Mon Mar 5 07:59:13 EST 2012
Newer item(s) at the front.
The application would perform several functions. It would make clear the possibilities for navigating the prerequisites in the freshman and sophomore years. It would also make clear the requirements for navigating the major in the junior and senior years. Above all, it would reveal various possible pathways inside the major -- for example, I'm interested in sustainable development, what courses are highly recommended? I'm interested in education policy, what could/should I do? For example, I think I'd like to write a thesis on climate change in China, how would I prepare for that?
The application should reveal the consequences of individual course choices by indicating what could/would follow on. It should link the WWS major choices with the College distribution requirements -- need a non-lab science? Here's how you do it in WWS. Need a course in moral reasoning? Here's how you do it in WWS while satisfying the latter's ethics requirement. Want to study security policy, broadly understood to include food security and cybersecurity? Here's how it can be done.
The completed application would be available on the WWS web site (currently under redesign) and, if successful, could be used by other departments for their majors.
Marvin is also interested in data analysis and visualization tools for a variety of library systems, in effect a dashboard for the library.
There are all sorts of capabilities we don't have and don't know how to build. Even automating the collection of data would be helpful. The implications of scholars being able to easily create their own searchable databases that use sources from a variety of archives is immense. For instance, we would like the ability to graph usage of certain terms, to search by date, to make any chart or graph that googlebooks (ngram) or worldcat allows, and also be able to compare across various editions.
How about a Thunderbird extension that allows me to right-click on an attachment and decide if I want to save it in a place that I choose or in a folder that corresponds to an email folder structurally, but is on my hard drive? Or, a way to save a message in an email folder, but that gives me the option of where to put the attachment - in the email folder or on my local drive, but with a 'stub' of some sort being kept with the message so it can retrieve the attachment from disk when I view the message.
Using these feeds, one could build an app (mobile) for example, that would keep track of where a student was supposed to be at any given time (from their personal calendar and course schedule) and make sure they were there (and help get them there). There are many other possibilities; this is an excellent resource.
(1) automatically populate with all significant university deadlines (add/drop, pdf, mid-terms, dean's date, deadlines for declaring a major, JP, etc). For some of these events, there could be an estimation of how far in advance you need to prepare for the event so you can see a bar indicating when you should begin planning -- for example 72 hours before add/drop so you have time to schedule a meeting with your professor or adviser to get an update on your status in the course, a month prior for JP deadline to make sure you have a working draft, etc.). User could add, sync, or import additional events from other calendars. If a student selects a particular major the calendar could populate with a list of departmental requirements that could be dropped into the calendar in the appropriate term -- using features of ICE perhaps? Courses that have prerequisites would prompt users for those courses when they are dropped into the calendar.
(2) a feature that ranks or tags calendar events with relative importance to you and what type of goal it is connected with -- for example: thesis would be tied to the "graduate from Princeton" goal so it would be ranked high, while attending TH night arch sing could be given relatively low importance and tied to "relaxation".
(3) zoom feature allowing users to see a week, month, term, year, or all four years at Princeton in a single view. Events that are ranked high in importance (for example finish thesis with a 6 month block of time) would be visible event from the highest level while events ranked lower would only be visible when viewed at a higher resolution. This would help students to think about how they spend their time as it relates to their goals by seeing long term goals and deadlines from different perspectives.
Princeton, the New York public library, and Columbia run a joint off-site storage facility on the Forrestal campus named "RECAP." One of our longterm dreams is to do something called "de-duping," meaning "de-duplicating," meaning storing only 1 copy of a particular volume rather than 2 or 3 (one from Princeton, one from NYPL, and one from Columbia). There are many obstacles to this dream, some of which are legal (e.g., if there's one copy, who owns it?).
But one of the obstacles is technical. To de-dupe, we would have to identify the duplicates (preferably before they entered RECAP). This can be tricky for at least two reasons. One is that, given the purposes of the research libraries, it will matter (at least sometimes) whether the duplicates are exact or not: the 2nd edition and the 4th edition are not perfect substitutes for one another. The second is that Princeton, NYPL, and Columbia all run differently configured online catalogs, so it becomes a clunky, manual process to compare records.
This should be solvable by a Kayak-like program: if one app can search a bunch of airline websites, why not an app that combs multiple library databases?
We want to search one text (A) with a set of other texts (B & C), find places in A that are identical or similar to B or C, tag them accordingly, and have a way to link back accurately to exactly where in B or C the relevant text portion is from. Historians would like to be able to do this to identify previously unrecognized instances of plagiarism or, more-often, "self-plagiarism," in which an author has lifted text from previous things she's written (from letters to articles) and re-used them in a later text. Such a search/visualization tool would be of general interest to intellectual historians, especially those dealing with authors/thinkers who have limited corpora, were known to plagiarize themselves, and do so in complex or otherwise misunderstood ways.
Such a project would have two parts: a search algorithm and a visualizer (like a PDF viewer). The former should be able to match strings (not line-based, but sentence-based), and it would be great if there were ways to avoid false negatives especially (e.g., an author might blank out a name in an example paragraph, such that exact strings wouldn't match but the paragraph is still lifted and we'd like to pick that up). The visualizer is almost more important: something clean, into which digital texts could be loaded in a straightforward way and out of which "results" (i.e., highlighted text, with scrollover revelations of original provenance in B and C, listed in a menu bar).
The Cultural Diplomacy Network is a one-stop-shop for cultural exchange and professional development for the arts community. The portal is all inclusive and is primarily focused on user generated content. We are looking to create a customized online portal that will be navigable by user-choice, and will present a user-friendly design with social media features tailored to the page. We are looking to aggregate user-generated content entries on profiles, videos, forums, chats and blogs. If a user posts a forum entry that is applicable to more than one category, it should simultaneously be reflected on the respective categorical forums and the forum main page.
The two key challenges of this portal are: a) producing multiple pages of social media content; b) aggregating/ connecting the content with the respective pages/features of the site in customizable way. While tagging and categorizing can achieve some of this, the format presented is usually a list generated by a search feature rather than content embedded in the social media feature. We have conducted extensive research and have not yet found a product that solves this problem. Therefore, we believe that the creation of a solution to this aspect of data aggregation could be a technological breakthrough.
We are beginning to institute conversations around bystander behavior in an effort to get students to be aware of their responsibility to help their peers when in need or to act in a way that helps to prevent an issue. This is true whether it is about alcohol use and high risk drinking, sexual assault situations or other student behavior issues, or just being a responsible citizen of the university community.
"Beyond Bystander" is a program which calls students to act on behalf of themselves and their classmates -- to move beyond observing and to engage, participate and speak up. Peer culture makes it very difficult for students to call out or challenge another's behavior if it doesn't directly impact him or her or student norms. Students tell us that action is generally only taken when the authority to act has been given or when an agreed upon student cultural norm is being violated. How do we encourage students to move beyond being a bystander?
We were intrigued with the idea of 'gamifying' the information -- of making a computer game which rewards choices of behavior with points or other positive rewards which are a part of the 'gaming process'. Creating a video game for this purpose would likely be a first of its kind in higher education. We think a game would be of real interest to students and would be at the forefront of articulating educational messages through video games.