Tag Archives: CUNYcast

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.

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!

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

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

CUNYcast weekly update

CUNYcast has hit the ground running with great work all around.

Outreach & Management:

This week outreach set up an amazing tabling event! We received over 30 signatures from people who are interested in casting! This week Tuesday evening we will be hosting a workshop for interested casters!

Developer:

To get our front-end Calender and show info widgets working, we had to do two things:

Define sourceDomain: The installation guide for the widgets does a poor job of explaining this, but the sourceDomain is the site which you are pulling information from. The tutorials we were using stated that source domain should be your public site address, but no, it actually isn’t. Our public site address is cunycast.net (as in, the site we are sending information to) and the information we’re getting the information from to fill the widgets is airtime.cunycast.net (the proper sourceDomain).

Remove i-frame: Airtime recommends putting its widgets in an iframe, which stands for inline frame.  an inline frame allows you to embed another html document on to a page. As such, they let you define and manipulate rules within a specific section of your page. That said, they are finicky and hard to configure, in that not only do you have to figure out the proper dimensions for the frame on the page, but you also need to work between two .html to get it working properly. As such, we took the information from the i-frame.html and just embedded it in the <head> and <body> of our page.

Designer:

The website has been flushed out we now have 5 pages:

today

today1

today2

The FAQ list is rounding out a lot of uses for the site and the Process page is going to be a great space for us to manage our longer form tutorials and our project development. This week will formally document our user testing and make the necessary changes to our site. This week we will perform 5 user testing experiments. We will open the website for a subject and ask them to respond. We will then ask them to use the tutorial page specifically, and respond. This should be a great way to finalize the language about our project.

YOU CAN NOT SEE THE CHANGES LIVE YET but… you will be able to see them Monday!

yay!

Stay tuned and I will update this post when the pages go live!

Wanna “Cast” ?

Q. What did one graduate student say to the other graduate student?

A. Wanna “cast”???

Go ahead…. we dare ya. Shout out loud! (and if you’re still not sure, stop by the front lobby, we’ll be demo-ing from 1:30-7 on Monday and Tuesday April 20 & 21st in front of the library)

Cast_1

Cast_2

Cast_3

Cast_4

Back 2 Werk

Hope everyone had a great week away from classes.

We have approval for tabling in front of the library on April 20 & 21st to get the word out about CUNYcast (Thank you Matt G. for getting permissions). We hope to sign up casters at GC and share information about our initiative with the rest of the student body.

Our first big event will be attempting to broadcast the Annual Academic M.O.M. Conference which is being held at The Graduate Center this year (as well as Manhattan College).

WGS tells me that they have organized electronic signage and the event is posted on their website. (Read more about the launch on my blog last week). Or, our blog posting here on the Commons from April 5 here to see what our upcoming work schedule looks like.

See ya’ll in class. Onward.

Moving Ahead with CUNYcast

We were really excited to meet with Liam after class last week. In case you don’t remember Liam was part of our original team, and looks forward to coming back to the DHpraxis class in the spring of 2016. In the meantime he’s learning lots of cool code over at the School of Journalism, and stopped to chat with us and see how our progress is going. Below is our work schedule posted online.

Martha Joy Rose, Liam Sweeney, Julia Pollack

Martha Joy Rose, Liam Sweeney, Julia Pollack

CUNYcast Schedule

April 7
Julia & James – Java script for the schedule widget, get the play button working on the website
Julia – get brothers audio 1 hour
James – program audio to play on the site non-stop until someone else interrupts it with a show; and then make it auto play again after the interruption. Decide about what kind of license we want to have/ Creative Commons?
Joy – post blog and edit audio

April 14
Joy – create Process Reports in PDF, Joy create the google slides for the presentation. Confirm tabling opp by library in front lobby. (I’ve written Matt about this). Organize more sessions to train CUNYcasters (we didn’t succeed in our first tutorial, so more clarity is needed)
Julia – figure out how to upload PDFs; Drop down menu for Tutorials, or clickable pages, PDF or what?
Add to Pedegogy explanation: Professor Cheryl Smith.
Organize tutorial notes on how to build the website.
James – collect and organize tutorial notes on how to build the airtime project, widget, hosting, icecast, duplicate what we did….. Stream a cast or upload a prerecorded cast. Joy will send Liam’s interview for uploading. (Check FILE SIZE restrictions)
All – plan on staying after class to test broadcast, buttons, widgets, etc. and generally make sure all kinks are ironed out.

April 20 & 21
Joy – make flyers and distribute at tabling opportunity to gather CUNYcasters outside the library Monday and Tues (please join me if you can for any or all of it)
Julia – provide tutorials for those wanting to build a website for CUNYcast. Update Pedegogy explanations
James – 1) provide tutorials: General CUNYcast user, a) how to do a livestream b) how to post a show
2) tutorial for those who want to create their own CUNYcast website for their university
All – class presentation on Tues- tutorials ready to go and present to the class

April 28
Julia – Make more art for website, and provide documentation for creative commons and create licensing notice as well as waiver for broadcast ie: Permissions [LINK] and add into main website. Ad any credits and build out pages for additional Tutorials and PDFs.
James – work on archival calendar, and RSS feeds ask about ARCHIVAL LIVE STREAM?
Joy – make preparations for first day-long broadcast of Annual Academic MOM Conference at CUNY, CG. test, and prepare to go live on April 30th. I’ve asked for electronic signage for this event that advertises CUNYcast.net

May 5
Clean up any issues

May 12
Class Preso

May 19
Giant Preso

CUNYcast Progress

Exciting to share our report in class last week. The google slide show is posted online here for anyone who missed it.

Now that we know we can create actual working audio our task continues to be sorting out the specifics.

This week CSS for the Airtime widgets was successfully updated and our webpages went live. Also Julia has a lead on some original ambient music that does not require licensing. We’d like to be able to have stuff playing all the time, even if we only have a few casters to start.

Our security certificate is now 100% working and the url to www.cunycast.net links seamlessly. Audio connections still have to be resolved and that will be James’s focus this week.

widget pic

The app required for recording on iphone is KoalaSAN app which is a $6 purchase from the itunes store.

Installation is pretty easy. We downloaded it to our phones and ran tests. Anyone wanting to create a cast with us will need a few coordinates from us, and can write us at CUNYcast@gmail.com so that we can provide the necessary info. Then tabs should be configured thus:

unnamed-1

Recording device on the phone is pretty sweeeeet (Screenshot):

unnamed

Right now we have two potential casters (one is a special surprise guest) coming to our tutorial Tuesday night, March 31st at 6:30 in room 4108 at the GC. “Shout it out” if you know anyone else who would like to attend for a 45 minute “Introduction to CUNYcast” on Tues. to learn the basics and find out more.

Our new branding acknowledges the fact that we are focused on students, faculty, and staff at The Graduate Center: We are “CUNYcast for the Graduate Center.” Subsequent projects may focus on “CUNYcast for Hunter,” “CUNYcast for Baruch,” and “CUNYcast for Queens College,” etc.

Thanks for your support and your tweets :-))

#CUNYcast

Trouble in Paradise

The internet is a paradise of open-source code, shared information, and technology tutorials. Right?

But, what about the obstacles we’ve all come up against? Whether problems present a steeper learning curve than we expect, a tiny piece of missing information, or a techie dead end, these issues can result in lack of sleep, brain overload, or simply “giving up.” Our team has been working diligently throughout the last many weeks on three major fronts:

  • Identifying exactly what our project is, and how to model it.
  • Grappling with the technology in all its various aspects: broadcast & web building.
  • Overcoming what appears to be inherent issues with the systems we’re working with.

We are presenting in class this week. So, we’ll share many of the details of CUNYcast’s progress then. But, for the weekly blog we’ll divulge one particularly annoying problem.

When you contact us to start a cast, we provide a url. Making an attempt to create a broadcast using the information we currently provide leads to one of two things:

www.CUNYcast.net leads to:CUNYcast_NAA search for CUNYcast.net leads to:

CUNYcast_safe?

Which will prompt a potential CUNYcast user to contact our developer who will respond with kind encouragement to just ignore the warnings and go ahead (see the nice red arrow):

unnamed

For potential casters this might be a sign to give up or walk away. The lack of security certificate is a problem. We’ve made inquiries but we just don’t know how to fix it yet. Until we do, inviting potential casters to get on board might be a mistake. We don’t want to turn them off before they begin, and ultimately many of the casters may not be techie types at all. The whole process has gotta be super easy. That’s why we’re working so hard– so it can be super smooth to Shout It Out with CUNYcast in the future.

NEVER GIVE UP!
@CUNYcast #CUNYcast #DHPraxis14