Elias Tzoc blog!

This summer, we had a soft launch for the companion website or digital archive for the book Sex for Sale: Six Progressive-Era Brothel Dramas by Katie N. Johnson.  We believe creating companion sites like this one for print publications can truly benefit readers as they get richer/updated/dynamic content, and authors also benefit as they have more options for extending the reach of their research.  I was in charge for some of the technical side of the project e.g. putting in place an organization structure for the site’s content, modifying the WordPress software to produce a clean and user-friendly interface, installing custom plugins and themes, etc.

Also, in early July I attended the 2015 ARIS Summit in Madison, WI and this time I decided (or had) to record my talk, the good news is that Ann Elizabeth helped with the content … the bad news is that I was –again- reminded that video editing can also be super time-consuming.  Anyway, I think I had a good time at the Summit and now I just cannot wait for some of the upcoming features in ARIS e.g. group and world behavior (sounds like the glue/magic for collaborative playing), ARISjs (maybe the workaround for embedding minigames), and ARIS for Android … so just in case someone is interested in our captioned video talk, check this out:

Finally, both of these faculty-driven projects are unique for CDS and they exemplify the potential and benefits of digital publishing, digital humanities, and collaborative work among scholars, students and librarians.

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I believe the words in the title of this post are good terms/tags to describe what my summer was “all” about -at least when I was on campus

In the world of websites, I spent a couple of weeks finalizing our new responsive Scholarly Commons site, which is one of the latest contributions by @mire.  On top of the required CSS edits for the look-and-feel, two tweak examples included: adding a submit option in the drop-down menu for logged in users and re-embedding a video player from Kaltura.  As a new member of the library’s web team, I also welcomed the opportunity to start doing some work in Drupal, my main contribution was with a new content type for items (hardware) that we check out.  And in July, I devoted most of my time to the WordPress’ MEM project, it was a bit confusing but we believe we now have the “taxonomy” requirement under control.  The “aha moment” was I learned that new URLs for browsing taxonomies require a re-save of the “permalinks” even if you don’t change anything on the permalinks settings … wish I knew this before

In July, we also learned that our 5K Tech Fee proposal for a Miami Video Captioning PILOT project was awarded and soon we’ll hire 2-3 students to help us transcribe some videos.  The ultimate goal is to evaluate a model that can allow us create more accessible videos and make them available in existing systems (e.g. Kaltura and Niihka) in an affordable and efficient way.  One of our student assistants has been a big help over the summer and we look forward to getting started with this.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt to know that now there is an institutional agreement with 3PlayMedia -we definitely plan to use their service for the text and video sync process.  Our current example is available at http://vimeo.com/99351098

Last but not least, the NEH grant project -AKA as the An Interactive Quest for Social Justice- has also taken a good chunk of time.  It’s been a great experience and we’re lucky to have a group of students who have been extraordinarily helpful in producing a design document … and in implementing/testing the game in ARIS.  It’s also good to have the ARIS experts in the consulting team, the two hangouts we’ve had with them have been productive and we look forward into getting some extra help in early September.  Perhaps my only complain is with time and Google, why couldn’t we/they wait for the new ARIS 2.0 editor? Why did Google have to discontinue their Maps Flash API exactly now? Oh well, I guess that’s part of the excitement in late 2014.

Finally, this week also seemed as a good start for my new IMS 201 class, and apparently teaching at 9am can actually help me have more productive days … just hope it continues like that … hasta pronto!

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As we officially end the second (cold) month of 2014, below is a list of some interesting project updates:

A couple of weeks ago, we finally launched the Digital Literacy Partnership website.  This project -led by Valerie Ubbes- promotes the contributions of literacy, health, and technology on learning; it runs on three Omeka and interdisciplinary databases and content include print and electronic materials for children, youth, and adults.  For me, it’s been an opportunity to install/customize some Omeka plugins using PHP and jQuery.

The simple search function is one piece that still requires some extra work, I see this as a summer project and who knows -the solution could even become a candidate for a new Omeka plugin.

For a Middle East Media project, we have switched from Omeka to WordPress -YES, learning and investigating what works and what does not work is also part of the consulting process of our work.  Anyway, it seems like the Really Simple Guest Post Plugin is what we need for the student submissions, and for the professors review, the Post Meta Plugin will be enough.  Of course, we still need to hack the PHP code to make it work for the MEM project, but we’re definitely better off using WordPress.

Other project updates include: this month (after 2 years) we officially joined the Flickr Commons, according to some of my colleagues, the number of visits has just dramatically increased; For the CAWC Lecture Series, we’re now working on the second batch of videos, we anticipate an official launch later this semester; for my paper on IR platforms, I’ve been learning quite a lot and cannot wait to see the final outcome of this study; and speaking of papers, this month I’m again reviewing an article for RIB.

Last, as part of the promotion and tenure approval process … in early February I was invited to represent the libraries and attend the Miami’s Board of Trustees meeting where they officially approved everyone being promoted or tenured.  And just last week, I got a copy of entire promotion package … mmmm, it was a lot of work and I do need to send a thank you note to a bunch of people, especially my reviewers!  Perhaps the only bad news this month is that -for my GC app- I still need to wait a few (~7) more months before I can truly celebrate this promotion.

That’s it for now … time to get ready for another cold weekend and March should be a warmer month

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