What is Innovation: A Tech Journey with a Humanities Grad Student | Tag

Infographic Resume

Date March 29, 2016

Comments37

I have been on the job market since September.

The academic job market takes just short of forever, and is a HUGE commitment. As a result, I have become curious about other job markets and how they work. I essentially know exactly nothing about how to get a job outside academia, despite training for a PhD for the last 5 years. Correction. I knew nothing about the market ‘out there.’

In this blog, I take an industry professional’s resume, and turn it into a cute, easy to read infographic using picktochart, a mostly free online drag and drop application that creates a platform on which you can build an infographic.

What is an infographic?

Customer Magnetism explains it really well, with pictures. Pictures are essential to infographics, as ‘graphic’ is the central part to displaying the ‘info’.

So when Oscar Rieken, Lead Software Engineer and All-Around Awesome Person, asked if I could make his resume into and infographic, I said, “Of course I can. Just tell me what you want featured, and what colors you want.” And we were off. I even got his permission to write about it here!

After we established the rough parameters for what he wanted his resume to display, I set to work making different visualizations that we could choose from.

The above shows the way we decided to display Oscar’s skills, after one or two trials with other charts. Each bar displays languages he knows and the level, (1-5) at which he places himself in experience, with 5 being “nothing left to learn.”

We decided this way, on a basic blue/green color scheme that we used consistently all the way through the infographic.

All of Oscar’s Skills, AND Tools are displayed this way.

Next, and perhaps the most difficult, was deciding how best to display his work experience. Here are some trials we played with:

Here, we can see Oscar’s current place of employment, and the skills/tools he uses most at this position. But the circular chart is very difficult to read, and the key is bulky and strange.

Next I tried displaying them on a similar chart that would visually match his skills and tools above. It looked better, but still didn’t necessarily warrant a display in an infographic.

I asked him to split his skills and tools up into the way he spends his typical day. Oscar created a spreadsheet for me with data that indicated that, in his current job, he spends 40% of his day in development, 30% in coaching, and so on. Using powerpoint, I arranged his skills and tools by logo, and put them into a ‘tech stack’ inside a container, which here, is a circle. In earlier jobs, I used the shapes of the states and countries he worked in, which worked to meet Oscar’s visual tastes.

Here, you can see the skills and tools Oscar used when he worked in Brazil. Creating the graphic was incredibly easy, and I just used some simple formatting in PowerPoint to create a .jpg that I could then upload to piktochart and insert into the infographic.

It took a lot of work, and a fair amount of consulting to get this the way Oscar wanted. But eventually we completed it, and he was quite happy with it, especially after I added the little robots as accents. Oscar is really into robots.

Below, is the infographic in its entirety (with full permission).

Immigration to Atlanta: Historical Data Visualization

Date March 11, 2016

Posted by Valerie Robin

Comments7

Immigration to Atlanta: Historical Data Visualization

This week before Spring Break, I was fortunate enough to get put on a new project coming out of the History Department. Working with Dr. Marni Davis, a team of SIFs and I are helping Marni to organize, visualize, and present her data on immigrants to Atlanta. We are beginning with data in the late 1800’s, and working up to the present. Currently, we have a lot of data up to about 1930, which is what I have been working with.

To begin, Marni supplied us with a spreadsheet of data with about 1600 entries on immigrants. These entries have data points such as name, birthdate, port entry city, date of immigration into Atlanta, date of naturalization, country of origin, address in Atlanta when applying for citizenship, and so on. Because I have experience with Tableau (a program which can produce beautiful data visualizations), Marni asked me to take some of this data and create charts that we could put up on her new GSU sites website dedicated to the Immigrants ATL project.

To begin, I decided to try and create a bit of a story that showed very simple data. For example, in the first figure, I show the m/f immigration difference, where you can see that men immigrated to Atlanta 100x more than women in this period.

In the next figure, you can see a comparison between when Asian/Pacific peoples were immigrating into Atlanta, versus when Central Europeans were. Additionally, you can see that there were far more Central Europeans immigrating to Atlanta than there were Asians.

The visualizations are really wonderful in that they make the data much easier to mentally process and compare, and they will be easy to present in any venue. Further, we can arrange any data visualization into a kind of story that we want the data to tell.

Currently we are working to create more graphs like you see above, but also to incorporate some maps that show data such as average age of immigrants into Atlanta from various regions, countries, and cities.

While these visualizations are gorgeous, and not difficult to make, there are some issues that arise to complicate matters. For example, there is not a year of entry for absolutely every immigrant to Atlanta. In order to create the graphs, I have to omit whole people who may only be missing one piece of data. Further, I learned the hard way, that Tableau does not read the formulas that we make in Excel. I had a lot of loading issues and eventually found that Tableau is set up to do my computing. After several hours of trying to load, visiting the Tableau sub-reddit, and doing a lot of Googling, that I could subtract the Immigration year from the Naturalization year right in the graph.

Next, we are going to build out more visualizations, meet with the rest of the team to see what they are working on, and hopefully create a really robust and face-smackingly wonderful set of data that Marni can present in any venue easily as she works to collect and manage all this data.

VisMe Experiment

Date January 24, 2016

Posted by Valerie Robin

Comments5

VisMe Experiment

Over the last two weeks, I have been on campus visits. The campus visit is the last stage of the interview process for those of us staying in academia once we get our terminal degree. One of the steps in the campus visit interview (one of my interviews lasted for 21 hours over 2 days to give you a sense of scope), was to give a scholarly presentation on my own work.

One of my main aims was to use a presentation software that would look clean, and be something that most of the faculty I knew would be present for my presentation had not yet seen a lot. After some research and one trial with a timeline software, I chose VisMe.

Below is a mostly final draft of my presentation. If it works properly, you can push play, or click through it to view it.

The process of using VisMe was interesting, particularly since I didn’t *notice* that it is still in beta when I began. In fact, despite the very clearly noted ‘beta’ attached to the logo, I still missed it, all the way until I was frustrated with the build process.

What I DO like about VisMe is the clean minimalist design that is really in at the moment. Each template has a library of pages the user can choose from in order to built a well rounded presentation. The designs are built already to give the user a sense of how a presentation could look, depending on what the presentation material is covering.

And even though the pages are built for you – here is an example:

You are not required to keep the page this way. As you can see, I altered the template page a lot to fit my needs.

As a user, I am able to completely revamp any aspect of any slide that I choose. But I found the template to be a really great guide as a first time user. The end product turned out beautiful, and I was complimented on how clean it looked.

Because VisMe is in beta, it still has a lot of bugs. Among these bugs are the incredible difficulty involved in clicking on text I have created in a text box. Once I created text, and aligned it with other objects, if I found a typo, or wanted to edit, I had to drag the text box away, and then click vigorously and hope that I might somehow land my cursor in the magical spot that would then select the text I wanted to edit. If my apartment neighbors didn’t think I was crazy already, they surely do now. Frustration.

And then of course there are the mystery issues that come with all software. For example, I published my test presentation to see what options would appear once I published. The library of slides disappeared. I had to completely start my presentation over. Of course it turned out better, as many of you have probably experienced for yourselves. But… this problem has only happened one time. I published the above presentation, and none of the same problems persist. Face to palm – I’m feeling a little gaslighted.

The last problem I want to address is that once an animation is applied to text, it cannot be fully deleted. It CAN be altered, but not completely deleted and this led to more frustration and yelling on my part. Because of this issue, I ended up downloading each slide (a publishing feature) and putting the whole thing inside a power point presentation – animation problem solved.

Probably the most interesting part of VisMe is that it exists in the cloud. Since I only played with the free version, I had no access to the cloud editing and sharing capability, but it exists. Of course, my presentation exists in the cloud, and is clearly hosted above that way, which is a viable and relevant part of cloud computing. But in order to access sharing features, I need to pay the monthly business fee, which is not feasible for a scholar who might use this once or twice a year. But knowing it exists is relevant to many of the arguments I am currently making about the work of composing in the cloud – so I may dip back in here for further exploration.

Until then – give it a try if you are in the mood to learn something new that is improving as the company grows.

Edge Website Prototype

Date October 29, 2015

Posted by Valerie Robin

Comments4

In moving ahead in the process of getting Edge magazine off the ground, Nathan Sharratt and I took some time to develop a prototype using sites.gsu.

After much consideration, and thanks to Nathan’s artist’s eye, we decided to try out the theme called Hueman – a cute portmanteau smashing together color and people. The theme has a lot of affordances with menu bars, sidebars can be moved (for example), and with scrolling posts. It favors media and can be formatted in several ways that may end up working out really well for what Edge becomes.

One of our hopes is to feature student designed banner images containing their interpretations of our project name, ‘Edge.’ Below, you can see a banner that Nathan created in just a few moments. The name of the magazine is prominent, with a cute tagline I invented on the fly. The prominent design can be replaced easily with a student designed banner.

What’s more, we plan to archive all featured student images in an archive so they are searchable by students and future employers that may wish to see what students have produced. Further, we can replace and move around any of the menus you see in the image above. We can alter the colors, and re-arrange the sidebars.

There is only a small portion of the sidebars visible in the image above, but if you look below, you will see lower down on the same page, which features both left and right sidebars (one with a blue header, and one with a green header), and the post scroller.

Nearly every aspect of these sidebars can be altered, including content, color, and position. But what is exciting to me, is the scroller in the middle, which is currently featuring a video. Nathan pulled a video from an art installation he did and put it up on the Edge site, just to see how it would look. The scroller displays a thumbnail, and can be played right in-site. It also features text area below, and can be made to pop-out. We can insert still images, audio, video, and so on. But we did find that if there is no featured image, this area remains ‘blank,’ which you will see if you go to the website in the next week or so: sites.gsu.edu/edge.

One of the pages I have worked on from the beginning is the missions statement page. It turns out that writing a missions statement is very tricky. Word choice matters VERY much because our audience will be quite diverse, and I need to make sure our mission statement points only to potentially positive missions. Below is the top part of the missions statement.

You can see the image that I have chosen as a placement image. Ideally, I will feature something that takes place on GSU campus, but I haven’t yet come up with the right idea that will portray ‘mission statement for our magazine.’ Below the image, you can see the beginning of the mission statement. And to the left, you can see that on this page, we experimented with a single sidebar, and chose what goes on it. For now, we are using the term ‘baskets’ instead of categories, because we use that word a lot in meetings, and I thought it would make some of us giggle.

Featuring particular posts profiles on Edge has also been a popular topic in meetings, so Nathan and I decided to create a test profile, which can be navigated to from the front page (if you look above to the second image). Below, you can see that Nathan created his own profile as a test piece.

The page is a static page and can be archived, categorized, and featured on the front page, as needed. As you can see, we have moved the menu options around in the sidebar, which demonstrates all the menu options available in the theme without having to hack it.

Overall, we’re pretty excited to see our first project prototypes go up on the site. We plan to build one of each medium that the theme allows, and try to do a few cross-media pieces to, to show what the website might be like when it officially launches next Fall.

In the meantime, stay tuned for more developments on Edge and feel free to leave comments below with suggestions, problems, or thoughts.

Edge Magazine in Development

Date October 13, 2015

Posted by Valerie Robin

Comments3

Maybe you’ve heard the buzz, and maybe you haven’t:

Edge Magazine is coming to Georgia State University next Fall.

What is Edge Magazine?

Edge is an undergraduate project and research magazine/journal hybrid. It will be a fully online publication that encourages interesting multimedia presentations of excellent undergraduate work done in and out of class.

Why Edge?

You may have heard that GSU already has an undergraduate research journal called Discovery.

Discovery features only Honors student work and is a much more traditional approach to research that Edge intends to be. We hope to be a more interactive take on the undergraduate research journal.

Edge is not Discovery. Edge is its own entity – it’s own experiment. Edge is Edge.

What’s up with the name?

We chose the name Edge for several reasons:

In an attempt to make sure we are, in fact, a little ‘edgy’ in terms of what a journal could be, Edge seemed like the logical choice for a name.
We want to be on the cutting edge of what a research journal can be.
Sometimes, when we come to the edge of something, a cliff, an idea, a sidewalk, it seems that nothing further can be done. We want to be that ‘further’. We want to do what research journals have not yet done. We want to go there. Over that edge.

Taken from http://fiqixirsi.com/most-beautiful-landscape-photos-of-norway/

Who is our audience?

Edge will be outward facing, so that anyone with an internet connection may experience it. It will not be kept behind a paywall. It will not be limited to GSU students’ eyes only. If you contribute to Edge, your parents, your friends, your uncle Jack in Sarasota will have access to your work.

This means our audience will be anyone who is interested in experiencing the amazing work that is coming out of Georgia State University today. These are people who are interested in knowing what is happening at GSU. They are people who are interested in experiment, innovation, and ideas.

What is the vision?

There is no link to Edge as I write this entry today. This is because we are still in vision mode. I have drawn up plans for the amount of labor we will eventually need, and plans for the editorial process.

We are in the stage where we get to build the ideal. And that ideal is currently to create a multimedia journal/magazine hybrid that is accessible and fun for the audience to read, while maintaining a cutting-edge format where authors may attempt to showcase their research and project work in ways that research journals haven’t ever before.

You might see multi-layered work with lots of hyperlinks and videos. Or you might see text with audio spliced in and an image or two. Or you may see something unexpected that I can’t envision enough to explain yet.

What’s next?

We are excited about the possibilities of this project and are attempting to set the groundwork for an exciting launch during the next school year. In the meantime, we need to construct an infrastructure capable of maintaining a website that is actually on the edge of content that comes from a research university and showcases the work that undergraduates are capable of.

At the moment, we’re cobbling together ideas from a bunch of brains that are as capable as they are brilliant, in order to launch the skeleton of a website which will be both malleable and fluid in its ability to be molded to fit the content we receive.

We are preparing with images, banners, video capability, lots of other great art, and some really wonderful content that will hopefully be interesting and surprising.

Here is one of the images I captured for the image archive to enhance content with provoking images.

As we come up with a logo, a basic site, and more solid visions, I will be updating you here, hopefully with more images. Stay tuned.

Digital Portfolio Workshop

Date March 31, 2015

Posted by Valerie Robin

Comments5

Yesterday, I delivered a 1 hour workshop on building a digital portfolio. 11 people showed up, but three of them were Will, Taylor and Heidi, so I’m not sure 11 is cheating or not. I WAS excited to see them there – don’t get me wrong.

The Interact Wall in CURVE in action

Overall, the workshop was well received, though it felt a lot more like a class than a workshop. I spent the first 30 minutes talking through points which covered online presence, types of hosting, available apps, and potential content. I was really hoping people would have their own attempts at digital portfolios to share — but I think that might be a different kind of workshop all together.

We had a variety of people with different levels of knowledge in the group though – which I was really hoping for. Two people from career services showed up and provided some helpful tips, and a student from the art department had some really great questions about presenting an art-forward portfolio as opposed to the professional job-forward portfolio I have designed for myself.

If I do this again, which I might since many of you expressed interest, but couldn’t make the date/time, I would probably find other examples of portfolios online – both successful and unsuccessful and we would have a discussion about what works and what doesn’t. At this point, I’m unsure whether I focused too much on design, or not enough. I tend to forget that even though most of us spend an astonishing amount of time online, we often don’t soak up how the design works. Design, at this moment in Web 2.0 history, is minimalist with lots of white space, only little splashes of color, and lacking anything too flashy. This kind of design may be becoming naturalized for many users so that not only is the interface of the operating system invisible, but the very design of the site is also invisible. In fact, this is what we’re going for when we design (most of the time), so that means the design aesthetic is successful. But this then becomes problematic for people that don’t work in tech to break into this seemingly opaque world of design.

My overall aim was to make building a digital portfolio seem like a relatively easy, approachable task for people new to the idea. I was quite surprised to find that no one in the audience had a portfolio of their own – not even an attempt at one. So I decided to talk to that point and highlight the ease of the WYSYWG and the fact that my content was quite limited in terms of the way I showcase myself in a general way that could appeal to many kinds of potential employers.

If you have a desire to see this workshop and couldn’t make it – please leave me a comment below and we’ll see if I can’t get another one scheduled.

Building Digital Portfolios

Date March 11, 2015

Posted by Valerie Robin

Comments0

Building Digital Portfolios

I will be holding a workshop on digital portfolios Monday March 30th, at 1PM in the CURVE.

The workshop is for both students and faculty. If you are a student, you may want to come to see what kinds of options are available for you to create your own digital presence. If you are a faculty member, you can come for the same reason, OR to get tips on how you might teach the digital portfolio. I will be presenting a few versions of my own portfolio, and then we will be discussing ways to present ourselves, and sharing new tools and tips together.

In order to prepare for this workshop, I had to do a lot of research and a LOT of building. I want to be able to showcase a few of the major sites where portfolios can be hosted, both free, and at low cost. I learned an incredible amount about web building and design. I’ve picked up new coding tricks, and learned how to embed a Google Doc, though Google has some of their own bugs to work out concerning that.

Let me show you some examples of how different portfolios can look (this also serves as a sneak peak at my workshop):

Below is my Squarespace website. I own the domain, vrobinphd.com and I have been working on this for quite some time. This is my permanent portfolio, and the one I give to potential employers and promote on my social media.

Squarespace

As you can see from this front page, the design is sleek, and professional looking, with a lot of white space, which is what the trend for design is right now. Squarespace is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), but it also has options for coding, so you aren’t always limited to the template parameters. For example, I was able to drop an embedded Google Doc in as my CV, using the code function. This took some experimentation (and Googling), as I assumed the embed function would do it – and this turned out to be not the case. Unfortunately, this cool red button you see in the header, is not something I can code or manipulate to make it show up on other pages. So while I can manipulate much of the template, I can’t control all of it. Also – it is important to note that buying into Squarespace allows me to create my own logo with tagline. You can’t see the little red robot well here, but you will see it on other portfolios below.

This next one I made on a website called strikingly.com which I learned about from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “How to Curate Your Digital Identity as an Academic.”

Strikingly is ONLY a WYSIWYG drag and drop application, and it only allows you to have one page. This page however, can be as long as you could ever want it to be. So instead of your visitors clicking to find content on new pages, they just scroll to each section. Strikingly allows you to upload backgrounds to enhance certain sections, and provides lots of neat, attractive buttons to place along the way for people to click on to email you, or visit a project you’re working on outside this site. It’s really simple, so it will be great for people who can’t code, or just want easy maintenance.

The last one I have to show you here is from wordpress.com which is on a template/theme called ‘pen scratch.’

I chose a theme that looks clean and has a lot of white space to stay in the theme I have going among these portfolios I’ve made. This one is currently in heaviest build mode, but creating new pages, and showcasing my content has been very easy. WordPress is both a WYSIWYG and has coding capabilities you can use to manipulate both theme and content. I have learned a LOT about themes from working on the Tools Wiki project, including how much each theme can make or break the look of your site. I may find out as I continue to build that ‘pen scratch’ does not, in fact, work for my portfolio, and it could look COMPLETELY different by the time I give the workshop – this is one of the things we’ll cover in the workshop, actually. For now, you can see it largely works well, and there’s my cool Squarespace robot up at the top.

It’s been really fun hanging out at the Exchange researching, and building, and saying, “pssst, does this look stupid?” to other SIFs that hang out in the Exchange with me. I’m really excited I get to give the workshop, but I’m MORE excited about all the invaluable things I’ve learned in the process.

If you find yourself in need of portfolio help, please let me know and I’ll be happy to put my two cents in.

Paddock – Adventures at Fry’s Electronics

Date January 8, 2015

Posted by Valerie Robin

Comments0

Over break, I made a trip to Fry’s Electronics. It started out as an innocent trip to help my mother find rewriteable discs for her job. It turned into something else entirely.

After being mildly verbally attacked by a salesman after I told him I strongly dislike Windows 8, I told him I didn’t, in fact, need any help with the monitor I was getting my fingerprints on, and walked away, nearly crashing into a stack of boxes containing something called “SMK Paddock 10 V2.” The picture on the box was of a desktop stand for an iPad.

“Eureka!” I actually said out loud, and took a box out of the strategically stacked pyramid of rhomboidal boxes. Just like in a bad sitcom, the entire forward half of the stack came sliding apart, distributing oddly shaped boxes left and right in front of me. Avoiding the disapproving look of the salesman who loves Windows 8, I went to find a different salesman to show him what I did. And to as if he could open one of the boxes for me. The young man obliged, and didn’t even chastise me for my mishap.

This is what was inside:

As you can see, a person could put their iPad in there, and there are adapters and plug-ins involved for various activities one might want to do with an iPad. For example, if I were collecting video interviews for a project like Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, I could put my iPad into this device, and it works just like a tripod, except on a desktop. Additionally, the head swivels, and the whole iPad rests on a speaker, which also acts like a charger, or so the specs say on Amazon.

I’m not sure exactly how this contributes to my working definition of ‘innovation,’ but if I go with the idea that we are trying to collect narratives in a new way, then this qualifies.

And I accept.

Innovating by Hand

Date December 3, 2014

Posted by Valerie Robin

Comments2

Innovating by Hand

All of the text above was imported in, which is why I couldn’t hyperlink Touchnote. This is the only bit I’ve typed, save the title. As you can see, the pen has several issues, not least that it buzzes quite loudly. For some reason, the receiver picked up my ‘smooth’ lines as dashed and dotted above (perhaps it was my large sleeve), and this blog entry took me 3-4 times longer than a regular entry usually does.

Perhaps I can tell I’m innovating when it takes a long time, but feels like play… maybe.

The Tableau Experience

Date November 19, 2014

Posted by Valerie Robin

Comments0

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 the Tableau Experience. And so I leave you with a picture of my spoils, the swanky bathroom in the wetbar, and the view from the 16th floor. Enjoy:

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