Thursday 16 April 2015

Last Post

This will be my last post of the bunch, and serves to reflect on the course as a whole.

The very idea of the course is bold, and to some extent I think the structure of the course mirrors the current relationship between the humanities and the digital world. It's a little bit loose, but that is only because of the enormous opportunities that already exist, and the many more that will develop with time.

Through the course we learned a handful of useful tools that we may very well use again in our future careers, whether that be something like GIS or learning to navigate immense databases such as those behing Google's n-grams.

The classroom and lectures were typically fairly interesting and engaging, even during the first few lessons which mostly served to briefly cover the history of digital humanities. I may have been a little more knowledgeable about the development of the internet than most of my peers, but I think all of us learned a great deal from that part of the course, and beyond.

I think the course could deal with somewhat less of a student-driven learning focus, though it is still essentially to keep that as a strong element in a topic as broad as this. Like it or not, this class does exist in a somewhat less forgiving academic structure, and having more constant direction and feedback at least gives us some sense of our standing in the class. Leaving the capstone project largely in the hands of the students would be enough student-driven learning to let us pursue our own ideas about what digital humanities means, but I think better defining blog participation would help to keep the course grounded.

It may even be better to move away from the blog structure, and explore other opportunities that maybe encourage a little more interaction between students. Forums seem to be going the way of the dinosaur, but they come to mind as better system for sharing, discussion, and debate. If nothing else, you can set up something like that in courselink, though perhaps courselink debates stir up too many bad memories of awful online courses.

Alternatively, adding more weekly blog assignments would be an easy way to address this situation. The ones we were assigned seemed to encourage students to get the work done on time, while semi-voluntary participation leads to events where the student realizes just how little they've actually done compared to what they thought they did, and tries to fit a bunch in at once. (Who would do that? I mean really...)

These assignments don't always have to focus on a new tool that we've learned, and could be as simple as finding a recent news article relevant to digital humanities and tossing up a 5-600 word post interpreting it.

As it is, it's still a great class even without any of the improvements I've mulled over here, but I think they're worth keeping in mind. A little bit of direction helps to keep students focused, and regular marks let us know if we're actually grasping the material and engaging with the content as we should be.

Signing off (probably),
Trevor

Shamefully Late Review for Anthony

I should have had this done weeks ago, but regretfully did not. I think your project was quite well done and largely succeeded at what it set out to do, so writing a review seemed fairly irrelevant. Even still, I'll make a few notes in praise and give you a few recommendations if you decide you want to continue with this project, or perhaps revisit it at some point in the future.


You had a really great catch with the Creative Commons citing – it's definitely an excellent resource and one that more people should be aware of. It helped you skirt some potential legal issues, and I'm sure a few more in the class took note of that particular database.


Having a specific goal for time to read your site is an excellent idea, and you seemed to do a pretty good job keeping things concise enough to stay within those limits. This also let you situate your project as something different from resources already out there, and does so with a hook that should resonate with many people (saving time).


Making videos for your site was pretty ambitious, and I thought they were fairly well done as they were. If you want to build on this site in the future, I would recommend re-recording the audio tracks on these videos, and trying to reduce the verbal fillers or pauses that slipped in to the recording you used. It would look a lot more professional to get rid of those, and would really bump up the quality of your content.


I'd like to see a little more depth on the humanities side of your project, but it is important to consider that many of your readers won't have the kind of background that we do. You mentioned that your site wanted to educate potential agents on how certain sales tactics work with some cultures but not with others, something which I think is particularly interesting from an academic perspective. It might be worthwhile to spend some time trying to expand on this a little bit more, and could possibly help encourage genuine cultural understanding rather than seeming like a way to make an easy sale. I think it's that sort of issue that really lets us put our humanities training to use.



Other than that, I think it was fairly well put together, and not in need of any significant revisions. Good luck!

Notes on suggested changes

I opted to go with the title Digital Immersion. I think it pretty accurately captures the spirit of the project, and is short enough to keep it catchy. If I had the resources and felt there was interest in expanding this project, Digital Immersion could becomes a series of sorts, making this Digital Immersion – Mandarin.

I scrapped most of the lower content on the front page, and all of the non-collapse elements on the main media pages. From here it was a tough decision to either stick with HTML/CSS text overlays, or to edit the overlays on to the images themselves. I went with the latter because it let me create bordered text, which is much more readable. The downside is that, due to how jumbotrons scale images, they all look to be different sizes despite using the same font size when creating the image. I think this could be resolved by cropping all of the images to fit the dimensions of the smallest image, but I haven't tried that yet.

I added an about section to the main page, offering up a basic explanation for the purpose of the site and how to use it. I also clarified the general meaning of the difficulties I assigned to every link, and ended up revisiting some of the difficulties I assigned and changed them to match the criteria established. I also used basic HTML to colour code the difficulty levels, choosing green, orange and red.

I kept titles center-aligned, but moved descriptions and difficult to left-alignment. I also changed the colour of the hyperlinks to white as recommended, and in doing so learned how to use CSS to give them a little more style. I set already visited links to a bright gray, and removed the automatic underline from all basic links. Hovering over a link changes it to bold text, making it pop out.

I changed the order of the media types, putting education first. I initially ordered them as I did because I just wanted some consistency (entertainment, information, education), but agreed that education should probably come first both in principle, and because it is usually the 'easiest' of the types. I moved entertainment to the middle, and information to last to keep with this trend of easiest to hardest.

I added photo explanations to all of the jumbotron images, and wanted to quickly note that the one I used for video is from Lust, Caution, which was originally filmed in Mandarin.

Some of the other changes I wanted to make worked out fairly well, others didn't. It didn't take too long to merge the JS and CSS files into one file to handle the whole site, and doing so helped to make the pages a bit more uniform. In doing so, I realized why the collapse boxes in the audio section were not lining up. All of the entries were fine on every page but Radio on the audio page, so I changed the radio class I used to radiobox, and it then aligned properly. Radio must be a class already defined by bootstrap. I also found a CSS property that let me set a minimum height (min-height) for the collapse boxes. This turned out to be a less elegant solution than I hoped, because it essentially just created a lot of blank, black space under the body of the text. Given that the process of merging lumped all collapse boxes into the same styling, setting a minimum height globally would either do nothing for the larger boxes, or look ridiculous with the small boxes. I ended up settling for a size that brought the audio boxes in line, and left the others alone because they looked fine as they were.

The ugly overlay text and the non-uniform video collapse boxes are two outstanding issues, and in writing this I thought of a pretty easy way to fix the video boxes. Basically, I'd just have to add classes for the set of audio boxes, and the set of video boxes, and put the min-height attribute under those as suitable values. The issue of being unable to use Chinese characters in most of the content of the site still remains, and I'm no closer to finding a solution to that than I was when I initially mentioned the issue. I was able to somewhat work around this by writing the characters into the image overlays, then adding the pinyin for them since they cannot simply be copied and pasted. It will have to do for now, and it least it does give Chinese characters some presence on a site about immersing oneself in Chinese.

Language Learning, Digital Humanities, and the Future


I am going with a blog post to talk about the possible future of language learning on the internet because this is something that invites a lot more dialogue than it can hope to resolve. Personally, I see three issues to consider, and I'll write a bit on each of them: Firstly, the immersion and instruction resources using the internet; Secondly, the increasing dominance of the English language; Lastly, the possible irrelevance from the first two as translation technology improves.


The first is probably the easiest and most pleasant to consider. As my project sought to demonstrate, the internet offers a previously unthinkable level of cultural and linguistic access to far-off cultures. Though regional copyrights do exist and serve to restrict access to some content, it is quite clear that a little bit of persistence and some basic language skills can open up a plethora of immersion opportunities. In addition, websites like duolingo and programs like Rosetta Stone use computers and the internet to teach a language from the basics up. Humanities experts played very significant roles in developing these tools, and duolingo in particular is still looking to hire scholars who are trained in traditional education methods.


The expansion of these tools could serve to encourage people to broaden their cultural horizons in their spare time, and help to teach people new language skills that may then aid their professional pursuits. Perhaps more significantly, these resources can be used by people who are not native English speakers to teach themselves English – possibly opening up opportunities they would otherwise be denied.


This segues well into the next possibility, which is that English continues to grow in significance, partly aided by the internet. English is already estimated to be the second most widely spoken language, second only to Mandarin Chinese. The demographic difference between these two languages is quite telling, as the vast majority of Chinese speakers know it as their primary language, while the majority of English speakers know it as a second or third language. Most of the biggest websites outside of China's special sphere are English-language websites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. These websites offer translation options and in the case of Facebook and Twitter allow users to experience the site through their own communities, but still exist as something that is still English, or at the very least Western.


It is difficult to say whether this may contribute to the expansion of English as the global lingua franca. This could be counteracted by the first scenario, though the third could very well make them both mostly irrelevant.


Digital translation tools are a relatively new technology, but are improving at a striking pace. Google is particularly notable in pioneering this, mostly through Google Translate. It is still a very flawed tool, but translation technology seems a great deal ahead of the likes of babelfish some ten years ago. While often technically incorrect, from my personal experience using Google Translate, it seems to do a pretty decent job translating the meaning of messages even when they are stripped from nearly all the context that often determines what the real meaning should be. The potential for Google Translate to provide real-time translating through a device like Google Glass could create a watershed moment in linguistics, at least as it applies to your average person who isn't actively working to learn another language.



What would the future of Language Education be in that scenario? It seems risky to presume that technology will never be good enough to translate effectively enough to make learning languages obsolete for practical purposes. The discipline itself could very well be challenged to defend its existence, though it is likely that many would still seek to learn another language for the cultural understanding that it offers.

Final Project Report


You can find my final project here, http://chinanet.altervista.org

My capstone project was to create a website to showcase ways one can use the internet to immerse themselves in another language. I am mostly satisfied with the outcome, though it ended up differing significantly from my initial plans, something I will detail in the sections to come.


Project Background


This project was situated within the humanities discipline of Language Education. The academic justification for this project can be found in my initial project report in this blog. Overall, I think this project stayed faithful to its initial goals. My website offers resources for readers looking to start learning Chinese, as well as more advanced resources for readers looking to supplement their language education.

Data Acquisition


Data acquisition was reasonably close to what I stated in the project proposal. The resources presented on my website come from my personal experience learning Chinese, and pursuing this project. Some websites, such as Grooveshark's Mandarin station, Melnyk's and justlearnchinese.com are websites I used in the past. Others, such as youku and ppstream were recommended by Chinese contacts. The majority of resources featured were ones I discovered in the process of making this site, either through English or Chinese searches using the kinds of keywords I suggest in the main pictures.


Tool Application


The primary tools employed for this project were Sublime Text 2, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), and several websites that provided training or reference in the listed languages, as well as one that ultimately hosted the website.


Sublime Text 2 is a program designed to replace notepad for web design. It recognizes and colour coordinates elements and tags for better visibility, while also providing some basic quality of life improvements, such as automatically appending finished tags and end quotations when one initiates a tag or starts a quotation. Before a friend recommended Sublime Text, I was using EditPad, another notepad replacement that offers some advanced features such as tabbed windows, but lacked the programming-oriented features of Sublime Text.


GIMP is an open source image manipulation program, something I used to overlay bordered text on the main images used in each page. The process of creating that bordered text was somewhat complicated due to the relative lack of features in GIMP compared with something like Adobe Photoshop, but given the significant price tag on the latter it was out of the question. Out of all of the tools used, my application of this particular tool was weakest, likely because I have had no training in the proper use of image manipulation programs. I ended up with some pretty glaring flaws in my implementation of bordered overlay text, but this is not the fault of the tool.


Several websites also provided invaluable services, such as codecademy.com, w3schools.com, and altervista.org. I used codecademy's lesson programs to refresh myself on HTML and Javascript, and learned the fundamentals of using CSS to style a webpage. I originally thought to use some other websites to supplement my learning such as lynda.com, but chose not to partially because lynda.com requires a subscription, but also because I felt codecademy gave me enough of the basics to continue my learning in another fashion.


That continued learning came primarily through exploring W3schools.com, which taught me several new traits and their proper syntax for styling with CSS. It also served as excellent reference for HTML and JavaScript, so it is no surprise that it is usually the first result for any web design related question in a search.


Lastly, altervista.org provided free, ad-less hosting with support for custom CSS and Javascript. This site let me simply upload my folder using their file manager, and it worked with minimal tweaking. Storage and bandwidth are fairly limited, but this should not be a major problem for this project. It does not host or even embed any of the media linked, so it is very light on storage, and it should not attract enough traffic to make bandwidth an issue either. If it does become an issue, altervista offers ways to increase bandwidth by either placing ads, or letting me pay a subscription fee.



New Skill Development


My skill development for this project mostly consisted of refreshing the HTML and Javascript I used to know, and learning CSS from scratch. My first exposure to HTML and Javascript was through High School Computer Science courses, where I learned the basics of website construction some ten or so years ago.


HTML was the most extensively used language, providing structure and most of the site content. Most of the basic structure was just a refresher, the HTML I learned through this project mostly involved the creation of classes and ID tags to be styled with CSS or called in Javascript.


Heavy use of CSS was the main focus of language learning. Learning to use CSS allowed me to create a simple but consistent aesthetic. Setting classes and styling them with CSS let me apply that same look across the website, while still allowing further customization through adding additional classes, or using specific IDs. especially with the incorporation of Bootstrap, a set of pre-defined CSS classes designed to divide the page into a set of twelve easily manageable columns. The process of learning to use CSS effectively was one of the most time consuming aspects of this project, something I will detail further in the reflections part of this report.


I used Javascript to add some basic interactivity, a process that was greatly aided by employing JQuery. JQuery is a set of pre-defined instructions that let one call classes and IDs established in the HTML file in an intuitive way. In the project, it is Javascript and JQuery toggling the 'collapse' CSS class on the boxes that allows them to expand when clicked on.


Reflection


The process of designing and building this site was one of constant reflection and revising. The difference between the first rough drawing and description of my project versus what it ultimately came to look like illustrates this fairly well.


For some time I followed the lessons available on codecademy and tried to brainstorm ways of implementing the initial design. When I reached the part of the second lesson where it taught how to use Javascript and CSS to animate elements of a webpage, I spent some time brainstorming ways in which I might approach what I wanted. I couldn't find anything that allowed for the direct perspective shift that I wanted, so I explored animating elements as a way to achieve an approximation of perspective shift – which was to shift literally everything on the page, bringing elements to the center rather than bringing the center to elements. I tried to visualize some pseudo-code that might establish each element on a grid, and have every element shift on the grid by the same amount needed to bring a given element to the center of the page, but ultimately felt that this was simply getting beyond my current capabilities.


With some hesitation, I went back to something else introduced through codecademy's lessons that caught my eye – Bootstrap. Bootstrap looked pretty good, and was fairly easy to use. It meant completely redesigning the page, but that seemed like a much more manageable task in the time limit I had to work with. I was able to get a pretty basic framework up before too long, and with a couple more evenings worth of work I was able to fill in the content.


Using Bootstrap began a shorter process of creating, reflecting, and revisiting. The site I presented to the class used separate .css and .js files for each page. I suspected this might be an inelegant and redundant way to structure the website quite some time after I finished the project as it was to be presented, but it worked so I left it as it was. In the weeks I've had to finalize the project, I consolidated those .js and .css files into one of each. This process wasn't too difficult, and helped to remove some of the inconsistencies from page to page.


To some extent, I was stepping into unfamiliar technical and academic territory with this project. I did not do extremely well in the courses I took before, so even the training I did have in using this languages was nothing spectacular. Even still, knowing the basics helped me absorb the online lessons readily. My unfamiliarity with Language Education as a discipline was also somewhat of a barrier, and a good reason why I've spent much more time in these reports talking about the hurdles I encountered with coding.


Time has not been a major issue in the development of the project, except in that case where I finished the build of the site despite wanting to restructure it. Regardless, it is fully functional one way or another, and that particular project was something more to challenge myself rather than to add anything to the user's experience.



It is not difficult to say that I learned, and remembered a great deal through creating this project, at least on a technical level. I have doubts that this particular model of exploring other languages and cultures using the internet will gain any traction, but there have been many focused projects that have grown significantly in recent years, such as duolingo. I'll be posting a blog entry talking more about the implications of the internet for language education, as well a s a couple that deal with some of the revisions I've made on a technical level, and how I could tackle work that still needs to be done on the site. For now, I want to wrap up the report by saying that it has been a very unexpected opportunity to retrain myself in some professional skills that grew dull, while teaching me to think of ways I can use the knowledge and skills gained as a humanities researcher to create new, important kinds of content.

Monday 9 March 2015

Google Earth Assignment

Not really sure what we're supposed to do with the files from this. I attached the image version of the map I made to this blog post, but I suppose I'll just email the .kml file to Professor Ross. Overall, it was a pretty neat assignment. It would have been cool to further explore some kind of bigger KML project, possibly as a class effort.


Tuesday 3 March 2015

Review for Sarah M. (also posted on her blog)

 Sarah, your project seems very well planned! If nothing else, you've certainly made reviewing it a challenge. You plainly stated your goal, which seems reasonable yet ambitious. It borrows much from existing scholarship, but lets you apply what you've learned to create an assignment with information that nobody else would really have access to.


I can't think of any other particularly relevant cognate projects, though it is somewhat interesting how genealogical interest manifests in social networking. I am a member of a Facebook group dedicated to the genealogical line of the Derasp family, and while I fully admit that genealogy has never been my greatest interest, I have learned a good deal from some of the posts there. That kind of networking certainly helps reach out to people who may have more information on your genealogical line, even if it's something as simple (but important) as alternate spellings.


Your plan to digitize your family tree, and some primary sources available to you should turn out to be useful experience in the process of digitization. I'm not sure if you already have extensive experience with digitization, but you could view this as a chance to develop that skill further – even if it's not a new skill per se.


I think you could stand to elaborate a bit on one aspect of this project, which seems to be something mentioned early on and then never really expanded upon. You mention that you plan to explore the evolution of the German Transylvanian Saxon culture, and propose using your family history with traditional historical material to accomplish this, but it doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the project. Everything else looks to be about digitizing your family's history and providing compelling ways to look at that history, which sounds like a totally worthwhile endeavour, but not one that fulfills that earlier goal. Are you planning on incorporating this analysis throughout your project, or will this be a distinct part where you reflect on how your family's history fits into this traditional narrative?


It's certainly not a criticism, or something I think needs to be included in this project, but it's worth considering the point I think I brought up in class. It would be interesting to explore how small-scale, personal projects such as this one could be used to build histories from the ground up. Detailed records of smaller towns and villages may be hard to find, but enough information from people who lived in these places might allow us to gain some perspective that was previously inaccessible. Do you intend to make the information you provide on this presentation publicly available, or are you thinking of restricting usage based on privacy concerns? Both courses are certainly justifiably, but it's something to consider if you haven't already.


All-in-all, looks like a solid project! I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.


Cheers,

Trevor

Tuesday 24 February 2015

Online Immersion Project


Goals and Project Context


There are two main goals to this project, one of which can be seen as a practical goal while the other is more idealistic and theoretical.


The practical goal is the easier one to meet, as it is simply to create a hub through which I can share Mandarin Chinese media. The idea behind this is to demonstrate the potential of the internet to aid the field of language education by giving students the opportunity to voluntarily immerse themselves in the language they are learning. This hub, which will likely manifest as a website, will offer direct links to sources of Chinese media and online resources to study grammar and vocabulary while attempting to educate the user in techniques to find new resources on their own.


The second goal is to encourage people who may not be actively learning another language to consider the vast sections of the digital world which aren't built for an English-speaking audience. Mandarin is perhaps one of the most useful languages to illustrate this, given the developmental history of the Chinese internet. Without getting too much into the history behind it, many of the giants of the Western digital world (e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon) are either banned in China, or failed to penetrate Chinese markets. Chinese alternatives to these exist, some of which have become phenomenally successful (e.g. Baidu, Taobao).


This project borrows from the discipline of Language Education, though does so on a relatively shallow level. The value of language immersion in traditional language education has been studied extensively, but these studies have so far looked at formal immersion programs, such as immersion schools. The internet offers a very different sort of immersion, and it is questionable how much existing research applies to the immersion opportunities highlighted by this project. Unlike traditional structured immersion, the internet allows students to seek out material that interests them. There is certainly no guarantee that this will significantly aid a student attempting to learn a new language, but it is worthwhile to explore the digital world as a means to develop language education.


Similar projects do exist, that much is obvious enough. There are many examples of websites that offer content from other cultures. Netflix is a particularly large example, even though this is not the main focus of their website. Other websites, such as live-radio.net or tunein.com let the user browse radio stations from all over the the globe. I am not aware of any resources that deviate from this internationalist approach and focus on presenting a variety of content from one particular language, but it is more than likely that they exist. Duolingo is an excellent example of bringing digital concepts such as crowdsourcing to language education, but does not currently offer training in either Mandarin or Cantonese. Rosetta Stone is another popular example of language education entering the digital world. It builds itself on the idea of immersive language learning, but does little to encourage its users to find content outside of its software.


Data Acquisition


The focus of this project is primarily to re-arrange existing data (content is perhaps a better word in this context) rather than to create new data. The part of this project aimed at teaching users how to explore the internet from another language is somewhat of an attempt to create new content, but the main focus is to demonstrate that there is already a wealth of data available if one can learn to approach it in different ways.

Most of the resources that this project will introduce have been obtained through search engines, while some are simply resources I have been exposed in the course of my own language training. All featured content will be filtered to make sure it has no obvious malware and lives up to some standard of quality. Learning how to use search engines to find the best quality resources will be a large part of the educational aspect of this project.


Content will be sorted into rough estimates of difficulty (beginner, intermediate, advanced), and divided up into loose types of content such as Audio, Video, and Reading Materials. These are broken down further into smaller categories (such as podcasts, radio stations, and music channels under Audio). The idea is to create a compartmentalized set of resources that the user accesses by starting with a general idea of the content they want to experience, and following a short path that also exposes them to similar options should they want to try something else in the future.


One major challenge with this project is inherent in its reliance on digital sources, given their relative unreliability. Many websites appear to offer content, but are riddled with dead links. This is issue seems especially pronounced when seeking out relatively obscure content. As part of the filtering mentioned above, I have had to either dismiss websites entirely due to broken content, or make special note of what works and what does not work.


Copyright issues are a much smaller issue, but still present. One potentially excellent video resource, kankan.com, is almost entirely non-functional outside of Mainland China. It is certainly possible that one could use a VPN to watch kankan from anywhere in the world, but this is an unreasonable step to ask users to take, and alternatives must be sought, such as 56.com.


Tool Application and Skill Development


From here, this proposal will entertain two ideas, and hopes for feedback on which of these sounds like a more worthwhile endeavour. The first is to use website building software to create this project, the second is to build the website from the ground up. Despite my hesitance regarding the second option in my presentation, I've found some resources in the past couple days that make me confident that I can learn to create a website using HTML5 and CSS quickly enough to make this feasible.


If I were to use website building software, I would look primarily at websites such as wix, webs, or weebly. Some other students used these for their own projects, and came up with some solid demonstrations. Those tools in particular show promise firstly because they are free, but also because they are relatively easy to use. You begin with a fairly solid template, and learn to tailor that template to suit the needs of your website. Photoshop (GIMP, actually...) would be an important tool for creating a unique, cohesive aesthetic. Following this path, tools would be mobilized towards polishing and presenting the content, as the actual mechanics of the website would not take long to lay out.


Building the website from the ground up is a far more ambitious task. From my limited experience building simple websites back when Geocities was cool, constructing a website with basically a bunch of links is not terribly difficult. The challenge here is to come up with a sufficiently ambitious site design, and attempt to learn enough HTML5 and CSS to make that design a reality. It is likely, in this case, that the project will be far less polished than were I to start with a website builder. It will be a continuous effort to try to improve my skill with the languages, and occasionally revisit my initial design as I learn new skills, and come to realize that certain functions are too advanced and I must either rethink them, or scrap them entirely. Codeacademy, and lynda.com would be crucial educational tools for this path, while codepen.io would expose me to creative ways other people are using CSS.


Though it is likely that the first path is far less of a time investment, it is important to note that it is likely the one which will better incorporate my skills as a humanities student. The less time I need to spend making the website work, the more effort I can put into focusing on the educational aspects, and the breadth of content.


Of course, there is an amusing parallel that can be drawn with the second path. Given that, at the time of me writing this I couldn't get much further than header and body tags, I would essentially be building a project about immersing oneself in a foreign language while relying on online resources to relearn web design languages.


My concept for the website I would try to build is attached below. You'll have to forgive the crudeness of it. Essentially, the idea is that the website will exist entirely on one 'plane', and the user navigates by clicking on circles to re-center their perspective. The path back will always be visible. The bar on the right side of the perspective is the difficulty slider, which would change the colour of the foreground from green, to blue, to red. I would like to have the education aspect as a button that appears on the currently centered circle, and pressing that button opens up a hovering dialogue box that gives more information on how to find this kind of content.




I'm totally eager to move ahead with either one of these ideas. I would prefer to see how far I can get with the second idea, but I would like to make sure that it is permissible for me to focus on a project that mostly involves improving web development skills.

Also, here's that short film I was talking about. It's fifteen minutes long.

 http://www.56.com/u90/v_ODE0NjAwMDc.html

Tuesday 10 February 2015


Mostly just dumping a couple more links today. Still not entirely sure how I want the final project to manifest, it seems like building a website would probably be the best idea. I had a thought that it could be interesting to explore how a form of digital media we haven't yet explored (video games) incorporate historical research into simulations, but I think it is a bit ambitious to so drastically change my focus this late in the game.

This one has links to a few Chinese language teaching podcasts. Still looking for Chinese podcasts about various topics instead of ones designed to teach Chinese, but that shouldn't be too hard to find with a more concerted effort.

http://www.fluentu.com/chinese/blog/2014/01/18/chinese-podcasts/

This website has a few short stories to read once people have enough grammar and vocabulary training to start tackling them.

http://justlearnchinese.com/mini-novels/

Sunday 1 February 2015

Body Breakdown

For our assignment this week, we were asked to play around with a few tools which can help quantify the written word. I chose to work with the Text-Token Ratio analysis tools, and employed them on a small comparison of some more famous novels between two genres - Fantasy, and Science Fiction. Essentially, this means I am looking at how often the author repeats words. A set of characters between spaces (usually, a word) is recognized as a token, and every time a unique token is recognized, it is recorded as a type. Repeated words count as tokens, but do not create new types, so the ratio of types to tokens gives you some idea of how often words are repeated.

I did not deliberately select these novels to try to make any particular point, they were essentially the first novels that came to mind and were easily obtainable... otherwise, Dune would have made the Sci-Fi list, and I would have worked with A Game of Thrones instead of A Dance with Dragons. Though I can't imagine there being any legal issues to this analysis, it's worth noting that I actually own physical copies of all these books.

After selecting these six, I had predicted that Tolkien and Martin would have the highest TTR, especially working with a limited set of tokens so the length of their books do not work against them. It seems that I could hardly have been more wrong! The two of them are both closer to Card's relatively easy Ender's Game than they are to Snow Crash or Neuromancer. It is difficult to fathom why this might be the case. After all, both genres are more than happy to indulge in making up new words. Perhaps the length of a book affects more than just the TTR consideration for the whole piece - a longer book is often paced quite differently. The author may spend more time detailing any given location when there are 800 pages to go, while an author trying to fit their whole story in under 300 won't spend precious time informing the reader about dust motes floating in a sunbeam.

It is, of course, worth repeating that TTR is in no way an indication of the quality of a book. It can give some idea regarding the reading level of a particular book, but I would certainly not say that Neuromancer is the most difficult book in this list. Really, they're all fantastic and you should read them all.


Novel and Author Types Tokens TTR
Fantasy
C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe 2,129 20,000 10.6%
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring 3040 20,000 15.2%
George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons 3430 20,000 17.2%
Science Fiction
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game 2647 20,000 13.2%
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash 4313 20,000 21.6%
William Gibson's Neuromancer 4401 20,000 22.0%

Wednesday 28 January 2015

http://www.chinesegrammar.info/

Just stumbled upon this site. Pretty nice design, but a very useful resource to look up some common grammatical questions.

Sunday 25 January 2015

As the Sleeper Awakes

Been a bit lax on updating, going to get this moving a bit more with a small dump of beginner's resources for learning Chinese.

Most of the stuff here is pretty basic, though they're at least half-decent and mostly free. I give a short assessment of each site, and have tried to rank them in order of usefulness.

http://www.chineselearner.com/

This website, particularly the grammar section, is a very good free resource to consider before moving on to the others. It is relatively easy to find Chinese content - whether that is new words, new idioms, audio or video - but finding good explanations of grammar is somewhat more difficult, and will help you actually understand how these words and phrases fit together.

http://www.melnyks.com/

Melnyks has options to pay and make things a bit easier on yourself, but ultimately these lessons are free. There are audio lessons in kind of a podcast format, and supplementary written materials to go along with it. In terms of site design, it is probably the best of the bunch.

http://english.cntv.cn/learnchinese/

Primarily audio and video lessons, but quite extensive and gives more immersion in Chinese language. The site itself could use some work, it really likes opening new tabs and doesn't always have a very intuitive layout. It appears to be having issues with many of the audio files at the moment, likely due to domain issues with the hosting website. Given that this part of the website looks like it hasn't been updated since 2012, it is likely that they won't be returning and these resources will remain inaccessible.

That said, all of the video lessons are still available. The series 'Growing up with Chinese' has the production value one might expect, but is still a pretty useful and entertaining way to learn conversational Chinese.

http://www.learnchineseez.com/

An important note about this site is that it is best to switch the lessons to Pinyin, using the link near the top of the page. By default they use what they call EZ Pinyin, which is a dumbed down version that will only confuse you once you learn real Pinyin - which is something designed for foreigners to learn Chinese in the first place.

The overall aesthetic is pretty basic, but it's certainly not a terrible resource. They have some media links, and a great section on idioms/proverbs.


Lastly, here is a pretty amusing blunder.

http://learningchineseonline.net/ - looks nicer than most, though clicking Chinese Programs gets you sent to a dead link!

Sunday 11 January 2015

One

“How do I see digital tools and approaches affecting my current and future practice as a humanities student and scholar?”

This is somewhat of a difficult question, as I have so very little experience with the practices of humanities scholars before the digital age. For today's students in developed (and even most developing) countries, computers are essential to our research and I would guess that most students would be hard pressed to get much research done should they find these tools inaccessible.

Our research starts with a cursory search in Google or Primo, and we've sat through guest lectures on how to expand or narrow our search results to find a suitable breadth of scholarship. We've all been taught to take the unsourced John Q. Geocities "10 Things You Didn't Know about the French Revolution!" page with a grain of salt, yet to make good use out of resources available on university or government websites - such as census information. 

From there, we either access entirely digital journal articles and books, or we use the library's digital tracking system to check the current availability and location of "real" books in meatspace. If the above fails, we have the tools to request digital or physical volumes through Trellis, most of which can be done without ever speaking to another person. We don't even need to guess the arrival date, as we'll get an e-mail telling us when our requests have been fulfilled.

School and classroom administration are increasingly digital as well, as transcripts are only a login and a few menu clicks away, as are past grades, financial information, and the ability to add or drop courses as one desires. I've honestly no idea how students registered for courses before the internet, but I know well that rituals have already grown around the system in place now, where students hover over their keyboards like hungry scavengers, waiting for the exact moment course selection opens up for their window so that they might claim a spot in a popular or needed course. 


As far as the future is concerned, I have little doubt that we will see the digital aspect of academia expand greatly. Perhaps the most significant aspect is the trend towards entirely online courses, something which challenges many of the fundamental characteristics of academia in ways that could be seen as liberating, cheapening, somewhere between the two, or something else entirely.

My greatest hope, and goal, is to use digital tools and approaches to bring academia to a wider audience. I think tools such as blogs or podcasts are increasingly employed by more and more professionals (as well as amateurs) who want to share something without the constraints of academia. It's certainly worth considering that this accessibility comes with costs – not the least of which the lack of peer-review that needs to happen to upload a new podcast, or for a new blog post to publish.

I am not too sure what solutions could exist for something like that, though I suspect it wouldn't be as much an issue as it first seems. Unsourced news reports are far from unique to the internet, and people like Alex Jones will always find an audience of people who couldn't be bothered to seek out a second opinion. This may be a bit optimistic, but simply having these discussions in open digital spaces for anyone with interest to discover just might help to condition new generations born into the digital world to recognize that there are many difference voices speaking on a given issue, and that we can look at the evidence they give to measure their validity.

That, or the work of future professors becomes building powerpoints and answering angry e-mails.

A Sense of Purpose

For my first post I will offer up one possible theme to unite this blog, possibly carrying it forward through the semester. In a nutshell, my idea is to create a website that showcased the resources available should one want to learn a new language online. It would search out and organize various types of media that would either help one learn a new language, or to immerse themselves within one.

Given my experience over the past couple years learning Mandarin, I will focus on that particular language instead of flooding the blog with as many non-English sources that I can find. I will attempt to find audio, video, and text sources of all varieties to show the effect the digital world is having on opportunities to develop language skills.

Time and interest willing, I may begin a side project to translate Journey to the West (西遊記 ) and update the blog on a semi-regular basis with my progress on that project.