Samantha Valdivia '19

At the core, coding is an effective method in conveying information. A journalist, in particular, can tell more engaging stories by understanding the ways in which information is collected and displayed with code. They don’t necessarily need to be programming gurus, however a baseline understanding on the possibilities of Computer Programming can help journalists effectively communicate what a particular software project does.

Alex Richards designed the course Coding for Journalists “for people who have some grounding in data journalism already and experience with spreadsheets and database managers. Helpful to understand Excel functions, for example, some basic SQL.” The course is now available as a set of self-guided tutorials with sample code and data at Richards’ site:

http://coding-for-journalists.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#coding-for-journalists

Here you can learn how to use Python, a programming language, to scrape data from the web, parse records that fall across multiple lines, make a reusable function, geocode, work with APIs and databases, unlock data stuck in a database, practice data cleaning, and more! However, this isn’t the only place to learn programming. The Internet is scattered with a plethora of coding tutorials, some of which are: codecademy.com, udacity.com, codeactually.com, and code.org.

On March 2, 2017 at 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm in Memorial Hall, Wish Theater, the Bowdoin Theater and Dance will open Eurydice, a contemporary, theatrical event that explores the power of love, loss and memory.

In this Greek myth Eurydice leaves her wedding with Orpheus for the underworld, searching for her father – but the reunion is costly. Trapped on the opposite side of death, Orpheus fights to retrieve his bride, making a deal that seals both their fates.

The incorporation of digital design began with determining what the play Eurydice needed to be projected, for example, an animated raining elevator. With subjects and scenes determined they were able to use Autodesk Maya, 3D computer graphics software, to incrementally build models needed for the play.

Professor Ryan MacDonald noted that “the most time consuming animations were the water simulations: River, Ocean, Rain, etc.” He built these animations using a plugin called Bifrost within Maya. From that point the works were put into After Effects, post- production application used for film- making, for fine tuning and exporting. Finally, Isadora, a graphic programming environment, was used to build a hierarchy between videos, which can be juxtaposed, moved specifically on the stage, and timed to the scenes.

Tickets are free. Advanced tickets can be reserved starting February 9, 2017 at Smith Union (207-725-3375) or at the door on the night of the performance. Limited Seating.

Zeitgeist Borders is a search engine that allows for users to distinguish what others are looking for on Google at a given point in time and cultural contexts.

Google’s autocomplete technologies serve to make the human- computer interaction more efficient by attempting to predict the word or sentence a user may input after only a few characters have been typed into a text input field.

Antoine Mazièrez states that “[w]hile past searches, account preferences and browsing interests differ for every individual logged user, location- specific suggestions is the only universal discriminant for suggestions, whether the user is logged in or not. Several measures allowed us to establish which elements are used by Google to perform such content discrimination: the public IP that originated the request and the “hl” (which stands or Human Language) parameter passed along with the query that express which language the user is commonly using.”

If you’d like to test it out Antoine Mazièrez’s project for yourself explore this link: https://zeitgeist-borders.antonomase.fr/?q=Why%20my%20dog%20

 

Mazieres, A. (2016). Georgraphical projection of Google's suggestions diversity. In 3rd GESIS Computational Social Science Winter Symposium.

Factum Arte, based in Madrid, London, and Milan, consists of a team of artists, technicians, and conservators dedicated to digital preservation and recreation of lost art.

Factum Arte’s approach to technology includes buying what they need for specific tasks and designing and fabricating the needed technology when it doesn’t exist. They write software and design operating systems to handle information. They currently use 3D scanning for cultural heritage conservation, photogrammetry, casting, recordings in two and three dimensions, multilayered files and conservation, and new technologies in print making.

Factum Arte’s successful innovations have had a strong influence on conservation methods and are redefining the role facsimiles play in the protection of cultural heritage. The Digital Information that is recorded has been used for documentation, monitoring and the production of 2D and 3D facsimiles which retain the surface complexity and characteristics of the original.

Interested in learning more? Explore their website at http://www.factum-arte.com/en/inicio