Category Archives: 2014 Teams

AccessED Update

Midterm review/What we did
Last week, we presented a synopsis of our findings to the DPSI community. We went over some of the legal considerations for MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) providers as well as our meeting with the Harvard Disability Services Office.
What went well
Our presentation went pretty well and we were able to get some good feedback from the audience. Our two main questions for the audience were:

  • Given Harvard’s decentralized governance structure, what are some incentives (besides money!) that would encourage professors who develop MOOCs to consider and apply best practices for accessibility upfront?
  • We originally started thinking about MOOCs broadly, but have since focused our efforts on accessibility of Harvard’s MOOCs. Would a better final product be Harvard-focused (e.g., helping Harvard encourage its own MOOCs to apply accessibility standards upfront) or should we broaden to a work product that may be more broadly applied by other universities?

If anyone has thoughts on these two questions, please feel free to drop us a comment!

What was challenging
A big piece of the puzzle that we are missing is getting a soup to nuts overview of how a MOOC is developed.
What’s up next
We are hoping to set up a meeting with a MOOC provider soon!

#DocShop Meeting 06

Midterm Review 

We got a good idea of people’s familiarity with interactive documentary and gauged the interest in the topic. As was brought up during our previous meetings by group members and the metaLAB team, folks wondered how we capture process and audience responses to media.

On the whole, we definitely made some nice connections and got great feedback… we also might get some lessons learned documentation from Wendy Fok, one of the winners of last year’s Dean’s Design Challenge, on our entry into the i-Lab Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge.

What we worked on

The group met Tina Pamintuan, Nieman Fellow from CUNY Grad Center, who introduced herself and sat in on the discussion. Dan and other group members shared their experience of the Sam Green show at the ICA, but much of the conversation was about Ragnar Kjartansson’s piece The Visitors and the overall success of troubling some of the ideas of how to show multi-stream work in a museum setting.

Dan continued his conversation with Lara Baladi (MIT OpenDocs Lab) and Dalia Othman (Berkman), and we hope that they can join our next meeting. Perhaps a build out of Lara’s project on Egypt would work well for our kickoff event! We hope they can attend the meeting 11/7.

What went well

Idea jamming and talking about architecting different kinds of interaction between time-based media and audiences/authors. It was really productive to think of the spatialization of documentary as an , from the ground level (in a gallery or museum space), as opposed to combining top-down approaches with narrative seen in mapping, or the ‘choose your own adventure model’ that is viewed in a browser or a device, still being a single stream experience.

What was challenging

Pinning down the terms we wish to use in our proposal and charter. How do we break out of the ‘black box’ in a cinematic or dramaturgical environment? Perhaps it is a black cube?

What do we call this group and event series? An incubator or seminar/workshop series, a school, an interactive doc film festival? Perhaps a new term– a CoLABoratory. This implies that a number of different stakeholders across disciplines are collaboratively designing solutions to the problems of interactive documentary.

What’s up next

A number of group members were at the Illuminus Festival, so it will be productive to talk about what worked about that. Start work on our narrative, scope and process schedule, budget, and milestones for 2014/early 2015.

Halloween field trip!!! At our last meeting we decided to hold our next session in Lawrence  to view the location-based documentary, The Path: Fall of the Pemberton Mill made by Dan Koff in 2010.  

AccessEd Team Update

What We Worked On

The AccessEd team met last week to:  (a) take stock where things stand in terms of background research and planned outputs for the project; and (b) discuss ways to best take advantage this week’s mid-semester review session to inform our work over the rest of the term.

What Went Well

The team continues to make progress on evaluating the landscape for online education and access and getting its collective arms around the scope of issues that learners with hearing and visual impairments face as course materials move online.   Conversations thus far with experts in this space have helped the team to understand key technical, policy, and resource concerns.

What Was Challenging

Identifying discrete tasks to be tackled within the scope and timeline of DPSI has been difficult.  Some of the technological challenges in this space are quite significant — e.g., challenges around development of fast and accurate captioning systems for audiovisual materials.  The team is perhaps more likely to have an impact as a resource (or aggregator of third-party resources) or perhaps codifier of best practices than as a technical engineering or development initiative.

What’s Up Next

The team looks forward to getting some feedback from the crowd at this week’s mid-semester review as we continue to develop our agenda for the coming weeks.

Open Access – Team Update

This week our team at Open Access has been productively researching and moving forward with the survey, which asks faculty members questions about how they currently submit research and what they know about DASH. It sounds like goals for our next meeting are a) to take the paper survey and transform it into a digital one and b) for each of us to pass the digital version along to faculty we know and gather some data that will inform our suggestions around nudges to encourage DASH use.

Updated: 21 October 2014 – Wendy W Fok

Farmer’s Market – Taking a step back

The team has been experiencing a growing tension over the past few weeks. It took a while to realize this tension might be driven from different interpretations of the word “sustainability”.

We were brought on to help create a sustainable Farmer’s Market. But what that meant to me meant something else to my teammates and the assigned mentor, thus leading to different expectations.

The Website solution we’ve been developing had been largely influenced by the needs of the mentor (vs the needs we’ve identified among ourselves). Today, we were advised to reflect on what matters to us in terms of local food and sustainability.

Hopefully, by the Mid-Semester Review tomorrow, we will have more direction on the work we want to accomplish for the rest of the term.

Sincerely,
Cindy

eyeData – Coding

What We Worked On

This week, we actually got started coding. Our friends at IQSS set us up with a server and website (http://eyedata.datascience.iq.harvard.edu/). We all set up our personal environments and are working off a git repo. We use Jenkins to integrate our changes nightly.

With our midterm presentation this week, we then decided to split up the project and each of us (Batsheva, Luis, and myself) would develop an area and integrate them for the presentation. Luis is working on the UI; Batsheva is processing the data; I am using d3.js to create visuals.

What Went Well

So far it’s all has been going quite well! We were able to lay out the architecture of the website clearly and divide up the work evenly. We are on track to have a very basic version this week.

What Was Challenging

Setting up the environment for Windows was challenging. I eventually just resorted to setting it up on a VM running Ubuntu.

For me personally, it has be challenging to navigate the various technologies that we are using. Most of what we are using, such as Django and d3.js, are new to me, so a lot of time is spent just learning the language and principles behind them. Luis and Batsheva have previous experience with their modules, but regardless it takes a nontrivial amount of time to work through. Once these fundamentals have been laid out, we’ll have a barebones version of the website that will use some datasets living in the git repo to generate some visuals!

What’s Up Next

Currently, we are all working on our individual parts in order to have something to present at the midterm presentations this Wednesday. Our goal is to have a basic mockup of the UI that we envision, a processed data set, and a visualization created from that dataset. If you’re in the area, feel free to stop by and check us out!

After this week, we’ll probably hook up our website with the Dataverse search API, polish the UI, and automate the creation of the d3.js graphs. Once we have the website’s functionality up and running, we’ll all transition to creating graphs for different types of data.

Until next week,

Alex

#DocShop meeting 05

What we worked on

We defined our problematic and came up with a first iteration of our event. This event will serve as a proof of concept for the need for conversation around i docs and the need to create community and engage a greater diversity of audiences in documentary modes. The immediate goal would be to secure funding to plan at least three events over the 2014-2015 year, with a culminating showcase toward the end. Beyond that, this project could be a seminar/workshop/screening and event series that seeks to engage new audiences in various modes of storytelling and documentary arts. One long term plan (after pilot year) would include a school for adults and young adults, as well as an artist in residency program. This would test out ideas of horizontal learning, via the networks engaged in the project. Connections would be made across disciplines and media, between online resources and real world affinity spaces.

Plan: Reach out to makers working in the interactive doc realm (across institutions, including The New School in NYC, CUNY Grad Center, MIT, Harvard, MassArt, SMFA, BU, and Emerson). Continue workshopping interactive docs. Engage a variety of stakeholders during the pilot event.

What went well

Simply defining the problem and what we are interested in actually doing. We will create a manifesto, then during the pilot event, make it open so that all stakeholders can edit it (basically wiki it).

What was challenging

Articulating exactly what it is that we are doing (is it a festival? a happening? a charette? a performance? a showcase?) What is our one-year plan and five-year plan, etc.

What’s up next

Presenting to the midterm group. Secure funding and start securing resources for the pilot. Next week we will divide and conquer with a detailed scope, and timeline with milestones.

SafeCampus Meeting Update—Prepping for the Mid-Semester Review

Updates:

  1. Tez spoke to contacts in final clubs; they are willing to give us some feedback about the app. We want to do a focus group in about a month, when we have more information to present. The tentative date is November 16, Sunday.
  2. We want to have another focus group for more aware or passionate individuals (such as CAARE)
  3. Jen knows people in GradSAGE and Our Harvard Can Do Better who can support this app. Also good to consider the UC for sponsorship.

We have a review of the app with the Berkman team on Wednesday, October 22. Want to give a wide variety of options so that there are a lot of places for feedback.

Current Outline

Biggest concerns:

  1. False positive. You can put your phone in your purse and forget about it and then the possibility crying wolf happens. There is about half an hour at most when you are not holding on to your back or your phone. Most people are checking their phones constantly, so at least in college culture this might be less of a problem.  But we definitely want to emphasize that people should set how long they have between check ins. Focus should be less on asking for help and more on bystander intervention.
  2. Need a large community buy-in for the bystander intervention effect to work. This is why we need the big ad campaign.
  3. Abuse of the app. Issues of predators using the app to find vulnerable people. Also limiting the app to someone who has an HUID or a .edu account.

Capabilities:

  1. Check-in and alerting that you have an emergency
    1. Duration of time between missed check-in and sending an alert
    2. Who the alert is sent to—friends, proximal people, or mix of both
    3. Privacy/how long the information is kept
  2. Walking
    1. Privacy/how long the information is kept
  3. Database/FAQ/Tips
    1. Phone numbers of BARCC, OSAPR, HUPD, etc.
    2. Tips for how to be a good bystander (see NightOwl app from CMU)
  4. Adding brownie points
    1. Supports/Encourages bystander intervention
    2. Allows easy way to rank friends (know who you will help you when you need it)

Geared toward:

College campuses, starting with Harvard

Graduate students might use it when walking on

Technical concerns:

What platform should we make it in (iOS, Android?)

Concerns about GPS—will it drain the phone battery? Selective GPS?

Designing a prototype (Flinto) https://www.flinto.com/ — getting a subscription for that?

Designing a media package:

Prof. Rosenfeld would be a good resource here, given her conenctions

Video? Ad campaign?

Might be nice to have something ready by the next school year to add to orientation

To Do

Tez, Alina, and Ana will go to the Mid-Semester Review on Wednesday.

Tez will get back to final club people, thanking them for their interest and letting them know about the date.

Jen can create a few more visuals of what the product will look like.

Everyone should add to the Google form that Tez shared with the group last week. We aim to send out the survey out to people within the next two weeks, before the focus groups.

Open Access – Team Update

During last week’s meeting, the Open Access Team’s discussions circled around the implicit and explicit ways as efforts of gathering Open Access Data. The entire team is looking at ways to contact student groups, student governments so forward the cause, and leveraging word-of-mouth discussions to get the knowledge of how important contributing to the Open Access DASH would assist in the future development of a sharing economy.

Loren and Alexandra pulled together a survey over the past week (DASH Survey). They would love to get your thoughts on a) whether we, as a group, find a survey for faculty useful and b) any changes to the format / questions. The results will assist on the development of the next steps of the Open Access group.

Additionally, Alexandra touched based with two HBS professors and one HKS professor, while Wendy also tried to reach out to the Dean of the GSD and the Communications department at the GSD, on expanding on the deposit.

The entire team is working on deliverables and next steps for the project, and developing strategies on moving forward.

Updated: 16 October 2014 – Wendy W Fok

Big Data – Learning about notions of anonymity

The Big Data team spent the past week creating a space to share ideas and articles about topics we will be exploring for the rest of the semester.

We started with discussing the core ideas around anonymizing information: k-anonymity and l-diversity.

Next week, we are excited to begin digging in to some of the data itself!