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The Tableau Experience

  November 20, 2014 , , ,

Today I attended “The Tableau Experience.” I’ve been struggling with what to call it: a conference, a convention… It had only one speaker, and a Q&A – and a wet-bar.  So… I’m settling with ‘experience’ as they do. What it really was though, was an advertisement. Don’t get me wrong – I like using Tableau to recreate charts for the Tobacco Ebook I’m working on, and this ‘experience’ was worth it for several reasons: 1. The speaker demoed several ways to share data that I haven’t seen in action since I’ve only been using it to create charts for data sets that are already created for me.   2. There were a lot of people there from many different kinds of institutions.  I met others from universities like me – Georgia Tech, Gwinnett College, and so on. But I spent most of the time schmoozing with a lady from Home Depot, and then talked briefly to a man from a company called Norfolk. Everyone was using Tableau for something different – I’m pretty sure I was the only one making an Ebook. 3. I was able to ask about that pesky issue Ryan Cagle and I have been having in trying to get the distance between pane tick marks and labels to be exactly the same in all our charts so they’re uniform within the Ebook. Sorry, Ryan – there is no way to do this. The guy I asked said your idea was the smartest. Overall, I’m glad I went to … Continue reading

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Art Vandenberg and the World Community Grid

  November 17, 2014 ,

Today I went to the talk given in CURVE by Art Vandenberg. When I decided to attend, I didn’t know what the World Community Grid was, and now I know – and I think you should know too. First, Art started off telling us a bit about himself. Here he is on the right: Art was funny, and personable, and the perfect person to be telling us about World Community Grid. What IS the World Community Grid, you ask? It’s pretty much the most complex, yet most simple thing you can do to help save the world. Essentially, if you join the world community grid (make sure you join the GSU team!), whenever you’re not using your computer, and it’s on (this also works on android phones, but they have to be plugged in), the world community grid can use your computing power to increase their ability to solve data problems like producing clean water, or mapping cancer markers. It’s really that simple. And what’s cooler, is that all of our library computers (CURVE too) are already running world community. When the library is closed, there is a lot of world saving going on in there. I left the link up there at the top of this entry – check it out. And if you have additional questions, go ahead an leave them below in the comments and I’ll see what I can do to find you an answer. –Valerie

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15th Century Poetry in Buckhead: The Hoccleve Archive hits SAMLA

  November 17, 2014 ,

Last Friday night, the SIF Hoccleve team presented our work at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference, held this year in Buckhead. The conference theme this year was sustainability, and our poster highlighted the way that the Hoccleve Archive Project sustains a corpus of texts, and functions as a pedagogical sight for the sustenance of textual scholarship skills. The poster session was very attended, and we got a lot of people interested in our project. Spreading the word Besides the poster, we displayed a slideshow documenting the work we have done transforming the old HOCCLEX files into .TXT and XML formats Having now cracked the nut of opening the HOCCLEX files, we are now moving on to putting up a TEI enhanced digital edition of the poems of the holograph manuscripts. the SIF’s of the Hoccleve Archive –Dylan.

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Archaeology and Cartography: Why Theory Matters

  November 17, 2014 , ,

Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world. [Harley and Woodward 1987:xvi, quoted in Crampton and Krygier 2005:17] Maps and archaeology have a long history. Heinrich Schliemann produced many maps and plans through the course of his excavations in what he deemed ancient Troy (Schliemann 1884). Spatial interpretation at all scales has long been part of the archaeological discourse (Ashmore, 2002; Ebert 2004). Ashmore (2002:1173) states “Myriad scholars, in the United States and elsewhere, have long sought to reconstruct social (or societal) organization from the archaeological record, as viewed through artifacts and features mapped across space (e.g., Chang 1958; Childe 1951; Fox 1932)”. Trends in archaeological cartography have followed those broader themes in archaeological theory as well as in cartographic, geographic and social theory. The “completion” of a map of Teotihuacan in 1970 (Millon 1970) after 8 years of work beginning in 1962(Millon 1964) is a great example of the state of spatial archaeology prior to the advent of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Technology. This project can be seen as a processual consumption of what Crampton and Krygier term “Scientific Cartography” (2005:20). That is, the use of techniques, method and theory for creating more accurate maps developed during and after the Second World War for the purposes of archaeological research. Million (1964, 1970) describes the project in detail, the methodology used and the attention to detail and accuracy by the project members in the creation of the map. … Continue reading

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Servers and SIF Longevity

  November 17, 2014 ,

This post will be a short update of some of the challenges I have run into with services available to students on campus in relation to servers and Esri’s ArcGIS. I’ve been working on two projects this semester which pair historical maps and planning documents for the city of Atlanta with present day data using Esri’s ArcGIS Online. One of the limitations of ArcGIS Online is that you are not able to host raster images on the Esri servers-you need to host them on your own servers. Server upkeep and support for ArcGIS was previously provided by a the technical advisor/GIS coordinator in the Department of Geosciences. For a number of reasons, this position is currently empty within department and, to my knowledge, there is no one at any level of campus providing the necessary support to GSU’s established GIS. Since the completion of these projects hinges on the ability to host this data and given the mission of CURVE for supporting the research and digital digital scholarship of students, I think it would be appropriate to explore possibilities of a server being available to students as a service of CURVE. This topic brings to light an interesting aspect of SIF that I had not previously considered–longevity:longevity in the sense that a project can continue once the current SIFs have graduated and moved on. To “continue” just doesn’t apply to a scenario where it has not yet been completed and the torch needs to be passed for the completion to be achieved-continue also means understanding how … Continue reading