Academic Technology Specialists Program: Expansion and New Projects
by Peter Chen
The Academic Technology Specialist program works with faculty, lecturers, and researchers within University departments, programs, and schools to advance the application of software and information technology in teaching and research. The newest ATS, Bob Muller, has been working with the Department of Political Science on advanced data projects. Michael Gonzalez, the ATS for the Departments of Art and Drama, has focused on several projects making innovative uses of technology.
Department of Political Science
Bob Muller joined the ATS program this fall after a number of years in private industry, working for such companies as Cytokinetics, ValueStar and Symantec. Most recently he comes to us from the IRT Systems Development Group at the Medical School where he was an Application Developer and Database Architect. A specialist in Oracle database systems for many years, Bob has penned a number of books on Oracle development, database design, and object-oriented software testing. Getting to work with the Department of Political Science is something of a return to an old field for Bob. He holds Masters and PhD degrees from MIT in Political Science, having specialized in data management for criminal surveying.
There are two interesting data projects that Bob has immersed himself in this fall. One is an historical and international trade and debt database that deals with data even going back several hundreds of years. This presents an interesting set of problems to chronicle and track because of ongoing political changes including the rise and fall of nations, not to mention readjustments to monetary systems. At present, much of the problem lies in understanding how all of the data must be set up so that these complex sets of relations can be properly structured when recalling the data. In addition, there is a large amount of historical data from different periods that must be entered by hand and, again, properly related.
In contrast to that, Bob's other data project tracks campaign contributions in modern political campaigns using existing electronic data from the Federal Elections Commission (FEC). Although this data is essentially fed from electronic sources, there is a need to deal with processed versions of the information and to track versions of the contribution data that is not organized in the same way that the FEC organizes the data. Bob has written a number of scripts in Perl to create processes that deal with these issues.
Departments of Art and Drama
Michael Gonzalez is just wrapping up his first year as the ATS for the Departments of Art and Drama and has already offered several ways to make thoughtful use of technologies in these fields.
In the Art Department, Michael has set up a new Media Center lab for faculty and graduate students to use for production quality processing for teaching and for projects that include scanning, digital editing, and graphical production tools. He has also put together training materials and workshops to introduce users to the facility and so they can make use of their new resources. On the infrastructure level, Michael has been working to bring online a reliable Retrospect system for the administrative staff to backup their data.
For the Drama Department, Michael has been building an extensive database of materials used in productions dating back several decades. Of particular interest is the data related to the use of various costumes. Photographs of costumes in the Drama Department archive are recorded in the database along with notes about their use in various productions.
For More Information
For more information about the Academic Technology Specialist Program see:
http://academiccomputing.stanford.edu/atsp/
For current projects from VPUE's Academic Technology Specialist Program, see News from VPUE's Academic Technology Specialist Program in this issue.
