Category Archives: Atlanta connections

First Steps in the Student Innovation Fellowship

  October 1, 2015 , , ,

My name is Saif Ali. I am a freshman Physics major at Georgia State University, so this is my first year as a SIF (Student Innovation Fellow). I will provide a short auto-biography of myself so that you, the reader, know whose work you are reading. I place my heritage in the country of Bangladesh where my family was born and raised, but I was born here in Atlanta which means I am first-generation American. I graduated from Woodstock High School in the Spring of 2015. At that point, I already knew I was going to GSU, but I was not aware of the SIF program. I became aware of this through the Honors College and immediately knew this is the place I wanted to be. Being exposed to this kind of academic atmosphere is the best way I can start my path to a career in science where research is the main focus of the job. I am mostly involved in the 3D 1928 Atlanta project. This project involves a team of four researchers and four builders who are re-creating 1928 Atlanta in an Oculus Rift setting. My assignment is researching Peachtree Street, also referred to as Whitehall Street during that time. I have accumulated a significant amount of photos that are from that era, but there are predictable problems that I have run into. I have found pictures that are dated around or on 1928, but I have also found many pictures of Atlanta from the 1930s. I … Continue reading

SIF Digital Humanities Projects Highlighted at GSU Scientific Computing Day

  September 20, 2015 , , , , , ,

Last week, GSU held its first Scientific Computing Day, a one-day symposium to foster interactions and collaborations between researchers at Georgia State University. The event provides researchers on the frontiers of computation research to present their work and exchange views with a multidisciplinary audience. As one might imagine, SIF collaborators have much to contribute to such an event, and the SIF was well represented, particularly in the digital humanities section of the conference, which was dominated by SIF-affiliated projects. A panel, which included Brennan Collins, Joe Hurley, Robin Wharton and previous SIF fellow Robert Bryant, discussed “How Technology Will Shape the Future of Humanities Research.” The panel’s presentation drew heavily on SIF-funded projects, including 3D Atlanta, 3D Modelling, and a variety of mapping projects.  SIF’s also contributed to the day’s poster-session, where Sruthi Vuppala and Dylan Ruediger presented a poster on “Digital Critical Editions of Medieval Texts: the Hoccleve Archive and the Digital Humanities.”  

No comments

Unpacking Memories

  September 17, 2015 ,

I grew up in the Morningside-Lenox Park neighborhood, here in Atlanta. I walked home from Inman and Grady, nearly every day of the combined seven years I attended the schools, through the heart of Virginia Highlands. When I started my undergrad work at Georgia State, my group of friends stayed fairly local as well, with those who weren’t from Atlanta originally slowly becoming settled in the city in various neighborhoods. A constant in all of this, either as landmark I recognized while driving, a meeting place for food, or simply hangout after a late night on campus, was Manuel’s Tavern. Be it a friend’s improve group holding an event there, or just ending up there because it was central to nearly everyone in a group, the bar was a staple of my social life until I graduated in 2004 and moved to the hinterlands of Buford, Ga (or so it felt to me). But, even then, as I did my Masters and now PhD at GSU, Manuel’s held a cozy, wood paneled place in my heart. Fear and panic gripped my heart when I heard the news that the land surrounding the Tavern and the Tavern itself were being bought out by a developer to “renovate” and “upscale” the area along North Avenue. I had already seen what was being done to the area on Piedmont at Rock Springs and Cheshire Bridge Rd., and felt a small bit of what had made the area special was being lost to a … Continue reading

No comments

First Digital Pedagogy Meetup of the School Year

  September 17, 2015 , ,

Today I attended the first Digital Pedagogy Meetup (DigPed Meetup) of the 2015-2016 school year. Hosted, by The Atlanta Connected Learning collegial network of university faculty and staff in the Atlanta area, ATLCL hosts DigPed meetups one time a month which aims to create a social face-to-face forum where various members of facutly, staff, and graduate student instructors can share, and discover what is happening cross-university and cross-disciplinarily in the greater Atlanta area. Each meeting is made up of two presentations, and discussions that occur during and after these presentations. Today, Jeff Greene and Pete Rorabaugh at Kennesaw State University gave a talk titled “Reframing a Degree for a New Media Ecosphere” in which they detail their reframing of the writing BA in their newly restructured KSU department after the merger. Jeff and Pete are teaching two courses, New Media I & II in which they teach a variety of composing skill that focus on content creation, interactivity and ownership. This kind of work is exciting, and necessary when we consider how quickly writing environments shift and change in today’s world where the digital is often emphasized. The second speaker was McKenna Rose at Emory, whose presentation was titled “Envisioning the Pechakucha: Strategies for Invention and Revision in the Literature Classroom.” McKenna explained her Pechakucha 20X20 assignment and showed a few examples of some of the work expected of her students. McKenna explained some of her techniques and processes as she asked her students to create and present their projects. What … Continue reading

No comments

Expanding 3d Atlanta through Geospatial research

  September 17, 2015 ,

As the new school year kicks off so too does the ambition and drive to continue our projects as SIF moving with that same force. A now year long standing process, the 3D Atlanta project has really begun to take form, with now a prototype that wows people. As the details and content is added to the interactive 3d game engine, Unity, and the technical side of the project proceeds at a slower pace due to its tedious and time consuming nature, the research group is moving ahead. As a part of the research team on this project, the purpose and mission has been to scour the internet or any other resources available to find any useful images or interesting facts of the surrounding area during the time (1930s). This has been a large task and as each researcher had previously taken off on their own journey for wholesome historical content, we began to note how chaotic and unruly all these files, images, articles, and data can be hard to manage. Through this struggle, I began to use a very well known tool, Google Maps. Through This I have been able to create layers of each time period and since the interactive environment is based on geographic accuracy to the time period, I began to place the images, if possible in the exact location where the image was taken, or the place of which the article was written about. Since this method the team has begun to realize how useful … Continue reading