Category Archives: SIF Projects

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Giving Artists New Tools Through Science And Technology

  October 12, 2014 ,

Building connections between seemingly disparate areas is one of the joys of being an artist. It’s also one of the biggest challenges. Conceptually, artists are trained (or train themselves) to look at topics from multiple angles and to build relationships that express the nuances of the proverbial “human condition” (one of my least-favorite artspeak terms, though it seems appropriate in this context). We take input from the world around us, process it through the lense of our personal experiences and knowledge, then spit it out in some novel way as artwork. Art schools are generally pretty good at giving artists artistic tools, but the focus tends to be on traditional art-making practice and thinking. Even new-media programs seem to focus on accepted art and design technology, such as Adobe Photoshop and the like. But what happens when an artist wants to expand their research into scientific fields, or access big data? The tools are out there, but the learning curve is so steep as to be seen as insurmountable. I’ve heard from multiple artists that they’d love to access primary sources of information, but dont know how or where to look. Consequently they end up relying on possibly inaccurate second- or third-hand information, with the caveat that it’s okay because it’s art, not science. To a certain extent that’s true: (probably) no one’s going to die if an artist uses bad or incomplete data. However, art can expose and educate us to experience and information in ways that no spreadsheet … Continue reading

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Learning the basics of mapping and further updates

  October 12, 2014 , , ,

This week has been another one of those informational weeks. I was recently recruited to be a part of the Atlanta transit project. This project is geared towards focusing on Atlanta’s public transportation history, particularly MARTA’s planned transit lines as well as existing ones. With this being said our plans are to create one all inclusive map of how MARTA’s transit lines were originally planned to extend to and where they actually ended up being today. With Atlanta’s new street car being prepared for release in the next upcoming months, we can see how public transit has impacted life downtown and how public transportation remains as an important issue for large cities like Atlanta. When analyzing the “game plan” for the project I was taught how to search for archival maps of Atlanta’s MARTA plans through GSU’s libraries resources. With these maps we can therefore sift through all the maps and record all of our findings to avoid overlapping and duplicates.These maps are then used in a large and very resourceful software called Arcmaps where we can over lay these old transit plans over another realistic map that places it to be geographically accurate. All this information was very enlightening and interesting when learning how all the mapping processes work. This project is going to be an exciting and educational experience for myself who is a computer science major in order  to obtain some hands on experience with mapping. I am glad to be what you call a rookie introduced … Continue reading

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You can lead a horse to water

  October 6, 2014 , ,

Taking risks in education is, well, risky. As I have mentioned in several previous posts, one of my SIF assignments is to work on the hybrid U.S. history sections being offered at GSU this fall. The course is innovative in a number of ways: it takes full advantage of the D2L platform, it has it’s own, custom made (and free!) textbook, and it uses video segments, essentially little documentaries, to supplement instruction and to create a class that meets in-person once a week, and in a virtual classroom on the other. The film segments, in combination with reading from both the textbook and from primary sources, become the material on which Thursday class is based. So, the classroom is also flipped, meaning that it replaces time often spent in lecturing for time spent on discussion or other types of activities that usually get little time in survey courses. As great as this sounds, there is a little bug in the system so far – very few students are watching the video. Because they are accessed through D2L, the number of students accessing each video can be tracked, and the results to date have been discouraging. This is frustrating – not only because of the many hours that go into producing each video segment but also because the videos are an attempt to engage learners who are supposedly visual, and who will tell you that they don’t keep up with reading because of the medium, not because they are averse to … Continue reading

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World of web programming 2

  October 5, 2014 ,

For the front end of Deliberation mapping tool, we had the choice of either using HTML5 or flash. HTML 5 is supposed to the future of web development and flash is getting less popular for websites. Hence, this lead to the design decision of using HTML 5 over flash.[1][2] In HTML 5, animations can be shown using canvas element. To ramp up my knowledge about HTML 5 canvas element, I started exploring the web for examples having clickable elements on canvas [3]. In the example, circular regions are created on canvas elements and the clicks are handled using jQuery and iterating over each circular region to find out whether the region corresponding to it has been clicked. This lead to me reading up about jQuery, which I shall describe in my next post. References http://myoocreate.com/why-adobe-flash-is-dying/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML5_and_Flash http://pterkildsen.com/2013/06/28/create-a-html5-canvas-element-with-clickable-elements/ Ram Sundarkumar  

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The Transit City

  October 5, 2014 , ,

Known as the southern commercial railway hub and also for it’s urban sprawl, Atlanta is in constant movement within the city and throughout the metro area.  Originally not the capital of Georgia, Atlanta was the center for rail traffic for the entire southeast.  As industry grew within the city, other, more public transit, emerged and connected industry workers with the various industrial centers, students with large universities, and residents to use for personal transit. What resulted was a large and intricate trolley car line that connected the city, at one time having over 200 miles of  tract-  a system any metropolis would be proud of.  However, the early 1900’s introduced the age of the automobile and our emergence of the sprawling metropolis we see today. The trolley lines were dug up, or paved over, to create an autocentric city dependent on individual transit. The reason I bring up this part of Atlanta history, is that this week I was added to a workgroup that will focus on the progression, regression and reintroduction of public transit in Atlanta.  A small group of us SIF’s will be creating a storymap (curious?) to conceptualize the evolution of our transit system through a spatial and historic lens. With the shift to more sustainable systems, urban centers are creating more vibrant and efficient public transit systems, and Atlanta is no exception.  Between the beltline, the “new” streetcar development, and talks of expanding MARTA to other metro cities, Atlanta is attempting to establish a more connected … Continue reading