Monthly Archives: February 2015

“Build, Launch, and Tweak, then Rinse and Repeat”: A Response to 37 Signals’ Getting Real and the rules of Agile Development

37 Signals’ Getting Real clarifies and details the praxis of Agile Development. After reading the wiki on the Agile Manifesto and its basic rules, many of which are captured in catchy phrases or abbreviations such as JBGE (Just Barely Good Enough) or Ruby on Rails’ CoC (Convention over Configuration) and DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), this book more carefully lays out how to put into practice this philosophy of quick, lean, and flexible software development. I see how this is a world of difference if you compare it to the days of sluggish development of giants such as Microsoft (CUNYfirst and Blackboard tell us that these days aren’t over yet, unfortunately), but right now, in a time of endless lean tech startups, where small groups of freelancers let their creativity flow in co-work spaces like WeWork, Getting Real does not seem so new anymore. Even so, it is enlightening to read a how-to book like this, maybe because I have not come close to anything so driven by practical concerns and real-life constraints in a long, long time, but also because it is just really helpful to think about your approach and attitude to your project. It is easy to get lost in practical questions about the product itself and miss the importance of having a “vision” and determining the way in which to make and deliver your product.

 

So it is all about having a small, cross-functional but highly skilled team, about releasing early and often, about minimizing the work (Rule No. 10: Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential), and about flexibility, multiple iterations, and costumer service. It is about reducing features but optimizing the essentials. Realizing that constraints can actually force creativity and that in the triangle of time-budget-scope it is the scope that should be the flexible factor can lower the threshold for a lot of aspiring developers.

 

What I want to highlight is the use of and emphasis on terms such as “passion,” “emergence,” and “liberation,” and in how in the “easy in, easy out” chapter they argue that you should let customers end their subscription with just one click and allow them to retrieve all their data. This is to create goodwill and trust with your costumer base. Obviously, it gives some relief to read this after years of signing scary binding contracts from large, monstrous corporations just to be able to watch TV or rent an apartment (though these evil empires still rule the world). Again, I associate this more compassionate attitude with the kind of hip start-up founded by passionate twenty-somethings, part of our current “maker-subculture” who, 37 Signals says, should strive for honesty in communication, openness and transparency. If you read it in this way, Agile Development is just as much a philosophy on life and mind as a manual for (tech) startups. And yes, there’s a TED talk on Agile Programming for your Family.

 

One thing I have to mention as a literature and writing instructor is the value Agile Development places on writing. They cite both Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (“omit needless words”) and Hemingway and Carver. You could say their philosophy is similar to the “show, don’t tell” mantra of fiction writing, but, unlike so many aspiring writers in this city and elsewhere, you have to let go of the anxiety to publish. Your work is never going to be ready, nor perfect. Now that’s something I should really take to heart, and with me many other PhD perfectionists.

Anke Geertsma

Apologies for the late posting, and, even though I would never accept such an excuse from my students (there are plenty of computers in the library of course), I just need to share that my macbook crashed a few days ago. It’s a devastating experience. Maybe I expect to find some sympathy here. Everything was backed up, but it’s still hard to have to give your dearest companion to a genius at a bar hoping he will be able to resuscitate it.

About myself: I was born and raised in Friesland, a small province in the north of the Netherlands, famous for its Frisian horses, black-and-white cows, open skies and lakes, islands, and for the strange language we speak, Frisian. This is now mostly a spoken language (I was never taught how to write it and can barely read it), but is one of the oldest European languages which closely resembles Old English with a bit of German and Dutch thrown in. Frisians are officially the tallest people on the planet, but I am clearly an exception.

I have a BA and MA in American Studies and am now a fourth-year PhD student in Comparative Literature, where I work in German, French, but mostly contemporary American literature. I have been teaching World Humanities Gen Ed classes for the past few years and went to the Institute of World Literature at Harvard, where I became interested in “world literature” as a field, and in questions concerning translation, circulation, and canonization in multicultural and multilingual classroom such as those I teach in at CUNY. One of my goals for this course is to come up with a way to teach literature so that student can see (literally, on a digital map of the world) how a text can change over time (different translations), and where and when it sees publication for the first time. Knowing I have to be careful not to want to do too much, I want to limit and link it to for example a Nobel Prize winning book, showing its “origin” on a map, and its reach before and after the moment it wins the Nobel Prize, with possibly links to reviews, selections of translations, and dates of publication in various parts of the world. I really don’t know if this would be at all possible, but it comes out of course I am designing on Nobel Prize novels, which is set up in such a way that student are exposed to the (politics of the) selection process and hopefully start to see a book or text not as a stable, finished product but as something that is always in the making, and always responding to the local culture in which it “lands.”

Jeffrey’s project ideas: text manipulations

Here are some ideas I had for my project this semester.

  1. One idea would be to try to develop a way of visualizing the establishment of clichés over time—especially ones that originate in quotations from literary texts. It would be possible to track the histories of relatively short clichés using the Google Ngrams data set, although that would require Big Data-level computing. I could also do this on a smaller scale (and with a lot more flexibility) using the just-released EEBO-TCP corpus, which includes manually transcribed versions of over 25,000 early modern English books.
  1. I might try to do something with computerized outlining tools. The work that I’ve done so far is way on the complicated side, so in the spirit of this class it might be useful to try to come up with a minimal viable product. In an ordinary outline, one line might be indented beneath another for any number of reasons—it might expand on an idea, provide an example, give a possible counterargument, etc. By including symbols that make these relationships explicit, it is possible to manipulate the structure using a computer—something that can be used, for instance, to play around with different possible structures for a paper in an interactive way.
  1. I’ve been toying around with the idea of developing a programming environment specifically designed for working with texts. There was an attempt to create a programming language for humanists way back in 1970, but nothing this century as far as I know. We have mostly picked up general-purpose languages like Python. But some of the basic operations that we have to do in manipulating texts—stripping tags, parsing document structures, tokenizing—can be awkward in these systems, and it can be difficult to the user to tell whether these operations are working right with a particular body of text. It would be much easier to work in an environment with immediate feedback. Imagine having your code on one side of the screen and a visualization of a text on the other, with annotations that indicate how the text is being chopped up, and that change immediately when you change the code. This project would constitute a desktop application along with either an interpreter for a new programming language or a library for an existing one that includes functions for the interactive manipulation of texts.

Initial project ideas — Gioia Stevens

1) Topic modeling project: I would like to explore topic modeling for library search and discovery as an initial prototype project for the Graduate Center’s new institutional repository, Academic Works. Academic Works is a digital repository of the scholarly and creative works of CUNY Graduate Center faculty, students, and research centers. The Graduate Center Library administers this open access repository to preserve, showcase, and facilitate access to these works, which currently include articles, dissertations, and theses.

Academic Works allows users to browse across collections and disciplines and to enter key word searches across a particular series of texts or across the full repository, but there is no more granular level of structured search by topic and the repository does not offer any traditional subject headings or other classification scheme. The problem is not limited to Academic Works and it common in many digital repositories. We need better metadata!

In the first phase of the project, I plan to use MALLET to analyze a test corpus of GC full text dissertations in Academic Works over a five-year period from 2009 to 2014. The prototype could then be used to launch a longer-term project based in the CUNY Graduate Center Library to implement topic modeling as an access tool for all materials in Academic Works.

2) Text mining project with special collections materials and archival finding aids. This project could use a tool such as the Stanford Named Entity Recognizer (NER) to search metadata and any available full text for names of individuals and organizations to be added to library authority databases (Library of Congress, Virtual International Authority File) and to more general resources such as Wikipedia/DBpedia.  This project would improve user search experiences (fixing problems such as searching through several different versions of the same name) and also increase public knowledge about neglected individuals and organizations. (This would be one way to address Wikipedia’s gender gap!)

3) A project which would both build and improve ways for users to find open access content (or open educational resources) through the library. Directing users (especially students) to high quality free resources would serve CUNY’s educational mission and also lessen the library’s reliance on high-priced content from commercial vendors.

Joseph Paul Hill’s Thoughts on Technology Projects for College Theatre Classrooms

1. A student/youth rush and discounted ticket app for Broadway and Off-Broadway

Theatre teachers require their undergraduate students to see performances. There are many good websites that have information about discounted tickets for various Broadway theatres, but no website that takes into account both Broadway and Off-Broadway (or even the few significant Off-Off) theatre houses. Every venue and every show has different policies about discounted tickets, and frankly, it’s often difficult to find the information online. An app that compiled rush and discounted ticket information along with performance schedules of each major theatre could prove extremely beneficial for students of all levels seeking quality, affordable theatre in the city.

What would be even more useful than having all of this information available in one place would be the interactive functionality of a live map, like Waze. Students and other theatre-goers could share real-time information about various theatres and the status of rush tickets on any given morning. For example, I wake up at 7 o’clock on a Thursday morning and think about heading down to Studio 54 in the hopes of getting a rush ticket to Cabaret. I open up my rush ticket app and see that someone has already been by Studio 54 that morning and posted to the app that Cabaret is not offering rush tickets to the performance that night. However, there’s a message from someone at Gentlemen’s Guide that there are only two people currently in line for rush tickets at the Walter Kerr Theatre. I don’t have to waste my time traveling to a theatre that doesn’t have available discounted tickets.

Such an app would be a wonderful tool for theatre students who are required to see productions for class, but the app could also appeal to avid theatre-goers who weekly encounter the difficulties and unpleasantness of rushing shows.

2. Database (and discussion forum) of useful online educational videos

There are a plethora of videos available online, many on YouTube, that could be useful for instructors of any given subject, but when it comes to finding useful videos and/or clips, it seems that every instructor is on her or his own. Wouldn’t it be great if there were some way for instructors to share, categorize, tag, and comment about online videos that they have found useful. The ability to categorize and comment is key because it would allow teachers to discuss how or why a particular video is useful. For instance, some videos might provide succinct summaries of textbook reading, while others might be beneficial for providing social and historical context for a given event.

Although YouTube has an Education Channel, YouTube does not easily allow for users to comment about the usefulness of videos in education. In fact, any critical, insightful comments made about a video are likely to end up buried beneath uncritical, judgmental comments provided by everyday users.

Perhaps an even simpler (but still extremely useful) tool would be a database of video databases. This would be extremely useful for theatre in particular where types and styles of performance are more easily explained through video than text. Over the last twenty years there has been an exponential growth in the use of video to document and archive performances, and if such videos are available online, theatre instructors and their students should know where they are.

3. Play adaptation/translation commentary and analysis interface

There are many different ways to analyze a play text, but one of the most useful approaches is to compare a particular adaptation or translation of a script to its source material or source text. Of course there are many ways to annotate a document (although perhaps not an easy way for thirty students to simultaneously annotate the same document), but within theatre it would be useful to be able to annotate multiple documents in a side-by-side format.

As an example, I offer up Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. If teaching the play in a theatre class, it could be useful for students to practice thinking intertextually by creating parallels between The Comedy of Errors and its various source materials, such as Menaechmi and Amphitryon. Portions of these two plays by Plautus could be taken and parsed out next to corresponding (or disparate) portions of Shakespeare’s play to see how the Bard borrowed and adapted the works of his predecessors. Likewise, such an interface could be useful for having students apply certain theatrical theories to playtexts. The Comedy of Errors could be taught in relationship to Aristotle, Horace, and the 18th century neoclassicists, with students pulling quotations from neoclassical texts and placing them beside Shakespeare’s play in order to show how the work reflects and/or adheres to certain theatrical theories.

If such an interface could be used and edited in real time online (such as in a Google Doc), then students would be able to see the work of their classmates and comment upon others’ insights.

4. Web of people, places, and ideas

An interesting project over the course of a semester might be to have students create a web of relations and connections between the various playwrights, producers, designers, theorists, theatres, plays, artistic movements, etc. The objective of such a project would be to have students visualize the complexity of artistic tradition and inspiration.

A decision would have to be made about how the connections are displayed visually. Does it make sense to plot points on a world map and see how different artistic cultures interact, or does it make sense to assemble an asymmetrical web of names, titles, and terms that progress in time historically with the earliest words being closest to the center of the system and branching outwards with the progression of time? The visual representation will dictate the possibilities of the project. Connections could be made like points between lines, but connections could also be labeled. Ultimately the web is a challenge for the students, daring them to find connections between seemingly disparate items in the field, such as musical writers Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kathakali Indian dance-drama, and Torelli’s chariot and pole system. It could almost function like an academic re-imagining of 7 degrees of separation.

Initial project ideas – Cailean

1) I would like to study the adoption of OERs in courses at City Tech from the students’ and instructors’ point of view. This would include designing the research/qualitative study including survey questions and methodology and submitting for IRB approval. I would also be looking into different digital publishing platforms for options to display the research findings.
2) There are a number of course sites on City Tech’s OpenLab site, a CMS based on WordPress (similar to the CUNY Academic Commons and Blogs at Baruch), and I’d like to think of ways to promote embedded librarianess through those course sites. I think it would be an interesting approach based on the potential for this platform to afford learners a more seamless academic experience, from students in traditional to hybrid, or online learning environments. Perhaps this could be achieved through creating or modifying an existing plugin/widget that could replicate something like the “ask a librarian” format. A less technical approach would be to supply the code and instructions for professors to add a tab in their WordPress theme with library information tailored to the discipline of study but then there are concerns like link rot and currency.
3) The librarian’s collection development responsibilities can include a lot of rote work- sifting through vendor lists and academic reviews; selections are not made off of approval plans. I know there already exist methods to automate these processes but they require knowledge I’m not yet knowledgeable with: specific engagement with programming languages, perhaps text mining processes as well. Another aim would be to scrutinize existing methods and adopt them. This could be advantageous not only as a workflow for collection development, but also has potential in the realm of marketing new acquisitions to instructors and students in discipline specific areas.

Project Proposal: Building a path from passive to active learning

I want to build a website to address the issue of passive learning and to provide a framework in which parents can explore new options for their children, by identifying failing schools and comparing them to schools who have a proven track record of success in educating children through engaging students through a combination of progressive and traditional learning. By highlighting the successes of these schools (i.e, showing student collaboration on projects, increased subject interest through research, making and building, and exploring how technology encourages blended learning through digital practices) parents can gage new educational options and understand children can be educated within combined progressive and traditional methodologies.

The website will allow visitors to view maps of both failing and successful schools, and will also provide different data visualizations around success rates and curriculum, trajectories for successful careers as well as consequences for failure.

A space would be provided to invite writers to contribute articles around the many ways technology could be used in the classroom. This space would be specific to technology, as a way to glean the possibilities for in-depth training in the area.

The website will also provide space for discussion around curriculums and ongoing projects at different schools.

Introducing … Joseph Paul Hill

Please pardon my picaresque musings, but an introduction wouldn’t be complete without some anecdotal humor. Since we briefly discussed our technology interests in class last week, I decided to use this space to talk about the development of my other academic interests.

I was born and raised in southern California. At that point in my life I had never been to New York City nor did I know anyone from the east coast, two facts that made it all the more unusual when I decided to spend several months of Kindergarten speaking with a New York accent. I do not remember the incident myself, but my mother maintains that my public school teacher, who had over forty years of teaching experience, thought it best for me to see a therapist. Since I was the third of four children and had always tended towards the dramatic, my mother insisted that it was a phase and would pass. The New York accent passed, my flare for the dramatic did not.

While growing up (and indeed, even to this day), my mother and grandmother actively consumed MGM movie musicals. Although not particularly enthralled by Judy Garland’s journey over the rainbow or Gene Kelly’s tap dance in the rain, my father was a musician and occasionally surprised us with a chorus by Lerner and Loewe or, even more unexpectedly, all four verses of Rado, Ragni, and MacDermot’s “Hair.” Since neither of my older siblings expressed any interest in musical performance, the responsibility fell on my six-and-a-half year old shoulders. And I like to believe that I rose to the occasion. I cherished music, and I adored performing—or, at the very least, I proudly carried the banner for middle children everywhere and adored being the center of attention. Yet despite my childhood dreams to make it big on Broadway and ensure my parents’ favoritism, my career in musical theatre peaked at the age of twelve when I played the Artful Dodger.

Upon entering high school two years later, I decided to get more “serious” about theatre, opting to establish myself in drama instead of choir. (Besides, my voice changed in junior high, and I never fully recovered.) Although I had success as an actor, I was never satisfied with my theatrical education, repeatedly challenging my instructor and her unrelenting insistence on class time being used to play improv games. Wanting my artistic opinions to be heard, I cultivated interests in both directing and scenic design early in my senior year, and since I wasn’t about to receive any satisfying instruction in my high school drama class, I applied to undergraduate theatre programs.

For the majority of my academic studies, both undergraduate and graduate alike, my own theatrical interests were heavily influenced by my mentors and advisors. I was quick to latch onto the passions of academics whom I admired, just as I had been quick to latch onto my parents’ passion for musical performances. Amongst my four undergraduate mentors in theatre and English departments, three were self-identified Shakespeareans and two were musical theatre enthusiasts. Perhaps it’s little wonder then that for several years I believed that I too wanted to be a Shakespearean scholar—as if I had something more to contribute to four hundred years of Shakespearean scholarship.

Now at the precipice of my academic career, my decision to pursue academic fields other than my long-time interests perhaps surprises me more than anyone else. My views on scholarship have grown, and I no longer believe that interest is the only factor that should attract a scholar to her or his work. Scholarship should contribute qualitatively to a discussion, and although my interests in Shakespeare and musical theatre persist, presently I do not feel as though my contribution to such fields would be anything beyond quantitative. If I want to produce worthwhile scholarship—and I do—I need to work in areas that don’t just pique my interest but that also challenge my artistic understanding of the theatrical medium.

Because my interest is in the theatrical experience, I want to pursue scholarship that confronts contemporary theatre practices and how practitioners continue to develop the art form. Over the last two years, I have become particularly engrossed by theatres of disability, specifically deaf theatre and the theatrical company Deaf West. Since I do not yet sign, my interest in such theatrical experiences is perhaps a bit Artaudian, yet I can’t deny my fascination with theatrical languages and the depth of the emotional expression contained within such performances. At this particular time, disability studies are taking off, and deaf performance has been largely ignored. But hopefully that will change before long.

Bio: Sissi

Hello everyone! My name is Sissi (pronounced as “see-see”—meaning “to muse, to philosophize” or “pathway to wisdom” in Chinese), and I’m very excited to spend the semester with all of you!

I’m a doctoral candidate in the Theatre Program, and am currently writing my dissertation tentatively titled Wukongism: “72 Transformations” in the Age of Transnational and Transmedial Performance.  As you can probably tell from my dissertation title, my research interests include: theorizing intercultural theatre and performance, critical race theory, gender and sexuality, Asian and Asian American performance, mediatization, digital art, affect theory, game theory, and theory of liminality.

As a former concert pianist and on-and-off composer, I have a penchant for musical theatre, especially Broadway musical theatre that employ jazz idioms. I am currently working on a digital project that conceptualizes Broadway musicals as cartography of US sociocultural values through exploring their production of desire, consumption of pleasure, and creation of national identity from the 1920s to the present. The humanities aspect of the project is largely informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological studies. At the very initial stage of this huge project, I am familiarizing myself with data scraping and data mining tools, and exploring possibilities of analyzing the distinctive “Broadway sound” digitally (as opposed to musicologically—using Schenkerian analysis, etc.).  If any of you out there are familiar with sound software, or are interested in exploring sound digitally, please let me know and we could maybe work together!

I am particularly interested in digital art forms that challenge social norms and existent ways of thinking.  I am also a huge fan of games. One goal I have this semester is to initiate a small project (a game or a form of digital art) that stimulates one to rethink and revalue, in a small but significant way, the performance of one’s own everyday life.