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Innovative Student Projects Highlighted in Lightning Round Presentation

Innovative Student Projects Highlighted in Lightning Round Presentation

Join us for a lightning round presentation of innovative digital projects by Loyola students on Thursday, January 25th at 4 pm in the CTSDH. We will showcase engaging work from a range of disciplines to inspire their fellow students and the larger CTSDH community with the possibilities (and the challenges) of working digitally. Each participant will present for 5 minutes followed by 5 minutes of questions. Speakers include:

  • Taylor Brown (Digital Humanities), Mapping Inhumanity

  • Cat Litten (Computer Science), CincoGatos

  • Rebecca Parker (Digital Humanities), Finally in Chicago: Next Steps to Restoring Nell Nelson

  • Karen Sieber (History), The Well Read President: Examining the Reading Habits of Theodore Roosevelt

  • Liz Sink (Computer Science), PocketVote

Full descriptions of each talk can be found below.

Pizza will be served. Open to all. Please email Kyle Roberts (kroberts2@luc.edu) with any questions.

Cat Litten

CincoGatos is a language learning website built using Javascript and EJS templating for the client side (with extensive use of HTML5 Canvas for the UI) and Express and Firebase for the server side. All data about the user and their flashcards are handled using JSON objects. The app is flashcard based and aimed at complete beginners; upon registration the user selects if they would like to learn Spanish, Polish, Arabic or Japanese. Currently the application only supports learners who are coming from an English language background. Users are presented with premade flashcard sets covering alphabets for applicable languages as well as common topics such as food and colors. Users are also able to create their own flashcards from a small text document which is parsed client side and translated by the Glosbe API. While flashcard presentation is random, cards the user has a history of failure with will be more commonly selected. Users see a tracker for how many successes they need on a card and a set to have "completed" the card or set.

Rebecca Parker

Finally in Chicago: Next Steps to Restoring Nell Nelson: Helen Cusack's muckraking that exposed the unsanitary working conditions and cruel mistreatment of the women in Chicago's manufacturing industries was published under the pseudonym Nell Nelson in her series "City Slave Girls" printed by The Chicago Times in 1888. Cusack's witty exposé created an immediate social agitation. Yet, Nelson's series is frequently excluded from the discussion of Chicago industrialization and investigative reporting; superseded by Upton Sinclair and Nellie Bly. The Restoration of Nell Nelson project (http://nelson.newtfire.org) aims to change this through the digitization and computational analysis of Cusack's series. With project development now centered in the Chicago area, new paths of investigation are revealed as project expectations shift and strengthen.

Karen Sieber

The Well Read President is a timeline and virtual bookshelf of what Theodore Roosevelt read during his first term as President of the United States, between the years 1901-1904.  Built using mentions of his reading habits from thousands of documents in the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, the timeline illuminates how books not only affected Roosevelt’s diplomacy, but his relationships with his family and friends as well. Each book on the timeline connects to a digital copy of the edition Roosevelt read in Archive.org, as well as the original letter in which he wrote about the book from the TRDL.

Liz Sink

PocketVote: A voting website that can be used for quick polls using multiple voting methods. The website is serving two purposes. One, a practical purpose, giving options most polling sites don’t have – the option of multiple voting methods. Two, a social purpose, educating the public about these different alternatives. Given today’s polarity in our democracy, it’s important to have an informed populace. Using a site such as this for mundane polls (where should the office order lunch from this Friday) gives people a lesson in these methods without having political conversations. Some alternative voting methodologies have been proven to decrease the polarity of candidates. On the website the organizer of a poll can choose plurality, approval or ranked choice as the voting method. A URL is generated to give to participants for voting. The results are displayed for the organizer. There is also a demo ballot page that will show how each voting method works, as well as some background info on each method. Open source and collaborative project can be found at https://github.com/SizeableThink/pocketvote