Category Archives: Assignments

Midterm Project Proposal Sarah&Anke: Teaching Through Technology: a Website and Workshop Series

Introduction

We are two CUNY adjunct instructors who spent a lot of time researching, evaluating and designing WordPress sites for our own classrooms. We are not alone. More than half of all courses at CUNY are taught by adjunct instructors, and many of us want to use technology in our courses. CUNY encourages staff to integrate technology. In fact, its most wide-ranging cross-campus initiatives support teaching with technology: the Academic Commons and the Hybrid Initiative. And yet, we face two pressing problems. First  there is no one source that shows the pedagogical thinking underlying technological choices professors make in designing and developing effective course sites. Second, CUNY’s resources provide hidden nuggets of pedagogical wisdom and helpful tips, but you have to dig deep and few instructors have the time, resources or know-how to do so.

To address these issues, we will create Teaching Through Technology, a website and workshop series that invites CUNY instructors to come together to think through the why, what, and how of building a class site. We won’t just offer a how-to. Rather, we will start with pedagogical best practices to provide guidance, direct instructors to resources, and, doing so, strengthen communities of innovative instructors.

Teaching Through Technology has three components: a training module on the Academic Commons, workshops at CUNY campuses, and a Commons Group for participants.

1. Training Module: Hosted on the CUNY Academic Commons, this evolving site will act as a replicable workshop outline and stand-alone resource. We will collect and curate resources from across the web that explicate the pedagogical thinking behind course site design. To encourage cross-disciplinarity, we will highlight examples from the Humanities, Social, and Natural Sciences.

2. Workshops: We propose to give workshops at Baruch, John Jay, City, and Queens College because each of these colleges already has a Center for Teaching and Learning that can provide infrastructure, support, publicity, and follow-up.

3. Commons Group Site: A group site linked to the online training module will offer a platform for workshop participants to continue the conversation, share experiences, troubleshoot and expand on their practice to help further improve CUNY’s online pedagogy.

Personas

  • Edward: Young adjunct professor in Social Sciences at City College. Wants to start using a WordPress blog for his psychology 101 course but has a lot of questions and does not know where to start. He has done some research online but feels lost in the maze of information and online tutorials. Feels that much of what he finds is not relevant to his specific situation and would like to discuss questions of privacy and assessment but also just find out what themes are useful, and how he can provide access for his students and create an online community.
  • Stacey: Older full time professor in the English Department at Queens College. Does not necessarily want to use a course site for her literature classes and is not sure about the benefits of technology, but senses that times are a’changing and wants to know what’s going on. She wants to talk to younger colleagues and others who are already using sites to find out why they do so, what the pros and cons are, and what role it can possibly play in her teaching.
  • Luke: Director of Center for Teaching and Learning at a CUNY campus. Wants to increase outreach and resources to faculty at his campus to further improve the quantity but most importantly quality of course sites. Is invested in innovation and integration of technology and pedagogy and wants faculty to increase awareness and knowledge of the pedagogy behind the use of technology in teaching.

Use Case Scenario

CUNY instructors can attend the workshops at the specific colleges, access the site online and become members of its online community. The site on the Academic Commons will be public so that, even when you did not attend the workshop, you can still have access to its content and connect with colleagues. It will provide a starting point for instructors designing or already using course sites in their classrooms, offering both an introduction to the pedagogy and the practice. After visiting the workshop and/or the site they can continue their exploration by navigating the other resources we have collected and curated for them.

Full Fledged Version

Our vision for a final product is an evolving web resource for professors interested in creating course sites and an adaptable and replicable workshop available to Centers for Teaching and Learning in August and January at a number of CUNY campuses. While the site will initially host our learning module, workshop participants’ contributions will make it a lively and evolving forum for faculty from a variety of disciplines and campuses to share, discuss, and develop their pedagogical best practices in course site development.

Training Module and Group Site

We will host the training module and group site on the Academic Commons using WordPress. Before deciding exactly how to design the site (what theme, what plug-ins, etc), we need to do research into the pedagogy behind course site development (see below.) Our initial thought is to break the site into five main pages:

  • Pedagogy.  This lays out and offers citations to some of the the pedagogical frameworks grounding the thinking behind the integration and design of course sites. This page will also encourage users to add their own recommendations for resources focusing specifically on the pedagogy behind course structure and site design. (This is the group site element.)
  • Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities. Each of these three pages offers a few models of course sites from professors who teach in this discipline. Each offers screenshots of the professor’s sites with his/her annotations about the choices this site reflects and why he/she made those choices.
  • Details, Details. This points professors to how-to resources on WordPress as well as logistical FAQ-type elements. For example, “Can I post readings as I would on blackboard?” “Can I use this course again next semester?” “How do I cite the images I use in the banner?”

Workshops

To offer the workshops, we will need buy-in, administrative help, and the use of facilities at four CUNY campuses. We already know Luke at Baruch and he seems excited about our project. Sarah teaches at John Jay and Anke teaches at City College, so we need to start building relationships with the directors of the Centers for Teaching and Learning now in order to start the process of scheduling the first workshops (at Baruch and John Jay) in January, 2016. We will plan to offer the City and Queens College workshops in August, 2016.

Minimally Viable Product

Training Module

We will host the training module on the Academic Commons using WordPress. Before deciding exactly how to design the site (what theme, what plug-ins, etc), we need to do research into the pedagogy behind course site development. The site will have three main components:

  • Pedagogy. See above.
  • Best Practices. This will offer links to a few different model sites as well as audio recordings with the professors who designed them describing their pedagogical thinking and design choices.
  • Details, Details. See above.

Timeline and Skills Acquisition

  1. Study the literature for pedagogy and best practices in course site design. (80 hours each)
  2. Identify and recruit professors who have made thoughtful (and diverse) choices in creating their sites, can articulate/annotate their process, and would be willing to invest time in sharing with us. (20 hours each)
  3. Design and build the Academic Commons site (20 hours each)
  4. Create workshops  (10 hours each)
  5. Admin Work (scheduling workshops, set-up, follow-ups) (30 hours each)

Critical Digital Edition: Memories and Adventures

Memories and Adventures is a 1924 autobiography by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the late-Victorian writer most famous for his creation of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was a physician, a Spiritualist, and a prominent public figure. His autobiography describes his adventures whaling in the deep Arctic, his experiences in medical practice, his religious epiphanies, and his efforts as a British apologist during the Boer war. Although Holmes is a figure of central interest to scholars concerned with fin de siècle culture, fan studies, and the literature of detection, Doyle’s autobiography has received relatively little critical scrutiny, and the majority of the scholarly attention it does receive is in introductions to collections of Holmes stories as a source of biographic material. To an extent, this is unsurprising—Doyle’s Spiritualism, for example, seems incongruous, given the empirical tendencies of his most famous creation. However, the book holds some special appeal from a history of science perspective, and an annotated edition, backed up with letters, images, and historical background, would provide an original biographical perspective on the complex figure who conceived the Great Detective.

Memories and Adventures

Memories and Adventures

Minimal Viable Product

 Memories and Adventures is an ideal length for a scholarly edition, and creating such a work would be a worthwhile contribution to Holmes studies. However, the creation of a digital scholarly edition could also be limited to the initial release of a small set of annotated Holmes stories rather than a full critical edition of Doyle’s autobiography, a move that could provide a proof of concept. Thus, my MVP could be a set of critically annotated Holmes stories presented on an existing cross-platform publishing platform, such as iBooks or an open-source alternative.

Larger Scope Project

A more substantial version of the project would be a Holmes digital archive or Doyle omnibus, which would be a much more substantial undertaking. Alternatively, I could focus more on the platform, rather than using preexisting tools to create a larger book-length commentary. This would actually be timely, since as of now there are actually few satisfactory or comprehensive alternatives for publishing critical editions online—most current platforms are focused on textbooks or lack features that make them attractive on tablets. (I’m looking at you, Scalar.)

Whether I go with the short stories or the full edition, an intertextual, archival, and multimedia approach built on a modern distribution platform would enable the digital edition to go beyond critical commentary to include some of the elements of an archive. A digital edition constructed around the capabilities of the modern tablet could incorporate high-resolution images and illustrations, “tours” of prominent locations, interviews with Doyle scholars, facsimiles of original editions, and other materials usually reserved for an archive.

 

 

 

 

Short proposals, Gioia Stevens

Project Proposal #1: Topic modeling project

  1. Introduction

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. There is no more granular level of structured search and the repository does not offer any traditional subject headings or other classification scheme. This problem of limited search and discovery in digital repositories is not limited to Academic Works. The traditional methods of providing structured searching by topic through the use of hierarchical taxonomies have failed to keep pace with the explosion of digitized print publications and born digital texts. A researcher looking for information by topic in a large digital corpus is often at sea without a compass and cannot be sure that search results offer complete or accurate information. Academic Works needs better metadata!

  1. Set of personas

Andromeda Dissertation is a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is planning her dissertation topic and she wants to consult Academic Works to see what other students at GC have done.

Professor Old Hat is not very excited about digital projects, but he thinks Academic Works sounds more convenient than going to the library to look at the print copies of the dissertations.

Faraway Researcher lives in another country and does not know anything about the CUNY Graduate Center. S/he comes to Academic Works after doing a search in Google Scholar.

  1. Use case scenario

Andromeda Dissertation is a graduate student in the English department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is browsing Academic Works to look for recent dissertations on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. She looks at the discipline lists but discovers that she can go no further than an undifferentiated list of “Works in American Literature.” Annoyed, she starts typing in “Leaves of Grass” in the keyword search box. This does pull up one dissertation on Whitman, but it also yields several irrelevant results such as “How Important Is Land-Based Foraging to Polar Bears?” Andromeda laughs bitterly and loathes those idiots at the library, but then she notices an attractive visualization displaying a cloud of words representing topics in all of the English department dissertations. She finds not only Whitman, but several other topics related to her research which she had not thought to seek out through a key word search. She clicks on the visualization that takes her directly to the related section of the full text and begins exploring.

  1. How to make the full-fledged version

In the first phase of the project, I plan to focus on a test corpus of GC full text dissertations in Academic Works over a five-year period from 2009 to 2014. The prototype will 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 dissertations in Academic Works. Academic Works will eventually contain the full corpus of past CUNY dissertations from 1965 to the present. It will also become the primary platform for the publication, dissemination, and preservation of all future CUNY dissertations. Creating better subject access to the dissertations through topic modeling will aid researchers and also provide an overview analysis of the history of scholarship at the Graduate Center. Other possible features of the full-fledged version would include building a metadata crosswalk from topic modeling results to standard controlled vocabularies such as Library of Congress Subject Headings or OCLC FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) Headings.

  1. Time estimate

Uncertain, but probably at least a year for the test phase with dissertations from 2009-2014. The larger project for all dissertations going back to 1965 is a long term project that would take several years.

Skills estimate

Known skills: XML/XSLT, MarcEdit, Excel, general metadata/controlled vocabulary knowledge

Skills I would need to learn: AntConc, Mallet, Gephi or other visualization tools. Also need to clear substantial technical and bureaucratic hurdles for integrating new search tool into Digital Commons repository platform. Building the metadata crosswalk would also require considerable additional exploration, consulting metadata experts at other libraries, and the acquisition of additional skills.

  1. How to make the stripped down version

A stripped down version would focus on a smaller test corpus of 377 dissertations and theses from 2010 and compare topic modeling results against author supplied key words, subject headings assigned in the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database, and traditional Library of Congress Subject Headings assigned by GC librarians in the records in the CUNY catalog. In 2010, the library was still doing manual, original cataloging of each dissertation, but it had also begun the electronic dissertation deposit process which affords both full text searching and additional metadata (author keywords and ProQuest headings). This comparison of old and new methods would be a more systematic and traditional way to test topic modeling as a library classification tool, but the resulting project would take the form of writing an initial evaluation rather than building a functioning tool. This version of the project would be much simpler to do and it would eliminate the need to integrate a new feature into the Digital Commons repository platform.

  1. Time estimate: 6 months

Skills estimate

Known skills: XML/XSLT, MarcEdit, Excel, general metadata/controlled vocabulary knowledge

Skills I would need to learn: AntConc, Mallet, Gephi or other visualization tools 

  

Project Proposal #2: Mapping the History of NYC Islands

  1. Introduction

New York City is the nation’s largest urban archipelago, with dozens of small islands which are now mostly abandoned and off limits to the public. Many of the islands were once part of New York’s maritime and industrial economy or served to house hospitals, jails, military training centers, and graveyards. Abandoned 19th century buildings can be seen on some islands, while most are barren except for flocks of nesting birds. Over thirty small islands no longer exist at all because they were joined to the mainland using construction debris as landfill. Some islands played a more dramatic role in history, such as Big Tom Island which housed a munitions depot destroyed by German saboteurs in 1916.

This project will use maps to tell the history of these islands, uniting information from books, scholarly articles, newspapers, and archives. The project will be suitable for use in New York City history classes as well as appealing to scholars, NYC history buffs, eccentric tourists, and curious kayakers and bird watchers.

  1. Set of personas

Cassidy Commoncore is a social studies teacher in a NYC public middle school. She is always looking for new ways to teach students about the history and environment of NYC.

Horatio History is a native New Yorker and local history enthusiast. He is not an academic, but he devotes a lot of time to reading and research.

Tina Tourista is a visitor to NYC who is interested in the off-beat and forgotten aspects of the city’s history.

Birding Bob & Kayaking Karen are interested in NYC harbor islands as part of the city’s natural environment.

  1. Use case scenario

Cassidy Commoncore is a social studies teacher in a NYC public middle school. She is required to teach about the history and environment of NYC as part of the curriculum, but it is a struggle to find ways to keep students interested in the material. The Mapping the History of NYC Islands project is a free online tool that helps her students learn geography and history as well as exploring environmental issues such as protecting nesting harbor herons. Students can explore the islands through an online map of New York City and click on each one to see images, interesting facts, historical summaries, and links to further information.

  1. How to make the full-fledged version

The project will have an initial research phase to find and assemble information on the history of the islands from a variety of sources (online sources including Wikipedia, NYC history blogs and websites, scholarly and popular journal articles and books, and museum and archive collections). The building of the actual interface would involve using CartoDB or similar platform designed for story telling with maps

  1. Time estimate: 6 months to 1 year.

Skills estimate

Known skills: Research, writing, and presentation skills. Basic HTML, WordPress skills.

Skills I would need to learn: GIS skills/CartoDB, more advanced WordPress

  1. How to make the stripped down version

The stripped down version would limit the initial research phase to more readily available resources and save more labor-intensive research (such as visits to museums and archives) for a later phase. This version would focus on building the basic interface first and then expand and develop with additional content on an ongoing basis.

  1. Time estimate: 6 months.

Skills estimate

Known skills: Research, writing, and presentation skills. Basic HTML, WordPress skills.

Skills I would need to learn: GIS skills/CartoDB, more advanced WordPress

Anke’s Project Proposal #1: WordPress Framework with Commons and Annotation Tool for Literature Courses

Introduction

Effective close reading is a challenge in many literature classrooms. Before students can even start to discuss or write about a text they have to actively engage with it. But the problem is that the majority of students read texts on electronic devices, especially on their smartphones. Active reading and annotating are habits rarely seen anymore. I want to design a WordPress framework for literature courses that brings this practice back into the (online) classroom. It will include an annotation tool and student community function, so that students can annotate and comment on (parts of) class readings in an online community setting. After basic training in WordPress, instructors can fill in the existing framework with their own reading materials. This will save them a lot of time. It can also help the department streamline course design and requirements, and, most importantly, improve student performance.

Personas

  • Willy: a young parttime adjunct instructor in the English Department. Wants to teach with WordPress but does not have the time or expertise to build his own website from scratch. Has been given a mandatory reading list for a literature survey course—a requirement for the Gen Ed Curriculum. Because of this, his students will have a widely varying level of ability and interest in the subject. This framework can help him set up his course site, save him time, and give him an effective tool to work with students with varying skill sets.
  • Beatrice: a fulltime professor in the English Department. Invested in curriculum development and innovation. Currently serving on a committee to rethink the Gen Ed course offerings, reading lists, and course tools. The framework can provide a user-friendly and effective way to integrate technology into the classroom, and streamline the course offerings across the department but still offer each instructor/course the freedom to fill in the course in a way that fits their specific needs/course requirements.
  • Alex: a student. Junior, majoring in English. English is his first language and he generally does well in literature and arts classes. Likes to read. Likes to contribute to class discussions but is shy to speak up. Uses his tablet to read the texts. Online annotation would be a great addition to class participation for him and help him actively engage with the texts, and his peers, on his tablet.
  • Julia: a student. Freshman, majoring in engineering. Has to take literature to meet Gen Ed requirements. English is not her native language. Struggles with reading comprehension. Uses her smartphone to read the texts. Online annotation can help her comprehension of class readings, give her a way to show where she’s struggling with the text, and increase overall engagement in class, even when she’s working on a smartphone.

Use Case Scenario

Language and literature departments can offer this tool to their faculty. In addition, they would offer faculty an introductory workshop on how to use WordPress and this framework specifically. Instructors would then incorporate it in their course design and use it to read (parts of) the assigned readings with the students. Follow-up meetings can address issues of assessment, offer continuing support and function as a platform for new ideas and the sharing of experiences.

Students would access their course websites before class to read texts, annotate and comment on them, and comment on each others’ comments. Passages that many mark as difficult, relevant or otherwise noteworthy will receive special attention in class discussion. It helps student engage with the texts, and faculty align instruction with needs and experiences of students.

Full Version

For the framework to be able to offer a blog, annotation tool and community function to many classrooms, I would need a tablet/smartphone compatible multisite network on WordPress with an annotation tool plug-in and commons function. I have recently changed my course website (courseblogs.org) into a multisite but have not yet made any additional sites. It is already smartphone compatible, and my students already use it on their phones. A large multisite needs a strong multisite network administration. Once the site is up, this administration, plus support for faculty, would take the most time and resources.

Right now the only annotation plug-in that I know is Commentpress, which is not the most user-friendly nor easy to integrate with other functionalities such as a blog. There are other options, such as Social Reader (also from The Institute for the Future of the Book), PRISM (from the Praxis Program at U of Virginia), NowComment, and Annotate.co. I need to evaluate all the options, but in an absolute ideal situation I would be able to design the annotation tool also.

Since undergraduates cannot access the already existing CUNY commons, I want to integrate that function by installing Commons in a Box.

I think the biggest hurdle is to make such a multi-user site run smoothly and to integrate the various functionalities within framework.

Time and Skills

I have intermediate skills with WordPress but would need to learn more about these specific plug-ins. Commons in a Box has a lot of features so it takes some time to learn how to work with it effectively. I would also need to learn how to manage a multi-site and train faculty how to start using it.

As the goal is to offer a framework for various literature courses, I would have to sit down with faculty in charge of curriculum development and discuss the process of building, implementation, and support for faculty. Together we would draw up the design for the framework, so that it reflects the needs and desires of the department and/or the Gen Ed curriculum.

I think it would take 2-3 months to design and create the framework. The faculty workshops, site management and troubleshooting, and user support would be ongoing after implementation.

Minimally Viable Product

The stripped-down version would be a WordPress site with the same functionalities (blog, annotation, commons). Everything would be the same but it would not yet be a multi-site network. I can build out my website to include all the features I would like the framework site to have, and use reading material from a course I am currently teaching to give it content. This could also serve as a showcase for the extended version. I would have to familiarize myself with annotation tools and Commons in a Box and can experiment with it in my own classroom, but would not yet expand beyond my own use.

It would take me 2-3 weeks to build out my site, then a few weeks to test it in the classroom, and another 2-3 weeks to fine-tune it.

(For my other proposal I am working with Sarah so we will post that separately).

A Space for Developing Historical Interests and Comprehension

As many of you already know, I am very interested in working on the subject of passive to active learning.  I overheard a young lady voice frustration around not understanding a class reading and bemoaning the idea of having to produce a lengthy writing around it.  I have since spent time reflecting on how to produce a tool that would visually aid students  to understand what they have read and potentially increase their desire to know more about historical events and human strife.

This exercise requires students to have read assignments before attempting to complete the exercise.  They should leave the exercise space prepared to begin writing around themes in the reading.

Utilizing a web app, students would be able to pose a question around a reading, construct keywords, and then recreate visually what they perceive is going on within a passage by placing  contemporary images in a grid that represents the action within the text.  Students would have the ability to rearrange the images in the grid.

For example, if the reading was about the French Revolution, students could focus their responses around other themes besides the main theme and use the keywords to help form contextual questions to help them populate the grid.  The option to add more rows to the grid would be available if students wanted to work in a larger space.

For instance, to answer the question why did the peasants revolt, students would be able to visually answer that question with the use of contemporary images to describe conditions around human hunger, greed, female suffrage or any of the other factors that figured in the politics of the day.  Having created the visual grid, students should be positioned to write with a better understanding of the various themes within the text.

A backchannel could also be made available that would allow other students to comment on the question posed in the main space.  Their discussions could be around other historical events that are similar to the topic in the main space.  This comparison is meant to help develop interest in and understanding of other historical events, either past or present.

Teachers could introduce this tool to students at the beginning of the semester, so that students gain familiarity before using the tool in their personal spaces.

Ayanna’s Project Ideas: Active Learning in Large Lectures

Hello All!

I’m late in posting, 1. because I missed our first class, and 2. I’m posting right before class so that no one feels that they have to write responses—it’s been great, a week with just reading! I hate to take that away from everyone.

I teach large format Biology courses, my main course is Anatomy and Physiology. In a good semester, I will have 230 students in my class, in a bad semester, 350+. We meet in lecture halls which seat 150 students at a time.

A challenge is to encourage active learning and class discussion in such a large course. Some students tend to dominate in class, others are shy and intimidated to speak up when responding to questions. Having class discussion groups is a nightmare due to stadium seating, and the noise level in a class of 150 can be intolerable.

We currently have “clicker” type software, using the students’ smartphones to respond to questions, but we can only use multiple choice questions. I would like to have the students complete clinical critical thinking problems instead, and to brainstorm with other members of the class, in a time efficient way, that would not require them to leave their seats.

Idea 1: Create a texting platform, similar to YikYak, which would allow the students within the lecture hall to create online discussions to the questions. The instructor would be able to see the contents of the chat as it is occurring. If the instructor presents multiple questions, we could find a method to divide the students into groups, and they would discuss their problems over the chat. The instructor could decide if the students would present their findings, or there could be a class-wide discussion following each chat session to talk about some of the comments. Unlike YikYak, the entire session would be captured for the instructor to later review if they like.

Idea 2: This is a fun little idea for my high school outreach summer program students. I will admit I got this idea in part from my husband, as Google visited his office the other day and brought goodies. Our department has a green initiative to reduce the amount of hazardous waste produced by our large format classes, so we have moved from dissections to virtual cadaver model programs–which requires students to purchase a code from a publisher to use. In our summer high-school outreach programs, they have an option to take a general bio or anatomy prep course, and it would be nice to provide students with this software option, but it is not cost-effective. If we could create a cadaver dissection app for these students, and add (this was my husband’s idea) Google Cardboard, to make it a virtual reality cadaver app, I think this would be a lot of fun and be a good learning tool for students at this level.

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.