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Sonia Gonzalez, from the Public Health program will talk a bit about an educational app she has been working on for helping young people get informed about important sexual and reproductive health services. Sonia’s been working on everything from design to platform considerations. She’ll be updating us on where she’s been and where she’s taking the project.

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Samwell Freeman is probably best known for his art and robotics projects made from obsolete technology. He’s given some memorable presentations in the past. This week he’s going to talk a bit about a new project he’s working on and the direction that he might be going down in semesters to come.

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Other than that, there will be a lot of both returning and new faces of both faculty and students talking about their digital work. Stop by and catch up or get acquainted with the GC’s digital cutting edge.

More on differences:

A Final Cut Pro 7 vs X comparison
Final Cut Pro and Con
Have professionals taken up FCP X a year later?
Top 10 editors’ Concerns about Final Cut Pro X
What aspects of 7 have been added back to Pro X

Suffice to say both are suitable for professional level work, so as the lab has both, we let the choice be yours. In the lab, computer 4 has FCP 7. Our edit room machine has both X and 7. If you are taking a class or prefer one over the other please let us know so we can switch you to the appropriate machine.

Meeting this week: Thursday, Feb 7, 12-1:30 pm Room 6304.01

The Internet Research Team (IRT), a collaborative of GC students, faculty, librarians, and administrators, aims to create a space (both online and offline) for scholars to talk about digital scholarship and research methods. Current and future projects include opportunities to workshop individual projects, share skills and resources, form collaborations, and explore how the GC can better support digital scholarship. We will also be co-sponsoring two upcoming events (more information below)

The next IRT meeting is next Thursday, February 7 from 12 – 1:30 pm in Room 6304.01 (Psychology Department). All are welcome and we encourage people with varying levels of technological experience to join! We also encourage people to join the group’s site on the CUNY Academic Commons.

On the agenda:

1) We will be planning (and signing up volunteers) for two events IRT is co-sponsoring:

-A roundtable session entitled “From Citizen Journalism to Hacktivism: How to successfully use social media in grassroots campaigns” on Wednesday, Feb 20th from 6 – 8 p.m. This event is part of Social Media Week (information here) and will be moderated by Simon Lundgren, researcher and author of New Noise: A Cultural Sociology of Digital Disruption. The session will have a roundtable/workshop format where the focus will be on experience-sharing, networking, and on identifying pitfalls as well as best practices for harnessing the power of social media in grassroots endeavours. Space is VERY limited but we have 15 seats reserved for GC people so you’ll need to volunteer in order to fetch one of them (we encourage you to sign up here ASAP).

-The Theorizing the Web conference on March 1-2 @ the GC. We’ll need volunteers to help with set-up/clean-up, tweeting, etc. Please register for the conference (it’s donation based) as soon as possible if you haven’t already.

2) Two students (Edwin Mayorga and Stephen Boatright) will workshop their current projects

3) Jen Jack Gieseking will present on an participatory open online course (i.e. POOC) on “Reassessing Inequality and Re-Imagining the 21st Century: East Harlem Focus” that has just started.

4) We’ll be presenting a preliminary version of a survey to gauge student interest in and the use of Internet research methods

Upcoming: At our March meeting (March 7), Matt Gold, Advisor to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives, will be presenting on student funding opportunities, including digital fellowships and other initiatives for the 2013-2014 school year. Also, if you’d like to present your work at a future meeting, please let us know.

If you have any questions, please email coordinators Collette Sosnowy & Kiersten Greene at cunyirt@gmail.com

Any questions/concerns, please let Aaron know.

Accurate as of 2.5.13. Please click to view full version.

While the New Media Lab won’t formally be presenting at this year’s CUNY IT Conference, several New Media Lab students will be talking about their digital scholarship at this Thursday and Friday’s panels.

Friday at 9:30 am
Building and Collaborating: Case Studies in Digital Scholarship

Digital humanities researchers debate the levels of technological expertise required from participants while examining how technology and the collaborative strategies it engenders have changed scholarship more generally. The CUNY Graduate Center’s New Media Lab empowers Ph.D. students to answer these questions for themselves. A roundtable of four students in Anthropology, Art History and Classics will offer individual strategies for embracing technology in research before opening the floor to discuss digital literacy.
Michelle Jubin, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center
Alice Lynn McMichael, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center
Antonia M. Santangelo, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center
Jared Simard, Ph.D. Candidate in Classics, CUNY Graduate Center

1:00 pm on Friday
Digital Tools: Opportunities for Research and Access

Four members of the Internet Research Team (three students in Environmental Psychology, Urban Education and Public Health and a reference librarian from the Mina Rees Library) present research projects using social networking platforms  – with a focus on methods, research and ethical considerations. A guiding question for this panel centers on how Internet research enhances existing scholarship while opening doors to new ways forward for academic research.
Collette Sosnowy, Ph.D. Candidate in Environmental Psychology, CUNY Graduate Center
Sonia K. Gonzalez, Ph.D. Candidate in Public Health, CUNY Graduate Center

2:15 pm on Friday
From Data Mining to Mobile App Development: Digital Scholarship across the Disciplines

 In spring of 2012, the CUNY Graduate Center inaugurated a new grant program aimed at fostering cutting-edge digital projects by graduate students. In this session, representatives from the ten winning grant proposals will provide overviews of their projects and discuss their progress so far. Funded projects include a range of disciplines, including Musicology, English, Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, History and Computer Science, and incorporate a range of methodologies from text mining to data visualization to mobile app development.
Antonia Santangelo, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology
Suzanne Tamang, Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science

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And of course there are several other good panels happening across both days. If you haven’t been to a New Media Lab meeting, the IT Conference is a great way to hear about some of the great scholarship of current and former NML researchers and their work both inside and outside the lab.

OWS First Anniversary Timeline

I saw my first Verite timeline in action at a NML meeting.    Mário Montenegro used it to track the history of plays about the great ideas and people that have historically influenced science.  As someone that just loves timelines (and is fascinated my time more generally), I was completely blown away and have been looking for a good reason to use the tool Mario demonstrated ever since.

Using a collection of over 30k OWS related tweets that had been extracted with Python’s Pattern package between September 15-17th for a recent #OccupyData hackathon, I worked with Uğur Güney (from Physics) .  Our aim was to use this data in a meaningful way, and one of the projects we initiated, which was inspired by a previous Occupy Data video project on temporal narratives, was using multimedia tweets to visualize the chronology of events that took place in NYC on those days.

Twitter timestamps allowed us to piece together a cohesive story.  These methods in no way present a comprehensive, unbiased (our tweets were extracted with pre-determined selection criteria) or temporally correct (timestamps provide an approximate anchor, but it is hard to discern the exact time of an event) event history.  However, we do feel it presents a remarkable way to move towards a participant documented history of events, as they are happening, and a new and exciting mode of social-mediated storytelling.   Mining real-time tweets helps to keeping the tale as close to the `true’ event, or its perception of the real event by occupiers as possible.  It reduces the potential for erroneous (romanticized, sensationalized, vilified, or incomplete) translations that are more likely to occur, or harder to fact-check as the event becomes further displaced in time.

More on our working group can be found on the #OccupyData NYC  hackathon project page.

** First two recipients: Collette Sosnowy, Environmental Psychology (personal health blogs) and Chris Baum, Anthropology (health and safety in the adult film industry).

This grant is provided with the support of an anonymous contribution. For more information and to download application form, click here.