Tag Archives: wordpress

Process Report CUNYcast

CUNYCast is an online experimental broadcast in the Digital Humanities. The CUNYcast site will model Ds106 Radio. It will also document the process, and create a “how to” manual for future CUNYcasters.  A link from the CUNYCast group page on the Academic Commons will lead people to an external site where content will be streamed. CUNYcast is a live online radio stream that anyone can take over and populate with their own DH audio radio broadcast. Cunycast is a non-archivable broadcast that will be accessible on the web. CUNYCast’s aim is to empower a DH guerrilla broadcast community.

Our team’s goal this week was to test an audio upload to Ds106 Radio, and begin to build out our WordPress site, while documenting and reporting on our process and our progress. *Note: although documentation appears here, it has not been verified between team members. Please do not attempt or post until we have completed final edits on the manual. Thanks!

Process Report 2/25/15:

Joy edited in-class audio from DH Praxis 2014-15, added music, and recorded an introduction.  James’s task was to upload that content in order to better understand how Ds106 radio works.

  1. Using edited audio recordings of our in-class conversations James converted ab .m4a, (advanced audio coding (AAC) file format) to an mp3 file.
  2. Using online converter media.io took about three minutes to convert, reducing its size from 28MB to 19MB.

Note: James chose 128kb/s as the quality, remembering that Ds106 radio has a 128kb/s stream. Next, we needed to figure out what would come first, the ds106radio how-to, Airtime, or Icecast? Airtime has a giant button on their landing page that says START NOW, so that seemed like a good place to begin. 30 day free trial, otherwise it’s 9.95 a month.

Question: If we do work with Ds106 we’ll have to get them to “grant a login, we think? Though it also possible that when we are preparing our radio station, it might cost us $10 monthly to maintain it via Airitme?

  1. Ds106radio is located in the interwebs, and how to access it via Icecast, it links to here: http://networkeffects.ca/?p=1478
  2. Download Icecast here: http://icecast.org/download/
  3. Start Icecast. It launches a console.
  4. Follow instructions by typing the address into Chrome.

Note: If I we were hosting Icecast via our local machine, this is how it would be controlled.

  1. Go to the Icecast installation directory and find a .xml doc.
  2. Open with my text

Note: This seems like it will be very important later, but we’re not sure that it will help complete the goal now. The next thing we attempt to try is looking at “Broadcasting Software” in the ds106radio how-to. We come across this document. We go for Mixxx; another broadcasting tool.

  1. Download Mixxx. Mixxx is 85MB: It does audio editing, mixing, broadcasting, recording.
  2. Enable Live Broadcasting

Note: It began importing James’s whole audio library. He loaded a song and just played with some dials. He encourages everyone to do this.

  1. Open up our cmd (command prompt and type in some commands for installing the codec:

Photo:James_Broadcast

Note: Watch for compatibility issues. We had a 64-bit version of Mixxx that was accidentally installing the 32-bit encoder. Some folders are inaccurately named. For Macs, this process seems smoother.

  1. Load up the audio for broadcast on ds106radio into Mixxx, by dragging and dropping. take
  2. Take the server info from ds106radio and put it into Mixxx:

Name: ds106rad.io / Server: ds106rad.io / Port: 8010 / Mountpoint: live / Username: source / Password: ds106 / Codec: mp3 / Bitrate: 128 (or less) / Protocol: Icecast2 / Stereo: Y/N

  1. Success = playing live audio from our class on Ds106

Process Report 2/28/15:

  1. This week Julia went to a workshop on “Bootstrap”http://getbootstrap.com/
    It is a model for a responsive website.
    2. This is our template:http://getbootstrap.com/examples/carousel/#
    Note: We have had some concerns with the constraints of wordpress. This will aford us more freedom although it may require a bit more now to update and change the site = More freedom less of a fancy wordpress back end.file structure
  2. Download Bootstrap; accessed here:http://getbootstrap.com/
  3. Use textwrangler (a bare bones html building editor) she saved the document as a .html file like (index.html).
  4. Place the file in the same folder on the desk top that held the Bootstrap.

Note: We are assuming that this series of files will be able to be uploaded to a server so they may become live. There may be a few steps missing that we’re unaware of since we’re not directly familiar with server setups.

5. Using Textwrengler to build the site; start with a blank text editor. Go to the template mentioned above (http://getbootstrap.com/examples/carousel/#) and open the site. It is a browser and look at the view page source option.

6. Copy and paste the page source from that page and place it into a plain text document.

Note: CSS of this document was all whacked out at first. The file connections to the rest of the folders would be different if they were sitting on the desktop.

  1. Go through the preliminary documentation to fix the <!DOCTYPE html> heading issues in the .html file.
  2. Screen shot of the website displayed in a browser on her computer. It is bare bones but it does display.CUNYcast_Web_SampleNote: Julia will next play with the style of CUNYcast site to reflect the new direction of the project. Barbara Kruger is a visual inspiration since we’re going guerrilla.

Please join us at our new twitter account @CUNYcast #CUNYcast
Also, we’ll be making our group page public on the commons this week.

Joy Report – Data Tech [E]mmersion

It’s good to know your strengths.

I’m never going to be a data dude. Thanks to Stephen Real who turned me onto Lynda.com (forwarded from Matt), I watched several tutorials trying to recreate what Micki shared during her workshop on Thursday, Oct. 31st.

But, let me back up a moment. Since acknowledging that I’m probably never going to be a data-dude, it occurs to me that my particular strength is as a communicator. To that end, let me share the last two week’s adventures in tech. I have been to EVERY available workshop except the ones on Thursday evenings when I have a previously scheduled class.

This has amounted to six in-person workshops at GC, one FB page, one WordPress site, three online tutorials and an impulsive registration for a Feminist technology course at Barnard (thank you Kelly for referring the info).

Here is what the last month of data-tech-[E]mmersion have looked like:

  • Tuesday, September 30 – Digital Fellow’s Social Media & Academia: Creating Digital Research Communities Workshop, (Andrew G. MKinney & Laura Kane), Library GC
  • Friday, October 1 – I wrote a “Twitter” review for the workshop and shared it with my classmates in the DH Praxis 2014 blog site on the Commons.
  • I also tweaked the Mother Studies webpage on the Commons blog post-workshop
  • Friday, October 24 – Fellows consultation with Patrick Smyth who showed me Ngram, “Python for kids” workbook, and some other cool things like “Internet Time Machine”, and “Distance Machine.”
  • Saturday, October 26, blogged about my experience with Patrick, and Ngramed two of my other classes at GC to compare words and texts from a gender perspective; American Studies, and Sociology of Gender.
  • Art+Feminism Wiki Workshop GC

    Art+Feminism Wiki Workshop GC

    Monday, October 27 – Wiki Art + Feminism workshop GC – we learned some Wiki code and also found out that only 5% of Wiki contributors are women.

  • Tuesday, October 28 – WordPress Advanced level users, Library GC. This workshop really helped me see some of the advanced options available to edit my site on the commons. Although these workshops are also frustrating because often we aren’t actually able to try things in the class and its tough to remember everything once you get back to your desk. Workshops should have an additional help session, or follow up lab (or online resource attached to them)
  • Wednesday, October 29 – Data Mapping for social media, Library GC
  • Came home that night and built a FB page and blog site called “OurHealthStories.” Thought this might serve as a repository for the big data project and these notes from class. Too much for the DH Blog (Don’t wanna be a “Blog Hog”). I’ve combed through a lot of data sets at this point, and many of them are health related. My own health issues, the state of health care in America today, and recent stories like the one about the creator of the game “Operation” who can’t afford an operation really touched me, and made me want to take action.
  • Below is a list of the data sites I’ve investigated thus far. I was envisioning a project comparing midwife activity to OBGYN deliveries in America because there is a section of my thesis that would benefit from this. Wrote my advisor.

B-
I have to run a data project for my DH class.
Have you ever, or do you have data on this:
Compare midwife assisted birth to physician assisted birth in US, and data map it.
I want to see the measurable comparisons of how midwives practice relative to doctors. Please let me know if you have anything, also because I want to use it in my thesis paper.
_

She wrote back and advised against it:
“There is a TON of data on this, and it’s kinda complicated.  How are you defining midwife?  Nurse-Midwife in-hospital? all midwives?  all locations, birth centers, hospitals and homes?  How are you controlling for maternal status?  Just go take a quick look at the literature and you’ll see.  I would not encourage you to include this in the thesis — not in this kind of oversimplistic ‘docs’ vs ‘midwives’ way — as I say, WAY too complicated for that.”
__

I wrote a friend of mine who is a public health nurse at Hunter.
She wrote back:
“Here are some sources. Is it by state or national data you need to map? Do you know Google Scholar search? 
Here’s a link to a report published in 2012 re Midwifery Births 
Here’s a link to an article comparing births MD vesus CNM
National Vital Statistics Report  ***** best resource for raw data
CMS Hospital Compare
https://data.medicare.gov/data/hospital-compare
National Center for Health Statistics Vital Data
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/Vitalstatsonline.htm
NYC Dept. of Health Data & Statistics http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/data/data.shtml_”

  • Thursday, October 30 – Data Visualization, (Micki Kaufman), Library GC; Impressive project and great demo. Again, I wish we could have actually tried to do some of the things Micki demoed.
  • Friday, October 31 – Can’t attend the Fellows open hours this week or next week. Wrote Micki to see if she could meet with me at any point during next week for specific questions/answers? Began to export and clean a data set from last year’s academic MOM Conference, thinking it would be interesting to map the geographic locations attendees hailed from.
  • Saturday, November 1 – Began the day online taking tutorials. Stephen Real and I met before class on Thursday and he suggested a few things after we discussed how we could create a collaborative project. Today I’m watching Lynda.com videos, but for the tutorials that follow up on where Micki left off on excel documents, I work on a MAC and don’t have a left/right click mouse. So I can’t try a lot of the things they’re demoing. Going to try PDF conversion and scrapping now.
  • Thursday, Nov. 6 – Stephen Real and I met up. He and I “played” with some data cleaning stuff. He told me about his “Great Expectations” project. Sounds cool. Spoke with Chris Vitale generously shared some of his tech finds (which people have already been writing about here). Stayed late to talk research ideas with Stephen Brier.
  • Friday, Nov. 7 – Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program at the Library. We talked wordpress, plug-ins, and sever technology.
  • Weekend, Nov. 8 – did some research on potential final projects. Explored DH in a Box. I have three ideas. Can’t decide which one to go with. Thinking about creating a survey monkey to ask classmates which idea they like best?

I signed up for “Technologies of Feminism” at Barnard. Starts November 18 and runs for 5 weeks. Here’s what it’s about. Feminism has always been interested in science and technology. Twitter feminists, transgender hormone therapy, and women in STEM are only more recent developments in the long entangled history of tech, science, and gender. And because feminism teaches that technology embodies societal values and that scientific knowledge is culturally situated, it is one of the best intellectual tools for disentangling that history. In this five-week course, we will revisit foundational texts in feminist science studies and contextualize current feminist issues. Hashtag activism and cyberfeminism, feminist coding language and feminized labor, and the eugenic past of reproductive medicine will be among our topics. Readings will include work by Donna Haraway, Maria Fernandez, Lisa Nakamura, Beatriz Preciado and more. Participants of all genders are welcome. No prior knowledge in feminist theory is required.

During the fall 2014 semester, courses similar to this one are taking place across North America in a feminist learning experiment called the Distributed Open Collaborative Course, organized by the international Feminist Technology Network (FemTechNet). As a node in this network, our class will open opportunities for collaboration in online feminist knowledge building—through organizing, content creation, Wikipedia editing, and other means. Together, we will discuss how these technologies might extend the knowledge created in our classroom to audiences and spaces beyond it.

Still haven’t pulled together a comprehensive plan amidst the massive choices available for the data project yet.

WHEW!

I’m en-JOY-ing the journey, but I’m not sure if I can pinpoint a location or product YET. Onward I suppose.

Dataset Play: Setting Things Up for Analysis

This post is an attempt to journal some of the attempts I have made to construct a useful space for an art historian who specializes in Dutch colonial art. She has been collecting images of the historic buildings along Breedestraat in Willemstad Curacao. After exploring the options available for tagging photos to particular points on GoogleMaps (mapsengine is now “My Maps”).

creating maps, Breedestraat, Willemstad, Curacao

creating maps, Breedestraat, Willemstad, Curacao

I was not achieving the visual flexibility I needed. The purpose of the project is not to simply see one photo at a time, but to be able to look at the photos side by side as they were in the past and as they are now.

My maps?

My maps?

Then I considered using a WordPress site. Assigning specific categories to each photo, I thought perhaps I could create pages that would pull up images based on separate categories. That way, MvLK could have one page of all the buildings as they existed in the 1890s and one page of a single building from 1890s until today. A website would also perhaps be easier for adding new images. As long as the available categories existed, she could upload photos, post them with categories marked, and they would be automatically appear on the appropriate page.

Screen Shot 2014-11-08 at 11.05.39 PM

Why aren’t the images showing, Minimatica Theme???

After trying out a number of themes — in an attempt to show the images in the most legible way for MvLK’s purposes– Minimatica seemed great but the pictures wouldn’t show up on the main screen, even though they seemed to be properly put in; Spun, the theme I use, was nice because the pictures of each post are visible on the home page, but the buildings would be better served by square or rectangular thumbnails– I have settled at least for the time being on Arias. I have to adjust thumbnails to see if it will work. The site is willemstad.commons.gc.cuny.edu.

 

Creating Categories

Welcome page

I like Imbalance 2 because it seems to keep the navigation easy, but I don’t like the distance from the header to the content.

How can you compare photos if they don't fit in the screen?

How can you compare photos if they don’t fit in the screen?

Another possibility I’ve been toying with is Omeka.net.

Screen Shot 2014-11-09 at 1.02.34 AMScreen Shot 2014-11-09 at 1.12.14 AM

Digital Fellow Patrick Smyth talked me through potential ways to use Omeka but the issue seemed to be where to host the data. WordPress also has this issue — how will I transfer editing control to her — I am currently using the Commons (woot!) as my workspace.

I went to the digital fellow office hours yesterday and Patrick and Evan were both helping me consider various map options. Takeaway was that I should learn Leaflet and teach myself the leaflet javascript packet (as my starter to learning the seemingly invaluable javascript totality).

At this point it’s been interesting to interrogate ways to go about assembling the images. Maps continue to intrigue me, but this project seems more about how to appropriate affix metadata to images for easy shuffling between images.

I will let you know how things progress.

-Jojo