We met for the second time to focus on refining our ideas. After recapping what we had discussed in our first meeting we decided to focus on a singular idea to begin. We believe that by narrowing our focus and flushing out the details of one project will allow us to see what direction we want our final project to take. Additionally we began discussing the categories and kinds of questions we want to ask the focus groups.
What went well
This meeting was especially helpful in brainstorming potential directions for our project. We were able to discuss a lot of ideas, both new and ones we brought up previously. Through our conversation we discovered that we were both leaning away from a static project that would end with our final presentation, but rather liked the idea of a more dynamic final product that allowed people to continue to add to it, whether in the form of a blog, oral history or hashtag.
What was challenging
Our discussion about the various forms of media campaigns and other projects revealed that we are still very unsure about the direction of our final presentation. We are also unclear about how exactly to approach such a broad topic, such as 21st century girlhood. The angles we could take in addressing this issue are extremely varied, which is both exciting and overwhelming.
What’s up next
The next step we hope to take is to begin actually talking to girls. We think that these preliminary focus groups will allow us to begin to focus and refine our ideas and the ultimate form we want for our final project. Also we plan on choosing a single possible format and planning it out from beginning to end to see if it seems feasible for our final project.
As Soraya mentioned last week, we discovered there are many opportunities to help improve Food for Free, both from a short-term and long-term perspective.
During our second meeting with Kelly, the Operational Director, we decided focusing on the immediate issues would be best, especially considering the scope of the project. We’ve been able to narrow down to two main operational issues: inventory control and communication between the drivers and Operational Director. There may be some root causes underlying these issues as well that we are hoping to uncover.
To start, we will be introducing ourselves to the drivers. Hopefully, it will be a warm welcome. We are looking forward to building this relationship through ride alongs and other touch points.
SaferCampus is back this semester, with the goal of finally producing and unveiling our app.
Last semester, our team worked to develop the interface of mobile app that can educate Harvard students about bystander intervention and encourage active bystander behavior. The plan we came up with involves allowing students to check in with a selected group of friends while they are out (at parties or walking around campus), and release calls for help during dire circumstances. Using an incentive system, the app (tentatively called “Bonobo”) would encourage students to practice active bystander behavior, thus putting the responsibility not just on the survivor of harassment, but on the entire community.
Looking forward, our goal is to further streamline the visualization of our app, so that we can effectively use the 10 hours of developer time that Berkman has allotted us this semester. To help us in this project, we are looking to work with a professor in computer science to advise us on feasibility of aspects of our project.
Additionally, our group is currently applying for the a grant from the president’s office in order to fund extra developer time during this semester.
Welcome back and check-in.. we met many times during January, but I will include notes from the most recent meeting.
Group gave hugs
Welcome Heather Craig! She is joining DocShop!!
We applied to i-Lab Dean’s Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge.. we should hear soon.
II. Progress and notes from the field
Tina– at Global Voices in Manila, Phillipines. Balanga Elementary school> museum in the back. Memory and ethnography.
Lara– Showed pieces of BackStory timeline in Egypt, built a kitchen
Matthew– group with Peter Macmurray focused on archive and humanities, other connections for DocShop/Vox Populi
Valery– continues work on N. Dakota oil boom project
Dan– continues work on spatialized archive, show at Kirkland gallery with Magic card and sledding parties
Cris– talked about premiere of Cold Storage and launching of webdoc, good turnout of architects, humanists, and other interesting folks. Group gave their initial impressions, more detailed workshop soon.
Joe– continues to be interested in memory and narrative in tackling archives
Heather– MIT CMS, Datalore Hackathon, interest in storytelling and currently working on interactive doc about pebble mine
III. Lara (MIT OpenDocLab Fellow we are incubating) went into more detail on her ideas for Vox Populi this semester:
Her need from us will be:
Production/Exhibitions (what prototyping and production needs we can meet, vs. farm out)
Methodology (the field guide and some pedagogy reflections, focus groups)
Proposal (a more refined proposal to send to institutions, orgs, museums)
Documentation (video, ethnography of the events, interviews, etc.)
Pedagogy design (practice of the ‘socratic circle’ and other workshops we could run related to Vox Pop and DocShop’s goals/skills)
Our Systemic Justice team will be working with HLS Professor Jon Hanson and SJP Program Director Jacob Lipton. Our last for this semester is to design a website for the Systemic Justice Project that intuitively presents the research of Prof. Hanson’s law school class.
During our first meeting, team members spoke with Hanson and Lipton about their expectations and desires for the website. Given that the reports will primarily be coming from law students, both Hanson and Lipton expect the bulk of content to come in at the end of the semester, and therefore would like to see the content organized thematically rather than chronologically.
This coming week, we will be meeting with the entire team of students to start our brainstorming and development process. During the first few weeks, we aim to gather ideas and inspiration from other websites, with a particular emphasis on websites affiliated with similar organizations (e.g., policy groups, research centers, journals). Looking at similar websites will give us a sense of what organizational formats will work best in displaying the great content we will receive at the SJP.
Since our group is not composed primarily of developers, the biggest challenge for us will be to design a website from scratch that can be created with the 10 hours of free developer time we get through Berkman this semester. In order to not waste any of this time, we will have to make sure that our proposal is simple and feasible, and is as efficient as possible to produce.
Team Members:
Tez Clark (Team Lead). Harvard College ’17, Philosophy, Adams House.
Trevor Brandt-Sarif, Harvard College ’15, Philosophy, Pforzheimer House.
Hillary Do, Harvard College ’17, Social Studies.
Jacqueline Lin, Harvard College ’16, Government, Currier House.
Miga Purev Ochir, Harvard College ’17, Philosophy, Pforzheimer House.
I’m Soraya Okuda, one of the two-person team (myself and Cindy Yang) working on the Food for Free project. Food for Free is a non-profit that has been operating since 1981. They serve more than 100 food programs every year, delivering to shelters, day care centers, after-school programs, clinics, drop-in centers, and more. This past year, their food rescue centers distributed 1.5 million pounds of food. They provide a vast number of food-delivery services, such as 4,000 to 8,000 pounds of freshly-grown vegetables from a quarter acre of land at the Lindentree Farm, a home delivery program that serves 90 to 100 housebound seniors and people with disabilities, and a transportation partnership that picks up food from the Greater Boston Food Bank on behalf of agencies that don’t have their own transportation (delivering more than a million pounds of food in the next year!).
Most recently, they began a new partnership with Harvard University Dining Services, redistributing flash-frozen foods from undergraduate dining halls. They are looking to expand this service to include other universities. Cindy and I are excited to help Food for Free’s small staff in increasing operational efficiency for food pickups and deliveries to people in need.
Cindy and I met with Food for Free’s operations director, Kelly, earlier this week to better acquaint ourselves with the variety of challenges that their organization faces. We learned more about their vast programming for food deliveries, which reaches Cambridge and Boston residents in need. We are setting up a time for a site visit to their office, where we will see how they use organizational tools, like Salesforce and a tracking app for deliveries, as well as to get a glimpse of how their staff works together.
We are still in the process of determining where we can be most helpful–there are a number of possible areas to pursue. After the site visit, as well as a future ride-along where we will accompany a driver in making pickups and deliveries, we will have a clearer idea of where we can help.
On Thursday, December 4, members of the Digital Problem-Solving Initiative (DPSI) community gathered to hear from members of the seven DPSI teams. DPSI teams feature a diverse group of learners (students, faculty, fellows, and staff) working on projects addressing problems and opportunities across the university. DPSI participants have had the novel opportunity to enhance and cultivate competency in various digital literacies as teams engage with research, design, and policy relating to the digital world.
Each team had 5 minutes to present and 5 minutes of feedback from the DPSI community audience.
Farmer’s Market: Building A Self-Sustaining Harvard Farmer’s Market Mentor: Margiana Peterson-Rockney (Food Literacy Project)
Farmer’s Market
Cindy, the representative of the Farmer’s Market team, talked about how the team has honed its vision for their goals and future endeavors. They talked with the director of Harvard’s dining services to figure out another way to fulfill their original farmer’s market goals now that the farmer’s market is closed for the winter. The plan is to work with Food for Free, a non-profit that redistributes food from Harvard dining halls to places of need. In the Spring, the team will be evaluating and optimizing Food for Free’s operational model.
AccessEd: Accessibility in Online Education Mentors: Chris Bavitz and Kira Hessekiel (Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Cyberlaw Clinic)
AccessEd
The AccessEd team talked about meeting with central individuals in the Harvard Office of Disability Services, the director of HarvardX, and the representative of a major technology vendor in the hopes of increasing accessibility in education. They’ve come to the conclusion that Harvard’s policies regarding accessibility are decentralized across schools, varying across the Business School, Kennedy School, Law School, and other Harvard schools. While cost is a major issue with any technological fix, the team hopes to increase awareness about accessibility in online education. They pointed out that there is a distinction between retroactively fitting existing courses and tools for those with disabilities and designing them from the beginning with these features in mind.
Big Data Mentor: Jim Waldo (Chief Technical Officer, Harvard University )
Big Data
Big Data talked about k-anonymization and statistical bias in application to the idea that anonymizing data sets changes their behavior. They ultimately want to figure out if it is possible to anonymize data in a way that preserves privacy and data integrity. Using data from five different HarvardX courses, they assessed the nature of the anonymized versus original data sets. While they have yet to figure out a statistical fix for the issue, they suggest that perhaps we can develop a new notion of what privacy means if we do not figure out the inherent statistical properties.
eyeData: Data Visualization and Exploratory Tools Applied to Real-World Research Data Mentor: Mercé Crosas and Vito D’Orazio (Institute for Quantitative Social Science)
eyeData
eyeData’s team included several coders who have been able to create visualizations of IQSS-Dataverse data. They’ve developed a website using Django and Jenkins, incorporating visualizations made using d3 of data processed using Panda. Their future work will involve further use of the Dataverse API and the addition of graphs and maps.
#DocShop: Interactive Documentary Workshop Mentors: Matthew Battles, Cris Magliozi, and Jessica Yurkofsky (metaLAB)
#DocShop
#DocShop team members continued talking about their year-long trajectory for uncovering a definition for interactive documentary film making and figuring out how to shift from audiences and spectators to actors. The group talked about their upcoming event at the Graduate School of Design featuring a location based documentary based on a trip to Lawrence, Massachusetts. They likened the experience of working with interactive documentary to film’s development in the 1920’s, suggesting that “there are no rules.”
Safe Campus: Dealing With Sexual Assault on Campus Mentors: Diane Rosenfeld and Anisha Gopi (Harvard Law School)
Safe Campus
Members of the Safe Campus team talked about their app development, titled Bonobo. The basic framework for the app is that it creates a social network for helping individuals respond to urgent situations. In contrast to existing apps, their app is geared toward existing college students. In the future they hope to talk to sexual assault support groups on campus as well as certain social organizations to gauge what types of features would be well received by college students themselves.
OA2014: Open Access Mentors: Peter Suber and Colin Lukens (Office of Scholarly Communication)
Open Access
OA2014 has been working to figure out what the best nudge would be to get faculty to deposit their published materials. Since team members come from the Kennedy School, Graduate School of Design, and Business School (the schools that interestingly have the lowest usage of Harvard’s open access repository), the team members are focused on in-context immersion to see what would make faculty there most likely to deposit research papers into the open access repository. There is also the thought of spreading awareness to student researchers to deposit into the repository, which may then inform their mentors and faculty advisors to do the same.
The evening ended with a 20 minute breakout session where teams could mingle and offer insight into ideas and methods for future work. Keep up to date with DPSI team progress on the blog, and be sure to keep an eye out for how to get involved with DPSI next semester!
Our prototype is done! You can view it here. There’s only basic functionality currently: you can select one of three datasets, select a variable from it, and it fits the parameters (less than 15 elements), it will generate a bar plot. It may seem a bit underwhelming, but a lot of time, effort, and learning went into this, and we’re proud of the result. More importantly, we’ve set up the framework to develop and extend the functionality and types of graphs covered. It took us a lot of time to set up Django, Jenkins, etc., and now that that is all done, it will be much easier for later generations to develop.
Regarding possible next steps, perhaps one of the most important features will be to connect with the new Dataverse API so you can actually search for datasets in the repository. Also important will be to write scripts to generate graphs for variables that don’t fit our parameters, such as density plots or time series. Functionality should extend to include maps and scatter plots. There’s also a lot to be done with the GUI and visual presentation. We still need to add axes to the graphs, and polish the UI to look sleek and appealing. And, of course, there are still some bugs to clean up.
Overall, our experience with DPSI was very rewarding! All of us got the experience we were looking for, whether it was with data visualizations, data processing, UI, or even just working in a team. We want to give special thanks to Phil Durbin and Raman Prasad from IQSS who were a massive help in getting to where we are, as well as our mentors Vito D’Orazio and Merce Crosas. We couldn’t have done it without you!
Dear Friends,
Harvard’s DocShop and MIT OpenDocLab Fellow Lara Baladi are happy to invite you to Notes from El Saniyya on Thursday December 11th from 3-9 pm, with the main event and artist’s talk from 6:30-8:00, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Based on a growing archive that artist Lara Baladi has been gathering since the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Notes from El Saniyya is an invitation to participate in the making of a ‘transmedia painting’ and is part of the interactive history-telling project Baladi is developing at OpenDocLab, called Vox Populi, Archiving a Revolution in the Digital Age.
Tahrir Square was the most digitally documented and disseminated event in modern history. It is the archetype of a global phenomenon that marks the beginning of the 21st century. Baladi’s Vox Populi will act as a tribute to this symbolic event and represent its impact on and resonance with the uprisings and socio-political movements that followed, and continue to do so worldwide.
Notes from El Saniyya is the first in a series that DocShop and artist Lara Baladi will present during the 2014-15 academic year. Experimental and conversational, the event will offer participants the chance to interact with archival media, give feedback, and contribute ideas which will help inform later events in the series. This open lab experience mixing art, history, and digital media will encourage participants to immerse themselves in the creative process of making socially-engaged art.
Notes from El Saniyya will take place on Thursday December 11th, from 3-9 pm in Gund 522 (The HILT room) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA 02138.
DocShop is an interactive documentary workshop that seeks to engage filmmakers, artists, and storytellers with new audiences. Dedicated to exploring the possibilities of embodied media in ever-expanding contexts of participation, DocShop is part of the Digital Problem Solving Initiative (DPSI) at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and metaLAB at Harvard.
Lara Baladi is an internationally recognized multi-disciplinary Egyptian artist. Baladi applies archives, investigations of myths, and personal narratives to a range of mediums including architectural and video installations. Baladi publishes and exhibits worldwide. Here is a link to her CreativeTime Reports articles. Her works are part of a number of institutional and private collections. She has been a board member of the Arab Image Foundation since its creation in 1997 and in 2014, began to serve on the advisory board of R-Shief, a historical online archive and media system.
During the 2011 Egyptian uprising, Baladi co-founded two media initiatives, Radio Tahrir and Tahrir Cinema, which served as public platforms to build and share an archive on and for the revolution. Today, much of Baladi’s work revolves around and stems from this archive.
