how many there are out there and where they might all be. Turns out, no one actually seems to know. The Wilson Center and John Jay Library said contact NYPL. NYPL has some stuff, but were not able to give us more than links to their holdings. LoC said contact NARA. NARA said, essentially, it is impossible to know, and in addition to whatever is published and in the world, they also have many boxes of closed executive hearings that are only barely indexed. What we do know is there is no one place where all the testimonies are, and certainly not online and not searchable. It’s sort of baffling that this is the case–one’s mind goes immediately to all of the other incomplete, sub-optimal, or dark archives containing important info that must be out there–though this certainly reinforces the value of our project.
 
Speaking of search, we’ve got a fancy new search interface. You can check it out and let us know what you think of it.  o_O

Fashion Index Weekly Update

We have started framing and accelerating our story telling. On the other hand, we have ceased decelerating and building the development.  This week, we focus on the narrative part. I also twitted on our Twitter account. Compared to the Instagram account, I haven’t actively used Twitter. I would rather balance up using those two distinct social medias. We got 28 Instagram followers!

 

Related Thanks

We updated the website. We included the essays in the theory section and mentioned Digital HUAC, CUNY Cast, DH TENDEM in the related work’s section. On the theory part, Jojo gave us her statement about our project, Thanks a lot. Renzo and Tessa also included their statements on the theory section. Minn added the statements on “About” Section.  If you want to see more update, please click on the link, http://nycfashionindex.com

In technological part, we are cleansing irrelevant data, fixing the image sets, and indexing the pages.

At this stage, we are gathering the literary works from our team members, classmates, and others from fashion studies communities. In addition, we are planning to start shaping the final paper.

 

CAU73lbXIAA-5-H

Thanks for the capture, CUNY Cast!  Actually, this picture was taken during the first presentation on March 17th.