Before We Teach, We Tinker

1. Before We Teach, We Tinker Constance Crompton March 22, 2013 http://bit.ly/udel_dh

2. Today • Introductions • Tinker-Centric Pedagogy • Why Visualize? • Voyant: Exploratory and Argumentative Visualization • Google Fusion Tables: Cultural Mapping Lunch • Assignment Design Break • Assignment Presentations and Discussion

3. Introductions • What are you teaching? • Which digital tools do you most often in your research (Word? Project Muse? Google Search? RefWorks?) • Which digital tools do you use (or are you thinking of using) in the classroom?

4. Tinker-Centric Pedagogy • Learning to use a new tool can be very frustrating, but it’s a great way to build troubleshooting skills • New tools put us in a situation that is similar to that of our students • Troubleshooting involves building on what you do understand and following multiple avenues for help • We can model troubleshooting for our students • Tell them how we have turned to the library advanced search, our colleagues, listerservs, guidelines, manuals, and Google for help with our research difficulties

5. Tinker-Centric Pedagogy • Students may be reluctant to try something new, because if they aren’t successful right away, they may worry about their grade. • It helps to test students on more than the appearance of a digital project • Their ability to articulate a research plan or thesis statement is more important to than their ability to produce a beautiful HTML page. • It helps to have students take low-stakes notes on their process, so that they can see improvement over time. Each time they sit down to encode, plot, upload they can answer the following questions: • What did you set out to do? • How did your result differ from your original vision? • How did you problem solve? • What frustrated you? What was your greatest success? • If you were to restart your experiment, what would you do differently?

6. Tinker-Centric Pedagogy • Tinkering is not about mastery and control, but about experiment and inquiry • We can help our students turn anxiety into the pleasure of tinkering, or productive play, but first we have to get comfortable with tinkering ourselves.

7. Why Visualize? There are two types of visualization • Argumentative Visualization (to prove a hypothesis or suggest meaning) • Exploratory Visualization (to look for patterns or generate research questions) Today we are using visualization to explore a small corpus of texts

8. Why Visualize? • What do you do with 4339 books? Visualize patters within and across them • Matt Jockers and Elijah Meeks • Chose a dataset or corpus (4339 novels written between 1760 and 1910) • Cleaned their data • Gave the data structure (categorized each novel by author sex, snipped each text into 10 parts. Each chunk is small enough to give specific insight about themes and large enough to actually contain themes (which, say, analysis run at the sentence level would not)) • Ran analysis (checked for similarity in style and theme between texts using a topic modeling algorithm) • Visualized that similarity

9. Why Visualize? • Matt Jockers and Elijah Meeks, 19thC novels. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eiLrjNpwRk

10. All the Steps • Open a browserand head to http://voyant-tools.org/ • Clean your data: remove trailing information from Project Gutenberg • Upload The Invisible Manor one of your own texts into Voyant • Tinker: Have a look at the panes • Clean your data: remove stop words (in options) • Explore: Click on any word to see how it operates in text • Visualize or publish: Export your visualization If you get stuck visit Voyant’s Help pages http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/users

11. Voyant • Open a browserand head to http://voyant-tools.org/ • Clean your data: remove trailing information from Project Gutenberg • Upload The Invisible Manor one of your own texts into Voyant • Tinker: Have a look at the panes If you get stuck visit Voyant’s Help pages http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/users

12. Voyant • Clean your data: remove stop words (in options) • Explore: Click on any word in the word cloud to see how it operates in text • Visualize or publish: Export your visualization If you get stuck visit Voyant’s Help pages http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/users

13. Voyant Experience Bonuses • Connect: If you like Voyant, subscribe to their email list by contacting Professor Stéfan Sinclair at sgsinclair@voyeurtools.org or stefan.sinclair@mcgill.ca • Explore: Download Gephi, take some tutorials, and try it out <https://gephi.org/users/>

14. Mapping • Open a browserand open each of the following pages in a new tab (to open a new browser tab hit Command + T or Control + T) • http://bit.ly/80daysmap and click on the “Map of City” tab • bit.ly/GoogleDrive and log in

15. Mapping • Choose a meaningful data set (a book, or all the works by an author, or all the diagnostic dictations by new language learners). • Clean your data (transcribe, look for formatting errors, or look for extraneous information) • Tinkerand refine • Publish or export

16. Mapping • Open the verne_80_days.xslx spreadsheet. • Examine the data • What is in the first row? • What type of file are the links the “Image” row pointing to? • What do you think is the significance of the “Text” and “Chapter” rows? • What are the links the “Chapter_link” row pointing to? What is the # in the last segment for?

17. Mapping • In Google Drive select Create> Fusion Table (experimental). • Select “From this computer,” hit browse and select the verne_80_days.xslx file. • Hit “Next.” Check that the “Column names are in row” is correct. Check that all the data in your spreadsheet was imported. • Hit “Next” • Click on the “Map of City” tab – and let Google load the place names.

18. Mapping • Ta-da! • Now have a look at the open spread sheet on your computer and • have a look at the pop-ups on your map. • Do you see the correlation between the data on the spreadsheet and the content of the spreadsheet?

19. Mapping • So the pop-up window content isn’t very attractive. Let’s remove some redundant content • Click on Tools> Change window info layout…> Automatic. Uncheck the box beside modern_name. • Think back to the pop-up window and have a look at the line you just unselected: <b>Modern_name:</b>{Modern_name}<br> • What is the code you just unselected doing? Try turning it on and off a few times.

20. Mapping • So now we can turn lines of code on and off, but we’d rather control the layout and add our own text. • Open Tools> Change window info layout…> Custom • Code! You will recognize each line from the “Automatic” tab • Let’s take a moment and unpack what we are seeing here.

21. Mapping Encoding uses tags to add more structure <b> City: </b> opening tag closing tag Element • Bonus: What does it look as though the {} are doing?

22. Mapping • With a partner : • Go element hunting • What about those floating <br/>s? Find out what they do by removing a whole <br/> = <br></br> tag from your code, saving, and having a look at your popup window. • Find out what the <b> tags stand for by removing an opening b tag and a its closing b tag from your code, saving, and having a look at your popup window.

23. Mapping • Try adding some text to your popup windows • Try rearranging the order of the elements and calls to your spreadsheet (which are the column names in {} brackets). • Try to puzzle out what is happening in the element marked by <a> tags. • Try to reproduce or improve on the popup windows at http://bit.ly/80daysmap • Publish (hint: it’s in one of the dropdown menus)

24. Mapping • Experience Bonus: Google Fusion Tables are actually meant to help you mash up data. Take the tour at http://support.google.com/fusiontables/answer/184641/ • Experience Bonus: Fusion Tables aren’t solely for mapmaking. Students can useFusion Tables can use them to create a visualization, chart, or table. • Experience Bonus:If you are excited about mapping, download Google Earth onto your own machine, take some tutorials, a make some really dynamic maps.

25. Lunch12:45-1:30

26. Assignment Design • Learning outcomes: What would you like your students to be able to do or know? • The learning outcomes will shape how you structure the assignment and how you measure success. • For example, if your class is building a wiki, do you want students to be • Competent wikiencoders? Have them present their code, or page. • Savvy Wikipedia readers? Have them analyze the use and quality of the sources for any given page. • Fearless troubleshooters? Have them share their problem solving process. • Content experts? Have them share their research process.

27. Assignment Design • Head over to http://bit.ly/udel_DH • There we will have a look a sample assignment, and then we’ll be break into groups and design some assignments

28. Break3:00-3:15

29. Assignment Presentations • Take 10 minutes to present your tinkering experience (feel free to draw on the guiding questions from the 5th slide) and the assignment you designed as a group. • Let’s discuss – what will work best in our classrooms?