Academic Technology Specialists Present Collaborative Projects with Faculty
by Zach Chandler
Amid the general bustle of the IT Open House on November 1, the Academic Technology Specialist (ATS) Program set up shop just under the vaulted eaves of Meyer Library. A simultaneous video stream was piped down to a digital projector from presentations taking place in the newly renovated studio space of the Digital Language Lab on the second floor above. (See also IT Open House a Success in this issue.)
This year's ATS presence had a new format, with presentations that featured faculty member partners whose work benefited from the ATS presence in their departments. The ATS program provides a unique combination of technological expertise and domain-specific understanding, which encourages new possibilities in teaching and research. This year's IT Open House presented the opportunity to showcase some of the projects produced or currently underway.
Visualizing the Bard
Matthew Jockers (ATS for the English Department) and David Riggs (Professor of English) demonstrated a joint project, Visualizing the Bard, which was initially conceived as a note-taking experiment, but evolved into a dynamic Web application. Riggs's intention of keeping track of his copious notes on the life events of Shakespeare (his actual whereabouts and the socio-political context of his writings) met Jockers' penchant for databases and dynamic Web delivery. What emerged was a tool that could graphically plot Shakespeare's publications in the context of surrounding events.
The visual layer added by Jockers' application (a PNG file dynamically generated from the database with PHP) sheds light on otherwise disparate data, allowing new conclusions to bubble up from the data, such as the apparent dearth in advertising of plays in 1603. According to Riggs, Visualizing the Bard has become a "great teaching aid." Since he brought the project back into the classroom, it continues to evolve and grow in value as students contribute to the research data.
Beyond the Kodak Carousel: Digital Workflow for Art Historians and Humanists
Michael Gonzalez (ATS for Art, Art History, and Drama) appeared with Michael Marrinan (Professor of Art History) in their joint presentation, Beyond the Kodak Carousel: Digital Workflow for Humanists. In it they elaborated on a method that they invented for a common problem among art historians, adapting to the post-slide carousel world. To this day, slide projectors are favored by many art historians as the display method of choice. This is not just a neo-luddite reaction to the inexorable digitization of the humanities, rather it is simply that slides are still qualitatively better, and the Kodak carousel workflow is simple and effective.
What Gonzalez and Marrinan came up with is an answer to the dilemma of the disappearing Kodak carousel (which, though much loved, was discontinued from production in 2004), taking full advantage of the benefits inherent in a digital medium. Their method involves a customized database, imaging and display software, and a wireless remote to create the optimal classroom display environment: side-by-side, high-resolution images through which the professor can conveniently navigate mid-lecture, evoking a familiar slide carousel workflow yet bringing best-practice into the digital era.
Collaborative Visualization and Argumentation in Anthropology
Claudia Engel (ATS for Anthropological Sciences and Cultural and Social Anthropology) joined John Rick (Professor of Anthropological Sciences) in their joint presentation, Collaborative Visualization and Argumentation in Anthropology, in which they explored the intersection of pedagogy, digital imaging, and learning space design in an Archaeology course. This experimental course focused on the use of advanced digital imaging (GIS, CAD, etc.) in the display of archaeological data. Students had to rapidly acquire the technical skills to conduct meaningful analyses. Taking advantage of Wallenberg Hall's HPLS, Engel designed a classroom laboratory that allowed teams of students using tandem touchscreens to interact with the data and each other in a learn-by-doing pedagogical model. Her design allowed the students to make extraordinary progress in a short period of time. Engel is currently working on making the laboratory space mobile.
Collaborative Web Tools
In separate presentations, Vijoy Abraham (ATS for the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences) and Nicole Coleman (ATS for the Stanford Humanities Center) explored the state of the art in collaborative Web tools and their attendant methodologies using tools that they had built for their respective constituencies on campus.
Abraham's presentation, entitled Social Science Research 2.0 (beta), illustrated how the underlying technologies of wikis, blogs, and RSS syndication enabled researchers in the Social Sciences to stay current and to collaborate in new ways. His PMwiki project for IRiSS was successful because of solid fundamentals (aside from the dynamic nature of the tool itself, which allows all users to simultaneously edit one live web document). His application rollout helps people manage their collaborative research efforts, fulfilling an existing need in an innovative way.
In a similar vein, Coleman's Humanities Research Network (or HRN) fulfills comparable needs for humanists along a proven model: the community of scholars at Stanford's renowned Humanities Center that brings together scholars from around the country and provides an environment conducive to collaboration and pursuit of research during a sabbatical year.
Enter the ATS, whose job is to evaluate and build technological resources. Coleman drew on the experiences of the Global Identities Group (GIG) that is using this new virtual workspace to co-author a book at a distance using a wiki and the Plone-based HRN platform. This combination of tools allows participation through invitation of members, a decentralized model that allows research groups to grow organically, obviating the need for an administrator to create and approve accounts. Coleman is an expert in emerging technologies and her approach focuses on making use of APIs (Application Programming Interface), which is essentially a computer code welcome mat created by tool developers that allows others to interact with their application (Google Maps, Amazon book data, etc.) without requiring intimate knowledge of the source code. Increased usage of APIs has opened the door for many exciting new "mashups" in recent years.
Portuguese 99 - Video Blogging in Rio Slums and the Promise of Ubiquitous Wireless Networks
In perhaps the most media-rich presentation of the day, Joseph Kautz (ATS for the Language Center) presented Portuguese 99 - Video Blogging in Rio Slums and the Promise of Ubiquitous Wireless Networks, together with Lyris Wiedemann (Senior Lecturer in Portuguese). They worked with another project collaborator patched in via video chat on one of the room's large touchscreens, allowing the entire audience in on the conversation. In this project, Stanford students of Portuguese were able to communicate via the Web with street children living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Sharing experiences, conversations and questions provided our students with a meaningful context for their language learning, as well as giving their Brazilian partners a fun and challenging educational opportunity.
The program coordinator recounted how the connection with the Stanford students gave the Brazilian children cause to engage in ways that they had not previously, challenging the bounds of their literacy in order to connect with these new friends. The Weblog created for the project, Vamos Blogar, allowed both sides to communicate in text, images, and video.
Captioned Video Lectures: Searchable, Accessible, and Research-Friendly
In Captioned Video Lectures: Searchable, Accessible, and Research-Friendly, Shelley Haven (ATS for the Office of Accessible Education) and Professor Kyle Cole from the Center for Probing the Nanoscale, demonstrated a remarkable system for capturing video lectures and making them searchable via a Web interface for on-demand viewing.
Haven's expertise is in accessibility, which most of us think of in terms of making resources available for people with disabilities. However, this project demonstrates the principles of Universal Design, an approach that facilitates universal access by all without forcing the individual to adapt to the system (as is often the case for a person with disabilities). This results in some amazing ancillary benefits for all users.
In this project, video recordings of lectures are outsourced for transcription and synchronization of the resulting text with the videos. The videos are loaded onto a streaming video server; another server holds a database of the synchronized text tracks and generates SMIL files on-demand. (SMIL is an acronym for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, a W3C recommendation). Instead of the usual model of human intervention (creating, labeling, and managing the video delivery), the server responds to a text search of the digitized video corpus and delivers search results showing time and context. The user selects a clip based on relevancy. Remarkably, each SMIL clip is itself dynamically generated, the in-point automatically set to ten seconds before the relevant section. Imagine a searchable video archive that delivers only exactly what you were looking for without the need for user-defined metadata. That's accessibility that benefits everyone. See also Captioned Lecture Video: Searchable, Accessible, and Archive-Friendly in this issue.
Video Captures of All Presentations Available
These projects are just a few examples of the creative potential of many productive partnerships formed between Academic Technology Specialists and the faculty in their respective department or program. Video captures of these presentations will be available on the ATS Web site at:
