Sugar Shack…success?

It’s amazing what humans can accomplish in a week when they set their minds to it. I’m pleased to announce that my interactive exhibit design has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past week and is ready to present (!?). I won’t promise the world, but I will say that there’s now something.

I’ve continued working on the sugar shack theme since my last post – but with a twist (revealed later). Step 1 for Maple Syrup Success was building my sugar shack model. For the base, I used a 3/4 inch thick, 30 cm x 60 high density fibre board fashioned by my boyfriend’s grandfather (a very nice man who took pity on me). How to get the syrup from the top of the ramp to the “evaporator” (a small bowl covered in aluminum foil) proved to be my next obstacle. As I discovered last class, the black plastic pipe that I procured for this purpose was not going to cut mustard since there’d be no way to connect the MaKey MaKey sensors to the maple syrup as it trickled down. I ended up fishing out a mostly in-tact paper towel role from our blue box, cutting out long, slightly curved strips, and lining the entire “ramp” with aluminum foil. Turns out it was much simpler and more cost effective. (On that note, if anyone has any creative ideas of what to do with approximately 60 cm of PVC piping, I’m all ears). Step 3 involved rediscovering my (lack of) artistic talent and spending an afternoon turning my boring plank of wood into a magical forest (with precisely six trees and a lot of swirly dust).

The physical element of the project was complete.

Next came the art of tailoring a variety of sugar shack videos into informative and humorous clips that would play as the syrup descended the ramp. Fortunately, I’d already spent some class time diving into the depths of internet doom to discover the most entertaining and enlightening videos about sugar shacks. I then discovered iMove, a genius video editing software application that, well, does exactly that. Allow you to edit videos. I spent a considerable amount of class time first attempting to download videos directly from YouTube (fail), and then trying to convert YouTube videos to .mov files (eventual success). From there, I saved the .mov videos onto the desktop and basically shuffled them into the iMovie. It’s really unfortunate how long it took me to figure this all out. I greatly amused myself while editing the videos, however, and took particular joy in adding fun (superflous) details like introductory slides and transitions. I optimistically developed five brief clips, for each of the five MaKey MaKey sensors.

Next, I decided to conduct a few test maple syrup runs on my ramp, and see if my video lengths corresponded with my syrup timing. It was at this point that I realized I had been ignoring a rather significant problem. I quickly confirmed that maple syrup runs at different speeds depending on the type of product, the room’s temperature, the slope of the slant, and the quantity poured. (Yes, yes this is all very logical). Beyond running an indefinite series of tests, fixing my board at a specific angle, and monitoring the temperature of my syrup prior to and during my presentation/other individuals’ interactions with my design, it would be virtually impossible to ensure that the syrup flowed at precisely the right speed. I spent a number of minutes feeling downtrodden and grumpy with my obvious lack of foresight before realizing that there could be a solution! Rather than placing the sensors along the aluminum foil ramp, I could insert them into the evaporator. The “visitor” could “stir” the maple syrup around as the syrup “entered” the evaporator, et voila! My video clip would magically appear all thanks to the magic of Canada’s finest delicacy (assuming, of course, that the syrup was conductive).

And then I turned to Max to design my “software”.

I’ve struggled with Max since our first class. For one, my aged, temperamental, computer abhors the program and tries to get rid of it at the earliest opportunity, which makes completing anything a giant pain in my derriere (pardon my French). I’ve resorted to either following along on my classmates’ more sophisticated computers, staring blankly at my sorry excuse for a machine, or transferring my business over to one of the giant Macs in the Digital Lab. The third solution contributed best to my ultimate success.

I reviewed Bil’s MaKey MaKey lesson & a few Max tutorials in an attempt to better grasp how these two entities worked and what I was supposed to do with them. Very, very slowly, I constructed a (rather simple) patch, complete with a key object, integer, and LEDs. Uploading the video required equal amounts of strain for my non-technological brain. But we got there.

I then realized that my project was rather dull with only one, five segment video clip. Feeling most displeased (again), I decided to take the rest of the night off. Never underestimate the powers of a good sleep my friends, for genius struck again! I decided to divide my “evaporator” into four subsections. Each compartment would include one MaKey MaKey sensor. The visitor would pour maple syrup down the (progressively stickier) ramp, and “stir” the maple syrup in each compartment to watch a series of different clips! That way, the visitor could learn about/be entertained by maple syrup four whole times rather than just the one! (#DreamBig.) I returned to iMovie, and divided my lengthy clip into two, much more entertaining clips: a “Heritage” clip and a “Things you should never do with maple syrup.” For clip three, I pasted a number of Google images together, and superimposed the non-iconic song “Sugar Shack” by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs. (Don’t listen to it, it’s too catch and will stay with you for days). In the end, I settled on three compartments instead of four, partly out of fear that my compartmentalization would not work, partly because I didn’t want to simply insert another round of videos. To loop the new videos in, I simply added more designs to my patch. As a final, purely aesthetic step, I made the patch pretty (blue) and presentable. It’s still not the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s kinda neat.

You’re probably wondering…so does this actually work? Is maple syrup conductive? Will the aluminum foil stand the test of time??

Only tomorrow will tell. Stay tuned for more fun (and pictures!).

Sugar Shack…success?

It’s amazing what humans can accomplish in a week when they set their minds to it. I’m pleased to announce that my interactive exhibit design has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past week and is ready to present (!?). I won’t promise the world, but I will say that there’s now something.

I’ve continued working on the sugar shack theme since my last post – but with a twist (revealed later). Step 1 for Maple Syrup Success was building my sugar shack model. For the base, I used a 3/4 inch thick, 30 cm x 60 high density fibre board fashioned by my boyfriend’s grandfather (a very nice man who took pity on me). How to get the syrup from the top of the ramp to the “evaporator” (a small bowl covered in aluminum foil) proved to be my next obstacle. As I discovered last class, the black plastic pipe that I procured for this purpose was not going to cut mustard since there’d be no way to connect the MaKey MaKey sensors to the maple syrup as it trickled down. I ended up fishing out a mostly in-tact paper towel role from our blue box, cutting out long, slightly curved strips, and lining the entire “ramp” with aluminum foil. Turns out it was much simpler and more cost effective. (On that note, if anyone has any creative ideas of what to do with approximately 60 cm of PVC piping, I’m all ears). Step 3 involved rediscovering my (lack of) artistic talent and spending an afternoon turning my boring plank of wood into a magical forest (with precisely six trees and a lot of swirly dust).

The physical element of the project was complete.

Next came the art of tailoring a variety of sugar shack videos into  informative and humorous clips that would play as the syrup descended the ramp. Fortunately, I’d already spent some class time diving into the depths of internet doom to discover the most entertaining and enlightening videos about sugar shacks. I then discovered iMove, a genius video editing software application that, well, does exactly that. Allow you to edit videos. I spent a considerable amount of class time first attempting to download videos directly from YouTube (fail), and then trying to convert YouTube videos to .mov files (eventual success). From there, I saved the .mov videos onto the desktop and basically shuffled them into the iMovie. It’s really unfortunate how long it took me to figure this all out. I greatly amused myself while editing the videos, however, and took particular joy in adding fun (superflous) details like introductory slides and transitions. I optimistically developed five brief clips, for each of the five MaKey MaKey sensors.

Next, I decided to conduct a few test maple syrup runs on my ramp, and see if my video lengths corresponded with my syrup timing. It was at this point that I realized I had been ignoring a rather significant problem. I quickly confirmed that maple syrup runs at different speeds depending on the type of product, the room’s temperature, the slope of the slant, and the quantity poured. (Yes, yes this is all very logical). Beyond running an indefinite series of tests, fixing my board at a specific angle, and monitoring the temperature of my syrup prior to and during my presentation/other individuals’ interactions with my design, it would be virtually impossible to ensure that the syrup flowed at precisely the right speed.  I spent a number of minutes feeling downtrodden and grumpy with my obvious lack of foresight before realizing that there could be a solution! Rather than placing the sensors along the aluminum foil ramp, I could insert them into the evaporator. The “visitor” could “stir” the maple syrup around as the syrup “entered” the evaporator, et voila! My video clip would magically appear all thanks to the magic of Canada’s finest delicacy (assuming, of course, that the syrup was conductive).

And then I turned to Max to design my “software”.

I’ve struggled with Max since our first class. For one, my aged, temperamental, computer abhors the program and tries to get rid of it at the earliest opportunity, which makes completing anything a giant pain in my derriere (pardon my French). I’ve resorted to either following along on my classmates’ more sophisticated computers, staring blankly at my sorry excuse for a machine, or transferring my business over to one of the giant Macs in the Digital Lab. The third solution contributed best to my ultimate success.

I reviewed Bil’s MaKey MaKey lesson & a few Max tutorials in an attempt to better grasp how these two entities worked and what I was supposed to do with them. Very, very slowly, I constructed a (rather simple) patch, complete with a key object, integer, and LEDs. Uploading the video required equal amounts of strain for my non-technological brain. But we got there.

I then realized that my project was rather dull with only one, five segment video clip. Feeling most displeased (again), I decided to take the rest of the night off. Never underestimate the powers of a good sleep my friends, for genius struck again! I decided to divide my “evaporator” into four subsections. Each compartment would include one MaKey MaKey sensor. The visitor would pour maple syrup down the (progressively stickier) ramp, and “stir” the maple syrup in each compartment to watch a series of different clips! That way, the visitor could learn about/be entertained by maple syrup four whole times rather than just the one! (#DreamBig.) I returned to iMovie, and divided my lengthy clip into two, much more entertaining clips: a “Heritage” clip and a “Things you should never do with maple syrup.” For clip three, I pasted a number of Google images together, and superimposed the non-iconic song “Sugar Shack” by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs. (Don’t listen to it, it’s too catch and will stay with you for days). In the end, I settled on three compartments instead of four, partly out of fear that my compartmentalization would not work, partly because I didn’t want to simply insert another round of videos. To loop the new videos in, I simply added more designs to my patch. As a final, purely aesthetic step, I made the patch pretty (blue) and presentable. It’s still not the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s kinda neat.

You’re probably wondering…so does this actually work?  Is maple syrup conductive? Will the aluminum foil stand the test of time??

Only tomorrow will tell. Stay tuned for more fun (and pictures!).

So long, and thanks for all the #FISH_Command arguments

Reflecting back on my twelve-odd weeks spent hammering out bash code and gradually accepting that the machines have claimed superiority over the squishy mind of man in one more moderately self-important but nonetheless critical (shut up!) genre of academia, I’ve mainly tried to consider what value these tools hold for those who are more interested in different types of analysis as opposed to more quantitative understanding. History is all about reading between the lines, and at first it seems like these tools are just giving us representations of those lines. A condensed look at the subject without accounting for how different patterns mean different things in different context. To me, that reflects archaeology more than it does history – certainly useful, but it’s just a base on which the historian performs their own craft. I feel it’s imperative that we keep this in mind when it comes to our search engines – we must be constantly trying our best to make connections in as many different ways as possible. Call me a hoarder, but the thought of something crucial getting lost because it was not recognized by our identifiers of relevance is one of my biggest fears as a historian.

As someone who is more interested in the theoretical component of history, I feel the most critical tools will be the ones that can open up new ways of bridging gaps in our factual network. Using the visual line graph to create a visually distinct means of viewing historical networks is a neat example. The Healy article makes good use of this in creating a representation of the American revolutionary movement and how different people were involved with one another. It’s not a more ‘complete’ understanding of the event, but it frames it in a different way so that people with different observational abilities in the present have more equal access to our history.  I’d love to see more work done to greatly expand on this – put history into as any different forms as possible so that it can be enjoyed by everyone. We stand more of a chance of strengthening our understanding the more people we allow into the dialogue.

When Foucault wrote his famous History of Sexuality, he observed that the most powerful forces in society are the ones that aren’t openly expressed. What we can express through language, speech, art, or any other media is only tangentially related to where power actually manifests itself. Limited means of human expression already constitute a filter between us and these mechanisms of power. When we transfer documents from writing to electronic text, from electronic text into what is decipherable through search engines, etc. we throw up more of these filters. The goal of the historian, in my view, is to expand the vocabulary we can employ in communicating with our past.

The tools I’ve been presented with in this class are quite relevant to the day-to-day work of a historian, and would likely be the same to any other research-based discipline. Extrapolating text from PDFs, Batch downloading,  and sending out web spiders are all useful tools. But as someone who is less about grand metrics and more about viewing primary sources as a fragile window into the underlying powers that move history along, going forward I’m going to be looking into these digital research methods in a way that allows for the most wide-ranging and all-inclusive understanding of our past that a likely hopeless but somehow endearingly ambitious (shut up!) historical observer can achieve.

He Hurts Himself in Confusion

To be perfectly honest, I got pretty lost on this past week’s lesson. I didn’t really understand the commands and was just trying to follow the written instructions as best I could. I spent a little time practicing over the week but didn’t feel much closer to understanding how to work with structured data. Awk in particular as an alternate language was difficult to rap my head around.

I plan to keep practicing this lesson until the end of the term, because I want to get it down. I plan to backtrack through my steps and figure out what does what, so it can be useful to me in the future.

Looking ahead to this week and “XML Parsing”, it seem like we’ll be dealing with more sorting, this time with tables and columns. I haven’t gotten the chance to practice that yet, so I’ll have to learn as I go in class today. There are a lot of new commands being introduced, so it’ll be trial by fire.

-Will

On Data-Mining

I was chatting with my Mother the other day, and somehow last week’s lesson about breaking down PDFs into text came up. My mother is a (at this point possibly the) reporter at the Toronto Sun, and with the newspaper industry in the midst of a long and agonizing death, the ability of reporters to do any physical reporting seems to have been among the first aspects of the paper deemed expendable.

As such, it seems much of what little future there is in journalism lies in data-mining, taking a raw collection of numbers and turning them into stories. Governments are being called upon to release more data these days, and often times the information (purposefully or not) is not organized in a way that makes important things stand out. Lists of things like Doctor’s salaries are given out in obtuse formats and require a great deal of effort to make usable. The historians of the future will no doubt have to deal with this more than us, but the easier it becomes to access information, the more skilled historians must become in interpreting it if we’re to stay ahead of the curb.

Looking back on last week’s lesson, one of the places I find myself often slipping up is highlighting specific pieces of text after I’ve drawn it from somewhere. The reliance on various numbers of dashes seems to trip me up (-n –color). It’s something I’m trying to practice, it seems to be a fundamental aspect of checking the success of your script as you’re writing it.

Just from looking at the lesson for this week, I’m already nervous. We’re deep behind enemy lines now.

-Will

The Home Stretch

This past week, we reviewed the material from the first six weeks of the course, which was pretty useful to me. Being a student of the social sciences, a course like this that is based in a mathematical process where everything builds off of an initial foundation, is something I haven’t done much of in the past few years. So a review I feel was necessary to take a step back and look at what’s been done so far.

I went through a few of the previous exercises and managed to get through them. I’m still trying to make the connections as to how I can make this work for the things I want to do. OCR has been the most promising so far, so if I keep practicing there it should be of some use to me when I’ve gathered my documents.

As someone who does use a ton of PDFs, I’m looking forward to this week’s lesson. In addition to learned commands like sudo and egrep, we’ll be adding a bunch of new commands to our repertoire, so I plan on trying to drill that one down over the course of the next week.

But what I do have are a very particular set of skills.

OCR has been the first technique we’ve learned in class that feels distinctly like something a historian would want to use, and would get fantastic use out of. It is the solution to one of the biggest challenges facing historians today and that is how to organize and search documents before they get put into digital form. Taking on something of this magnitude was a nice treat, and it may end up being the big thing I take away from this course.

Thankfully I didn’t end of moving every file in my home directory this time, and I think I’m comfortable navigating the various levels of directories. Re-sizing and otherwise managing the files I’m using with OCR looks like it will take some time and practice to get good at, as it’s not something that is easily transferred from the specific instructions to whatever file you’re working with. There are a lot of specific variables you have to account for with each type of file, and those are the trickiest things to deal with when you switch over to writing your own scripts.

I’m looking forward to the review this week, of the three stages Professor Turkel discussed in class last week, I’m definitely in the second camp. I’m going through the instructions, trying to replicate them as best I can, and thus far in class I’ve managed to keep up. Making the jump to being comfortable with all these tools and making them work for what I want to do is still going to be a difficult step.

Give Us the Url and Wipe Away the Debt

I found this week’s lesson to be the most enjoyable one so far. I feel like I’m finally getting the hand of the basic commands and how they function in the linux ecosystem. During the class this past week, I got caught up just prior to the bursting section, but I managed to figure out the issue and catch up before the end. For all the complexities and correcting that went on in class, by the end I felt good about the material.

Already this year I’ve found much better ways of searching through databases and online collections, and so I anticipate being able to make good use of these new tools. I’m sure with the way my thesis is coming together, I’ll be wanting to download these massive amounts of documents. Standard searching often causes problems, so being able to write your own script to find the documents you want based on your own knowledge of the sources is extremely useful.

On a more direct note, I’ve been having trouble the past few weeks trying to go through the lessons after the class on the classroom computers. I’ve had trouble trying to pull the files in and use them in the scripts. I try to practice throughout the week, so if I could get some advice on that, that’d be great.

-Will

From Input to Language

Looking back on my experience in the first few weeks of the course, I realize that I’ve spent a lot of time typing the command lines verbatim to how they appear in the instructions, just trying to keep up with the lecture. This was a mistake I made when I took Computer Science back in High School. Going through the material for this week, I’ve made a more conscious effort to understand precisely the function of each command. With any language, just trying to memorize a dictionary is never the most efficient way of understanding.

So I tried playing around with the various organization-related commands we were given this week. I feel like I’m getting more comfortable with commands like less that put you in reading-mode, whereas getting locked into that type of thing made me panic earlier in the course. I don’t find myself in as many panic situations as I did in the first two weeks.

Under the primary goal of examining documents in order to come up with an organizational system, the commands become a lot more easier to digest. This week’s commands were less about establishing a progression of action to reach an end goal and more about understanding a series of equal commands that help to do different things relating to a singular task. That was what I was looking for when I signed up for this course.

Next week’s lesson on search engines should be another interesting step in this direction.

-Will

 

 

Week 2 (Electric Boogaloo)

The week two exercises have been a lot more interesting to me and are showing the potential of these tool as research devices. In my undergraduate work I mainly focused on the analytic aspect of being a historian, rather than the research component, so I never undertook a project that required a massive amount of literature, particularly primary sources. Since that is going to be the case in this program, getting these tool early on has me very excited to move forward with my research ideas

In class this past week I managed to keep up with the lesson despite being a bit behind to do problems with my laptop. While I mostly worked off the sheet, I felt like I understood each of the individual steps and what they achieved. It felt more valuable than just being given the pipeline, as the ultimately goal is to create scripts that fit your specific needs. Unfortunately  didn’t make it to executing the full pipeline at the end.

I did have some issues going back and trying to run the same exercises again. Mainly I had a problem with trying to wget another copy of the file so I could work through the chain again. As such, I haven’t been able to do the full pipeline again yet, so I’ll have to try it again at some point. I feel a little more comfortable with the general commands but I still have a ways to go before I can comfortably go beyond the lesson plan.

-Will