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.

Tumblr has an interesting Captcha up these days. If you try to log in with a bad password too many times, you have to select all the photos of soup from a little gallery:
fashion_index

Definitely made me think of #nycfashionindex’s game ideas.

We’re live! The Digital GC: 2014-2015 Year-End Showcase

The Digital GC: 2014-2015 Year-End Showcase

Please join us on May 19th 2015 for a special event at the Graduate Center showcasing the innovative and diverse digital projects initiated during the 2014-2015 academic year! Presentations will be given by: the Digital Praxis Seminar, the GC Digital Fellows, Provost’s Digital Innovation Grantees, the New Media Lab, the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program, the Futures Initiative, and the GC Library.

Event Details:

The Digital GC: Year-End Showcase
Tuesday, May 19, 2015, 4:15 pm
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue between 34th and 35th Street
Room 9205

The Digital Praxis Seminar: Final Project Launches

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).

Event hashtag: #digitalgc

Students in the Digital Humanities Praxis course at the CUNY Graduate Center will launch four new projects:

@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/

Additional Presentations:

Following the Digital Praxis project presentations, the following programs will present their most recent projects and accomplishments:

The GC Digital Fellows

Provost’s Digital Innovation Grantees

The New Media Lab

The Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program

The Futures Initiative

The GC Library

 

A video of last year’s Digital GC Showcase can be found on the Videography Fellows Website.

Please visit the Graduate Center Digital Initiatives website to view all of the current and past Digital Initiatives at the Graduate Center, and please follow us on twitter.

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

 

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

What Could Have Been

Some of you noticed that we thought maybe we’d have a conversation today about what we might learn from this whole semester. We didn’t get to that, but if you have thoughts or feedback or ideas or insights, we would love to have them. Comments welcome, or just edit ye olde wiki.

Disagreement welcome!

Prep Your Slides

I created a shared Google Drive folder that you should all have access to. If you don’t have edit access, email me with your gmail handle and I’ll share the directory with you. Before we convene on May 12, your presentation should be in that directory.

From CartoDB

A few of you have shown some interest in doing cool things with CartoDB — consider coming to this. I’m pretty sure that I have some $0 discount codes somewhere, too, so let me know if you need one of those.

To support our growing group of cartographers in newsrooms, we’re hosting a two-day conference in two weeks and you’re invited!

GeoJourNews is a two-day conference and hackday, focused on showcasing and building maps in news reporting and investigative journalism. We’d like to invite you and provide you with 90% discount passes for your colleagues and friends who might be interested!

Date: May 15, 2015
Location: Parsons: The New School
Hosts: CartoDB, Knight-Mozilla: Open News, and Parsons: The New School

Please share the event and the following discount code. If you can’t be in NYC you should share this with your friends and collaborators who will be!

RSVP at: https://nvite.com/GeoJourNews/ab4d
Discount Code: mapsftw

Spread the word on Twitter via the hashtag #geojournews and @cartodb!

If you want to learn more about the event, read our blog post.

Thanks so much and looking forward to seeing you there,

Aurelia & the Community Team @CartoDB

Tandem Week 13 Update

WEEK 13 TANDEM PROJECT UPDATE:

We are happy to announce that the initial version of our near-polished UI is up and functioning on http://dhtandem.com/. This development means that you can now go to the site and walk through uploading files as well as review some early versions of our documentation.

Immediate next steps for our team include updating the text on the documentation pages to the more robust things we have patiently waiting in the wings while we finalize the connection of the front and back components of the app. We have been powering away at creating thorough documentation and user information to be present on the final site. This also includes our exploration of the Mother Goose corpus which is beginning to take shape (in part thanks to some TANDEM supporters and volunteers from the praxis class). Basically, we’re pushing our data set through various tools for discovery and analysis. These results will become incorporated in the Sample Data section on the TANDEM website, which is intended as an example of the apps potential, and as a learning tool for new users.

As we continue to work on bugs and high priority action items, such as fixing an error with zipping files that originated from a change in processing in this iteration, we are realizing areas that could use strengthening post-dhpraxis. Our function May 19th MVP is so close we can taste it.

The zipping problem mentioned above may be related to another problem, which only happens on the server and cannot be replicated in a development environment. What appears to happen follows: when a user starts a new project, TANDEM builds three folders on the server, one for the uploaded files, one for the final output which is subsequently zipped for download. The third folder is a staging or intermediate directory that can contains files after any pre-processing that is required. For example, PDF files must be converted to JPG for our image analysis software to work. Another example is that the text must be extracted into TXT files via an OCR step for NLTK to be able to consume the content.

These new folders appear to be created successfully, and their locations are saved to global variables in the program. However, when it comes time to write files to the newly created folders, it seems that the file are being written to a previously used set of folders. The problem is intermittent. To make diagnosis more difficult, the zip step sometimes zips the older folder which delivers content from multiple projects to the user. However, other times the zip step zips the new folder which is empty delivering an empty file to the user. At still other times, the files are all read and written properly.

Zipping issues aside, we are moving along. Given all the amazing progress we have made, it is not surprising that buzz for the launch is growing. (Also Jojo invites anyone and everyone she speaks to). With new details regarding presentations, we are ready to get this party started. The DH community at CUNY and in New York has been a part of these projects whether actively or abstractly, and it seems a grand opportunity to celebrate.

 

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