Category: Computers and Education

Sustainable Research: Around the World Conference

This week I am participating in the 6th Around the World Conference organized by the Kule Institute for Advanced Study.  This e-conference (electronic conference) is on Sustainable Research and we have a panel on a different topic every day of the week. (If you miss a panel, check out our YouTube channel.) Today we had a fabulous panel on Art and/in the Anthropocene that was led by Natalie Loveless and Jesse Beier. You can see some thoughts on the e-conference under the Twitter hastag #ATW2018, which we share with the American Trombone Workshop.

Manifest Attention

One of the problems with e-conferences is that they are local for everyone which means that everyone tunes in and out depending on what they have scheduled rather than devoting the time. When you fly to a conference you can’t be expected to leave the conference for a meeting, but when a conference is local or online we tend to not pay attention as we would when afar.

This has to change if we are to wean ourselves of flying any time we want to pay attention to a conference. We have to learn to be deliberate about allocating time to an e-conference. We have to manifest attention.

DPLA Primary Source Sets

Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Japan

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has a fascinating collection of Primary Source Sets that bring together materials around a subject for teaching and historical thinking. For example they have a set on Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Japan that allows you to see both American and Japanese representations of Perry and the important visit. These sets show how a digital archive can be repurposed in different ways.

Composite Image by Picasso
From the Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and Modern War Set

Python Programming for the Humanities by Folgert Karsdorp

Having just finished teaching a course on Big Data and Text Analysis where I taught students Python I can appreciate a well written tutorial on Python. Python Programming for the Humanities by Folgert Karsdorp is a great tutorial for humanists new to programming that takes the form of a series of Jupyter notebooks that students can download. As the tutorials are notebooks, if students have set up Python on their computers then they can use the tutorials interactively. Karsdorp has done a nice job of weaving in cells where the student has to code and Quizes which reinforce the materials which strikes me as an excellent use of the IPython notebook model.

I learned about this reading a more advanced set of tutorials from Allen Riddell for Dariah-DE, Text Analysis with Topic Models for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The title doesn’t do this collection of tutorials justice because they include a lot more than just Topic Models. There are advanced tutorials on all sorts of topics like machine learning and classification. See the index for the range of tutorials.

Text Analysis with Topic Models for the Humanities and Social Sciences (TAToM) consists of a series of tutorials covering basic procedures in quantitative text analysis. The tutorials cover the preparation of a text corpus for analysis and the exploration of a collection of texts using topic models and machine learning.

Stéfan Sinclair and I (mostly Stéfan) have also produced a textbook for teaching programming to humanists called The Art of Literary Text Analysis. These tutorials are also written as Jupyter notebooks so you can download them and play with them.

We are now reimplementing them with our own Voyant-based notebook environment called Spyral. See The Art of Literary Text Analysis with Spyral Notebooks. More on this in another blog entry.

Canadian Social Knowledge Institute

I just got an email announcing the soft launch of the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI). This institute grew out of the Electronic Textual Culture Lab and the INKE project. Part of C-SKI is a Open Scholarship Policy Observatory which has a number of partners through INKE.

The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI) actively engages issues related to networked open social scholarship: creating and disseminating research and research technologies in ways that are accessible and significant to a broad audience that includes specialists and active non-specialists. Representing, coordinating, and supporting the work of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, C-SKI activities include awareness raising, knowledge mobilization, training, public engagement, scholarly communication, and pertinent research and development on local, national, and international levels. Originated in 2015, C-SKI is located in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab in the Digital Scholarship Centre at UVic.

DataCamp

I’ve been playing with DataCamp‘s Python lessons and they are quite good. Python is taught in the context of data analysis rather than the turtle drawing of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. They have a nice mix of video tutorials and then exercises where you get a tripartite screen (see above.) You have an explanation and instructions on the left, a short script to fill in on the upper-right and interactive python shell where you can try stuff below.

Continue reading DataCamp

Naylor Report in Voyant

Correspondence Analysis (ScatterPlot) View

The Naylor Report (PDF) about research funding in Canada is out and we put it in Voyant. Here are some different

Continue reading Naylor Report in Voyant

FBI Game: What is Violent Extremism?

sheep

From Slashdot a story about an FBI game/interactive that is online and which aims at Countering Violent Extremism | What is Violent Extremism?. The subtitle is “Don’t Be A Puppet” and the game is part of a collection of interactive materials that try to teach about extremism in general and encourage some critical distance from the extremism. The game has you as a sheep avoiding pitfalls.

Continue reading FBI Game: What is Violent Extremism?

Geofeedia ‘allowed police to track protesters’

geofeedia
From the BBC a story about US start-up Geofeedia ‘allowed police to track protesters’. Geofeedia is apparently using social media data from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to monitor activists and protesters for law enforcement. Access to these social media was changed once the ACLU reported on the surveillance product. The ACLU discovered the agreements with Geofeedia when they requested public records of California law enforcement agencies. Geofeedia was boasting to law enforcement about their access. The ACLU has released some of the documents of interest including a PDF of a Geofeedia Product Update email discussing “sentiment” analytics (May 18, 2016).

Frome the Geofeedia web site I was surprised to see that they are offering solutions for education too.

Professor Emeritus Seymour Papert, pioneer of constructionist learning, dies at 88

From Humanist and then MIT News, Professor Emeritus Seymour Papert, pioneer of constructionist learning, dies at 88. Papert was Piaget’s student and thought about how computers could provide children a way to construct knowledge. Among other things he developed the Logo language that I learned at one point. He also collaborated with the LEGO folk on Mindstorms, named after his book by that title.