What’s Next After Beta Testing? (Changes, Then More Beta Testing): end/line Group Post

By Tom Lewek | Published: April 23, 2017

This past Thursday, Iuri organized a beta testing session with a number of literature scholars at Ryerson University in Toronto. We provided the five testers with an invitation letter, detailing the general instructions for testing, and a form to record their responses. Iuri also made himself available during the testing hours to answer any essential questions. (You can read more in Iuri’s own post on the subject.)

Overall, the testers provided mixed but constructive feedback that we’ll use to orient ourselves as we approach the 17 May launch date. The two most common, and I think valid, criticisms of the current site were its lack of 1) clarity about its purpose and 2) frame for users as they navigate the uploading, encoding, and comparing processes. During this past Wednesday’s class, Lisa anticipated some of the arguments that comprised this first criticism. Our homepage could be much clearer, and I’m going to rethink and revise the tagline and deck to emphasize that we’re connecting close reading to TEI markup. I’d also like to revise and foreground a Get Started guide we added to the encoding page last week—it might be worthwhile to feature this on the homepage instead. To address the second criticism, lack of frame, from beta testing, we need to integrate some FAQ answers into prompts on the appropriate pages and recognize that first-time or beginner TEI users will need more guidance with tags. We might also want to reconsider the usefulness of the FAQ page itself. For example, I could envision integrating the answers to the FAQs into prompts, doing away with the page, and maybe including a “How It Works” infographic instead. On a more positive note, beta testers noted that the simplicity of the design aided the encoding experience and a majority suggested that they would use the site again.

Now that we have these initial responses, we’ll need to adjust some of our work over the next week to address the most pressing concerns and make some changes. After that, however, we’re already looking forward to the next round of beta testing.

Posted in endline, spring17, Student Post | Comments closed

end/line: week 9

By Iuri Moscardi | Published: April 23, 2017

Spring Break was necessary to put together our thoughts about end/line development and to better define the technical features and the graphical aspect of our app. Indeed, on April 20th we hosted our first beta test, so it was necessary to set up a beta version of end/line that works at its best.

The test was hosted at the Centre for Digital Humanities at Ryerson University in Toronto by the two Co-Directors of the Centre – Dr. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Professor of English, and Professor Jason Boyd – and the Project Manager – Reg Beatty. A few words about this amazing and enthusiast group of people: they replied to an e-mail I sent with the call for testers proposing us to host the test during the Day of DH 2017. During this day, many universities or research centers or other institutions all around the world propose meetings or conferences to discuss about the state of the art in the field of the DH: the people at CDH at Ryerson considered end/line a relevant project in the DH field and they wanted to test it in this specific day.

My duties before the test was essentially to define a helpdesk contact (we chose to offer assistance via e-mail, avoiding video tools like Skype or Google Handouts) for the participant; to prepare an invitation letter for them, containing all the details for the test; and, above all, to set up a feedback form. In preparing this last one, I tried to imagine which difficulties or questions end/line could arise in a user logging in for the first time. I stressed the relevance of the FAQs and I also inserted some questions which resulted very useful for us to understand if end/line is perceived as a toll which increases the knowledge of TEI more than the use of encoding as a close reading of poems. We received four pretious feedbacks from the people working at Ryerson.

But the total number of the feedback we received was 5. Indeed, I also took advantage of the #dayofDH on Twitter by following the hashtag and retweeting and interacting from end/line Twitter account. In this way, not only we gained some new followers, but one of the Twitter user following the hashtag tested the app and then accepted to give us his feedback. This is a demonstration of the reputation our project has already gained, and also of the importance of communication to build an image and to reach potentially interested users.

Posted in Diary, endline, spring17, Student Post | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Spring Breaking and Catching Up: end/line Group Post

By Tom Lewek | Published: April 18, 2017

With spring break now over, we’re focused on prioritizing all the work required to get a minimum viable product ready by the end of the semester. In our last class prior to the break, Hannah and Jeremy offered some helpful feedback on end/line as it exists now. Coming from a computer science background, Hannah provided a useful non-humanistic perspective. More specifically, she challenged us to think about how best to explain TEI to those with limited TEI or even encoding experience. Jeremy, meanwhile, provided a deeper humanities perspective and encouraged us to validate encodings against the actual TEI DTD and distinguish XML tags through something like highlight.js. We’ll add these items to our development to-do list, along with a host of back-end (e.g. SSL configuration) and front-end (e.g. 404 and 500 error pages) tasks that Brian and Greg have planned.

Lisa also pushed us to think more deeply about the humanistic purpose of this project. Should end/line only teach users how to encode in TEI XML or should it force them to rethink how they read poetry? This seems like a far more complicated task than rethinking our information architecture to guide novice encoders or building in some JavaScript to highlight XML tags. Yet such thinking also seems necessary as we prepare to write an NEH grant application. In fact, we can begin to see how end/line could mine data to reveal the most commonly used, and most commonly abused, tags. Furthermore, end/line might go beyond validating encodings and also analyze them, asking encoders why they use certain tags in certain ways. That type of functionality, however, remains out-of-scope for this project. (Apps that analyze writing, in sometimes offbeat ways, do exist: see Hemingway Editor, Nitpicker, and write-good for some examples. Perhaps we could adopt this type of thinking for encoding?)

In the coming couple of weeks, we expect even more feedback as beta testing commences. Iuri has generated a lot of interest for end/line and has compiled an “invitation to test” letter and a comprehensive feedback form. It will be exciting to see what those outside of our team and outside of CUNY think about the app.

Posted in spring17, Student Post | Comments closed

ZUC Weekly Update 4.12.17

By Lauren Kehoe | Published: April 13, 2017

On Saturday, April 8, the ZUC team met to recap the week’s progress and to plan for the week of spring break and beyond.  As the semester is moving into the home stretch, we wanted to make sure we are on task for the weeks ahead.

Since Marti was not feeling well last week during class, we updated him on the meetings with Liza Harrell-Edge from the New School and on the group’s in-class meeting with Kerri Willette.  Both meetings very informative and helped us continue to develop and understand the function and possibilities of the Zine Union Catalog.  Liza was able to show us more of the mapping strategy for ingesting records into Collective Access among other design and function considerations like setting up the browse collections configuration file.  Kerri helped us think big picture about the potential of the ZUC and how her work with DPLA and Metro can speak to our work ingesting metadata from several various institutions with their own way of describing things.

After catching Marti up, we moved into the timeline for the remaining weeks.  Each of us are taking advantage of spring break and wanted to make sure we’d remain on task.  Our next group meeting will be in class (minus Lauren who is traveling abroad), but we did set up our next tentative meeting for Sunday 4/23 or Tuesday 4/25.  This hasn’t been set definitively, but Jenna, Marti, and Alex will organize the logistics during class next week and confirm with Lauren.  

We set up tasks and deadlines for the next two weeks:

Martí: all by April 20th

Upload logo to site (completed)

Tweak colors to match logo

Tweak architecture for display, fool around with themes

Favicon – separate out the cat paw

Fix nav: credits, blog (coordinate with Alex)

Lauren: all April 13th

Re-upload 25 QZAP records

Upload 25 DZL records

Holdings attached to these 75 records

Upload 25 MARC records

Collection ID field

Jenna

Keep advisory board updated: (completed)

Researchers survey: next Saturday

Update Alex on everything we said (completed)

Alex

Browse function

Set up cataloger account

  • Add items

Set up research account

  • Set up lightboard (or whatever you might want to call it)
  • Tagging

Finally, we discussed the final project and presentation.  We agreed that a zine would be the best way to present our work and Jenna & Marti agreed to create a mock-up where we can all add various content.  We’ve discussed some of the main things that need to be included and will begin to assign responsibilities for the content at the next out of class meeting.  We are excited and nervous about the presentation, so we ruminated on what we anticipate will be the structure of our presentation.  Essentially, we will do a demo of the ZUC, run through adding a batch of records from a hypothetical contributor, then discuss the future development and plans for the ZUC.  Lastly, we discussed that we’d still like to work on the grant opportunity and each confirmed that we are invested in the project and its success well beyond the end of this semester.

Posted in Digital Fellows, spring17, Uncategorized, ZUC | Comments closed

end/line — Week 6 Journal

By Brian Hamilton | Published: April 5, 2017

This week saw the website finally starting to come together. Most of what came before was just Greg building the front-end skeletons and EJS views, but now the real meat of the project is being implemented. It ended up going pretty well. I didn’t have any issues with the coding or anything, and things worked out the way I expected them to. I had to change the database a little, but that wasn’t too bad.

What I ended up adding was the ability to upload a poem, encode it, view the poem and its encodings, search for poems, view your own profile of poems and encodings, and compare two encodings, The validation script also runs on the encode page and works perfectly. I’m sure there are still some bugs to work out in these that testing will bring out, but I’m confident that they work perfectly for now.

There are still some more features to add. I still need to offer the ability to change passwords, view an encoding after you’ve submitted it, and a few other things. Eventually, there might be a need for pagination on the search page as well.

I think the project is moving along well so far. We’ll definitely have something done completely by May.

Posted in Diary, endline | Comments closed

end/line week 6 reflection

By Gregory Rocco | Published: April 3, 2017

This week was a bit of a rush to the end in terms of making sure Brian had everything he needed to start making all of the connections on the backend. A few pages had to be cleaned up, some information had to be added, and results pages had to be skeletoned out so they would display correctly once the application was in use. Hopefully by next week we can start testing the application amongst ourselves, make the necessary changes we need to make, and push a better app for the second round when we request our beta testers to test the app.

The first of the changes to the platform was from login and sign-up modals, to individual pages. Brian mentioned it would be an easier transition so I implemented a minimalist design for the pages themselves, extremely similar to what hypothes.is uses. Along with other aesthetic changes, the news page now has a jumper feature on the top of the page so you can quickly scroll to any story featured. An FAQ page has been fleshed out with test questions and test answers so that anyone can commit directly to the repo to fill those in. The glyphicons have been corrected, with BH’s direction I was able to change the navbar to two different views, and I added a partnership section on the home page.

However, the most important changes I made were the items added to the item pages and search page. This is so that Brian has a base to work off of when he starts making the connections. The actual item pages (currently) are designed to feature radio buttons to compare versions and feature title and author data for each iteration. Search results feature title, author, and date. One of the more challenging aspects of this was making sure I was working within Bootstrap’s column system while still making sure it was aesthetically pleasing and workable on mobile.

Otherwise, I can’t wait for Brian to finish because I’m really excited to see this thing work. However, I think I can hold off on my anticipation because I really needed this short break right now (hah!)

Posted in Diary, endline, spring17, Student Post | Comments closed

ZUC Weekly Update 4.2.17

By Lauren Kehoe | Published: April 3, 2017

Our team met yesterday and was able to make some progress on some of the back end programming that was perplexing us in addition to continuing our outreach to the ZUC Advisory Board and answer some additional design questions.  Once again, Eric Goldhagen joined us to provide some guidance on programming Collective Access within the cpanel.  Most explicitly, Eric was able to assist us with working out how to:

  • Auto generate unique ID numbers for the ZUC.  During the previous ingests of data, each record was assigned a “%” ID and we did not know how to set CA to auto generate the ID number.  There was some discussion of the additional metadata we need to have represented in CA and after some back an forth, we determined that each record in CA should have a unique ID that is not tied to the contributing institution.  So, using this help documentation, and with Eric’s guidance, we are now able to have each newly ingested record have its own unique ID.  The metadata specialist’s job this week is to clear out the database so that the data can be ingested anew with unique IDs assigned.
  • That leads to the second milestone of the meeting, which was to figure out how to batch edit several records at once.  Early last week, it was determined that sets needed to be created within Collective Access to do any batch editing (or deleting), but it was unclear how to easily add items to any created set easily.  At first it seemed cumbersome to add an item title by title, but Eric showed us a way to query the database easily and add items to a set within the search/browse interface.  By Wednesday of this week, the records will be deleted so that more specific metadata records can be added.
  • The group had a good discussion about what metadata needs to be included and found with any record in Collective Access.  The group now has a better understanding of various relationships and authorities within the database and why certain fields (i.e. creator or date) were not showing up in the object view interface.  We will continue to work on the interface so that the following fields are included in the object record:
    • ZUC ID#
    • Name of Holding Institution
    • Unique Collection ID# – like a bib number in a catalog or an accession number from a museum
    • Title of Zine
    • Creator
    • Date of Creation

A big goal for this week was to set up the browse functionality which we have not yet been able to make fully operational.  A meeting with Liza Harrell-Edge, digital archivist at The New School, had to be postponed until later this upcoming week, so we are hoping that she can provide another perspective on setting up Collective Access in addition to helping us with the browse function since the New School Digital Archive has done a great job at setting up their browse interface.    

Eric and the project developer had an interesting discussion about the limits of using the cpanel as opposed to the command line.  Attempts were made to set up command line access for the CA instance, but have not yet been fully realized on the developer’s machine.  An email was sent to Jim Groom to further establish this function and Eric will follow up with additional documentation to implement command line access.  

The project director continued working on our outreach strategy in general and specifically to the ZUC Advisory Board.  After setting goals, a timeline, and determining who should be invited to join the AB, emails have started to go out inviting scholars, librarians, zine librarians, zine makers, and technologists for participation and will be followed up this week with a three question survey about the catalog interface and design of the site so far.  Communication will then be made on a weekly basis where updates are provided about the progress of the project in one week and then a follow up three question survey sent out about the updates the following week.   

The group also discussed design and branding strategies.  The team designer will continue working on color schemes and finalizing the logo.  After attending Digital Fellows open hours, the team designer and lead developer were able to remove the default thumbnail image for objects within the search results field in addition to some other modifications.  This will continue to be updated as the group determines the layout of the site.

Lastly, and certainly not least, a discussion of the final project and the NEH DH Advancement Grant has been initiated.  The project director has commenced drafting the application and has developed an initial set of questions about the application process.  We will be sharing those within the next week and a half.  

 

Posted in spring17, Uncategorized, ZUC | Comments closed

end/line Weekly Diary: 2 April

By Tom Lewek | Published: April 3, 2017

After our group meeting with Kate Singer, discussed in this week’s group post, the remainder of the week has involved a good deal of housekeeping as project director and project manager. The community management and development teams continue to work, mainly, in their own spheres, so I’m trying to stay up-to-date with both. Iuri has continued to work on the invitation letter and feedback form for our potential beta testers, and he’s been in contact with a PhD student, working on the Shelley-Godwin Archive interested in the technology behind our project. Though I haven’t had a chance to do so, I definitely want to follow up on all of these items before spring break. Instead, I’ve focussed on some smaller tasks to keep the project moving. First, I moved all of the code out of my personal GitHub repository and into an organizational repository—this foregrounds the project itself and would allow us to scale up more easily if needed. Second, I began drafting some initial FAQs to guide our users. Obviously, users can sense how to use end/line through its information architecture, copy, and design, but an FAQ allows us to refine further the purpose of the project—I’m looking forward to seeing if these questions will be frequently-asked ones for actual users. Third, now that we’re getting closer and closer to the semester’s end, I put in a purchasing request for an SSL certificate, which would protect help protect the site beyond its HTTPS protocol and the security features Brian has implemented thus far. (Purchasing an SSL certificate would also require us to upgrade our hosting plan with Heroku from a free to a paid version—another purchasing request sent to Professor Rhody.) And, finally, I wrote Kate Singer a thank you note, asked if we could acknowledge her on our About page, and promised not to bombard her with emails. All smaller-scale items—when compared, for instance, to writing work or data management plans—but all necessary as we approach May.

Next week, I hope to turn my attention to the grant proposal that we plan to submit to the NEH in June, and finish all the other small-but-necessary items that arise between now and spring break.

Posted in Diary, spring17, Student Post | Comments closed

Group Post, end/line

By Tom Lewek | Published: April 3, 2017

This past week were able to break out from the classroom, slightly, when we spoke with Kate Singer from Mount Holyoke. Kate will serve as an advisor to end/line, and her comments, questions, and suggestions on Wednesday granted us some new perspectives on our work thus far. After we introduced ourselves, discussed our roles, and gave brief overviews of the technology used and the scholarly outreach campaign in progress, we delved into what the project needs to clarify and what it might become. Because Professor Singer has used TEI to teach poetry and poetics before, she understands the technical landscape and posed a series of questions:

  • Do you envision students using Oxygen, an XML editor, to encode poetry before uploading? Our answer: maybe, but we’d prefer they encode directly on the site.
  • Does end/line validate user-submitted XML, and, if that XML is invalid, does it point out the error(s)? Our answer: yes and yes, thanks to Brian’s work.
  • Do you have plans to distinguish XML tags with color for better readability? Our answer: perhaps, but that’s most likely out-of-scope at the moment.

Her knowledge of the digital humanities, and their intersections with literary studies, was also helpful. In fact, she encouraged us not only to reach out to digital humanities and digitally-inclined poetry and poetics instructors but also to consider that there may be a whole community of literature professors, with little-to-no knowledge of TEI, that might be interested in our work. Finally, Professor Singer challenged us to think about how end/line might mine submitted encodings to uncover the most commonly used tags, the tags most commonly associated with errors, and other such data (this work would, of course, be something to consider after the semester concludes).

After this conversation, we then discussed our current state of affairs with Professor Rhody, who suggested that we might want to write a proposal for the next round of NEH Digital Advancement Grants. Like our conversation with Professor Singer, this suggestion allowed us to break out of the classroom and consider end/line from a new, and wider, perspective. In fact, we reached a quick consensus and decided that it would be worthwhile to put together a proposal.

Posted in endline, spring17, Student Post | Comments closed

end/line: week 6

By Iuri Moscardi | Published: April 2, 2017

During last class, we had for the first time the opportunity to receive a feedback from a person not as involved as us in the development of our app, end/line. Of course we have received other feedbacks previously, but they were either indirect (such as the testers we tried to involve through call for participations, who expressed their interest based on the brief description of the app I wrote for them) or close to our class environment (such as our classmates, or JoJo, or professor Rhody).

The Skype call we had with prof. Kate Singer from Mount Holyoke College was instead the first time when we received feedbacks by someone not yet involved by us, and it was precious for us to understand how our work is perceived and its potentiality. Prof. Singer considered end/line through a pedagogical point of view, helping us to understand how this project can fit with the didactical needs of teachers and professors. For instance, she suggested us to find teachers with whom collaborate to test end/line directly with their students, the users for whom end/line is potentially most useful.

She also helped us to reinforce the connection between end/line and the TEI community, for instance by suggesting places and people to reach out and also by encouraging us to find professors who teach Digital Humanities classes.

Finally, she gave us precious feedbacks also about the technical aspects of the app. She asked us, for instance, if the TEI validation will show users where they made mistakes or not and how the comparison between different encoding of the same text will work. She also suggested us to collect data from the tests with our beta testers, because the analysis of the most common tags used or the most common mistakes could be very relevant to understand how users perceive end/line. Last, but not least, she suggested us to consider how to help the users during their encoding: for instance, with a link to a FAQ section into the app where users can find information about the tags to be employed and other technical aspects.

 

Posted in Diary, spring17, Student Post | Comments closed

  • Archives

  • Welcome to Digital Praxis 2016-2017

    Encouraging students think about the impact advancements in digital technology have on the future of scholarship from the moment they enter the Graduate Center, the Digital Praxis Seminar is a year-long sequence of two three-credit courses that familiarize students with a variety of digital tools and methods through lectures offered by high-profile scholars and technologists, hands-on workshops, and collaborative projects. Students enrolled in the two-course sequence will complete their first year at the GC having been introduced to a broad range of ways to critically evaluate and incorporate digital technologies in their academic research and teaching. In addition, they will have explored a particular area of digital scholarship and/or pedagogy of interest to them, produced a digital project in collaboration with fellow students, and established a digital portfolio that can be used to display their work. The two connected three-credit courses will be offered during the Fall and Spring semesters as MALS classes for master’s students and Interdisciplinary Studies courses for doctoral students.

    The syllabus for the course can be found at cuny.is/dps17.

  • Categories

Skip to toolbar