Digital and Computational Studies Initiative

The Spring 2017 Bowdoin Breakfast guests are Charlotte Carnevale Willner (’06) and Dave Willner (’06). Charlotte and Dave work, respectively, at Pinterest (Safety Manager) and Airbnb (Head of Community Policy) in the San Francisco Bay area. Having majored in Humanities (Art History and Anthropology/Arctic Studies), they both started fresh out of Bowdoin at Facebook, in the areas of conflict resolution and safety services. As young people in emerging fields at Facebook, they were in charge of making decisions about data and content during incredible times, and attribute their liberal arts education to helping them with the problem solving they faced.

DCS is excited to host the Willners in DCS 1200 on March 27 and DCS 2017 on March 28. In addition, we invite students and colleagues to join us in the VAC 3rd Floor Common Area at 4:00 on March 27 for an informal conversation about the role of the Liberal Arts in Silicon Valley. Light refreshments will be served.

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.

For colleagues interested in the Mellon Summer Fellowships or using FDC support for training related to Digital Humanities, here are a few more resources to keep in mind:

• Digital Humanities at Oxford (DHOxSS), July 3-7 with tracks related to machine learning for text analysis, digital musicology, and social humanities at a global scale: http://www.dhoxss.net/
• Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching Institute (HILT) 2017, June 5-9, UT Austin with tracks on Scalar, starting a DH project, Python for text analysis, and using DH as a critical and collaborative method (special focus on Black Publics): http://www.dhtraining.org/hilt2017
• Re-Boot Camp 2017, June 12-16, McGill University, a week-long course “Introduction to literary text mining using R”: https://txtlab.org/2017/02/re-boot-camp-2017/
• a list of bootcamps and workshops curated by the Price Lab at UPenn

 

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.