Tag Archives: community

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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

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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

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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

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#nicehashtag – Building a data-driven sculpture

  March 1, 2015 , ,

Since early fall 2014 I’ve been working on a data-driven sculpture for HLN called “#nicehashtag” that is now installed in the CNN World Headquarters in here in Atlanta (if you take the Inside CNN tour you’ll see it outside Studio 7). Programmable Hue bulbs change color to reflect realtime sentiment analysis of Twitter. The algorithm accesses Twitter every few seconds and pulls the most recent tweet into its program, determines whether the tweet is positive, neutral, or negative, then compares it to previous tweets and converts it into a percentage that it stores in memory. When that percentage reaches a certain threshold, the color changes. My goal with this project was to consider how we use technology to interact with each other, and how that affects our emotional connections. Screens have enhanced and expanded our communication capabilities enormously, but there are still concerns about what it does to our ability to empathize with others. #nicehashtag is a physical representation of internet emotion, at least within the Twitterverse. The challenge with any technologically-enhanced artwork is that the novelty of the tech will overpower the concept that (hopefully) supports it. Using tech in art just because it’s there is seductive but also dangerous for the above reason.

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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