...I Finished my Final Project

So, after three weeks of work my project is done! Here is the URL for it if anyone wants to take a look!

https://sites.google.com/site/harrypotterlocations/

...I gave an update on my Final Project

This past week I have not made a whole lot of progress. In the lab I presented my project and then worked on finding a good timeline creator site that I could use for my project. During the lab I thought that I might not have enough time to learn and use google earth. It is frustrating because I would like to learn it and hopefully I will have time to do so. If not, I will use google maps because I am already familiar with it.

This weeks difficulties I faced were during the lab. It is more difficult that I thought it would be to find a website that has a timeline template that I can use. For a lot of the sites you need to create an account or pay money to use. The free ones are generally not so good. I have fortunatly found one.

Since Tuesdays lab I have not made much progess seeing as the last week of school prooved to be very time consuming with final papers being due. The next week I will have much more time to work on the project. When I am not studying for other exams I will be able to do more research and find more locations. I hope to start writing my final paper as well as do more research on google earth to see if I can use it.  

...I made a proposal for the final project

For the final project, I think it would really interesting to document everything to do with location in the Harry Potter books. There would be many basic spots such as where Hogwarts is as well and the Ministry of Magic, but there would also be where the quidditch teams are located, where other schools are located, as well as following Harry, Ron, and Hermione through the seventh book as they travel around trying to defeat Voldemort.

We could use something as simple as Google maps or something a bit more complex. On the map we could have descriptions as well as clips from the movies (or just clips we've created ourselves) or pictures that go with specific locations. For example, to show where the ministry of magic is there could be a placement on the map of England in London where exactly it is and in the bubble that pops up when you click on that location a clip of the movie when Ron's dad and Harry enter the Ministry by going down the telephone booth.

There are many possibilities to incorporate video, pictures, and information in this project. I think it would be a very interesting one to do, and anyone who enjoyed reading the books would probably love to work on this. It would require some research to find out where exactly some locations are but in the end it would turn out to be a very fun and cool project that others might actually spend some time looking at if they stumbled upon it on the Internet. So not only would we be appealing to what we've been learning in the course but we are also reaching out to people outside of the course by using a topic that is very popular and well known.

...We Made a Map and Mapped History

The historical event that my partner Adam and I chose was the invention of human flight. I found this particularly interesting because my uncle is a pilot and my cousin is also training to become one. I have flown a lot, as have a lot of other people, and it is very interesting to know how it all started. On the map, Adam and I used pictures as well as information to make it easier for people to understand as well as see the people, objects, and places that were involved with the marvelous creation of the airplane. Using pictures helps to attract more people to read the information provided because that way they can not only read the information, but also look at some of the stuff that the information is talking about. For example, the information for the first flight in Canada is accompanied by a picture of the first glider and the man who made it all happen. The readers eye gets attracted to the picture then to the information. All of the information and pictures found on this event are from Wikipedia. There was a lot to be said about the Wright brothers and their struggles and triumphs while making the first glider and Wikipedia nicely included many pictures to go along with that information.

I would have liked to include a couple of things on the map. It would have been cool to see where the first flight was too and from over waters. It would have been neat to record that and it also would have brought a broader area into the map that we used. We did not include this because we could not find the information. Creating this map would help people understand the history because they would be able to like everything together. Not only do they get the information about the first flight but they also get the background information about the Wright brothers. Also, it shows how this invention started to spread across countries from American to countries like Canada. 

The History pin website was interesting but not very specific. There did not seem to be much information on it seeing as it is saying it has "pinned" things from 1840-2000. There were only 23,778 photo's on it and I'm sure that in America there are many many more historical events that could have been noted. My topic (the invention on flight) wasn't even pinned on there. It noted that there was a Wright Brother Memorial Park but there was no pin for that. The Communitywalk site seemed plain and boring to me. I think it was too simple in the fact that all you do is map out where something and where another thing is and then it draws a line for you. The Flickrmap was the most interesting in my opinion. It can be very personal which is what I like about it compared to the others which seem more standard. 

For the Historypin website I would use this to create a collage of historical events. It has quite a few amazing pictures, and although it does not document everything about American History it can still provide good information through pictures and location. People who would use this would generally be people in school looking for pictures on certain events. It is sometimes hard to find old pictures, but this site seems to have a copious amount of them. 

For the Communitywalk website I would use this to map out directions for where I'm going if it's far away. Also, if I were to use it for a project, like social studies back in the day, I could map out adventures that people like James Cook did and use that on a presentation. People who could use this are people who have a bad sense of direction (using it for getting from one place to another) or like I said, a kid in social studies wanting to map out some of the adventures of famous explorers. 

For the Flickrmap website I would use this to document where I am travelling if I were on a trip. Since you use your own photos It would be a neat way to show your family and friends where you're going and all the amazing sites you're seeing. It would also be more personal because you can have yourself in the pictures! People who would possibly use this site are world travellers or photographers. It is a great way to share what you're doing with everyone.

Here is the google map that Adam and I created on the invention of human flight.

http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&tab=wl

...There was a Text Analysis and Data Visualization assignment that had to be done!

For my text analysis assignment I decided to research the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I chose this book because although I have never read it I have always enjoyed the Disney movie. By using text analysis and tools such as wordle and voyeurtools I can see the similarities and differences between the book and the classic movie.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a classic book that tells the story about a young girl who finds herself in a magical world that makes no sense! Alice finds herself getting confused constantly throughout the story and get quite upset and emotional when she thinks she will never find her way home. With the help of some very odd characters and after a series of trials and errors she continues to find herself lost in Wonderland. Although the reader would like to think that Alice could find her way out of Wonderland this is not what ends up happening. Once Alice finds herself in the most trouble in this fantasy land she gets woken up out of her dream! Yes, the whole story was a dream. Knowing this, the reader can either feel comfort that Alice is out of Wonderland, or discomfort for the question of what would've happened if she had stayed asleep?

The first type of analysis I did was the textual analysis. I distracted the metadata from the project Gutenberg site for this information.

Title: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Author: Lewis Carroll
Publisher:
       Original - Macmillan
       Online - Project Gutenberg
Date of Creation:
       Original - 26 November, 1865
       Online - 25 June, 2008
Web Link: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm
Language: English
Format: HTML
Media Type: Text File
Subject: Fiction, Fantasy
Category: Literature
Copyright Status: Public Domain

For the second part of the assignment I used wordle and voyeurtools to compare the script from the Disney movie to the book that Lewis Carroll wrote to see the similarities and differences between the two.

First is the wordle from the book by Lewis Carroll. I used the book that I found off project Gutenberg and put it right into the wordle creation spot. I did not take out any words so these are all of the words in the book with the highest frequencies being the largest and the smaller frequency words being the smaller ones. The highest frequency word used is the word "the" being used in the book 1522 times. The name "Alice" came up quite a few times (386 times to be exact) because most of the characters throughout the story say her name multiple times possibly because throughout the book, the characters tend to constantly say Alice's name to get her attention as well as confuse and annoy her. The highest content word is the word "little" which is used 125 times. I am not entirely sure why the word "little" is used so often, but it is possibly the fact that at one point in the movie and book Alice gets shrunk to the size of small flowers and stays that size for at least half of the book and movie.There are 2,674 unique words (words used only once) and 26,541 words used over all.
Some changes I made to the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland book wordle:
Colour: from "firenze" to "Blue meets Orange"
Layout: from "Mostly Verticle" to "Half and Half"
Font: Goudy Bookletter 1911

The changes I made to the wordle were made because I thought the original colour used (firenze) was too subtle. I changed it to blue meets orange because those are colours that don't usually go together. In the movie and book a lot of the characters are described as out of the ordinary and unusual; therefore, the colour that I picked fits with how the characters and most of the book is described, odd and mismatched, yet fitting well together. 

Nest is the script from the the movie "Alice in Wonderland" directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske. There are quite a few differences between the script for the movie and the actual book. As you can see from the wordles, the only similarity is that the name "Alice" is used the most.

The highest content words are mostly character names. The word "mad" was used 70 times, being the highest content word with close seconds being  "hatter" (used 65 times) "rabbit" (used 61 times) and "queen" (used 60 times). These names are all characters that are constantly mentioned throughout the movie and book; the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, and the Red Queen. My guess for this massive change in words is that because this script is meant for children. It is a Disney movie, and kids don't need the all the descriptions of every detail like an adult would like to see. Because of this difference, the more descriptive words that are used in the book such as "little" are taken out of the script to make it more straight forward and less complicated for the younger viewers of this movie. Another reason why these wordles are so different is because in the book there are significantly more words used than there are in the movie. There are 2,674 unique words in the book and only 1,296 unique words in the movie. This would have a major effect on the wordles because one would be more crowded than the other.

Some changes I made to the "Alice in Wonderland" (script) worlde:

Colour: from "Blue meets Orange" to "Indian Earthy"

Layout: from "Half and Half" to "Mostly Horizontal"

Font: "Teen"

I changed the colour because I used "blue meets orange" for the book's wordle. Also, the "indian earthy" reminds me of quite a few of the colours that I saw in the movie. The movie was quite dark because it is set mostly in a forest, and the purple colour reminds me of the Cheshire cat that is seen throughout the movie.

...We Worked in a Group

I was in the group called team Helo. We chose "Many Eyes" because that was our only option. We decided to show the class the data tree because it was the most straight forward one to demonstrating this complicated site.
The tools that our group used were in the data tree. We looked up Denmark which gave us a massive tree to look at. From there we could click on different words to narrow down the search. I personally found that this website was a bit much for any information that I would be looking for. It is a little too specific and therefore makes it confusing for me to navigate around to the topic I would be looking for. Because the information you get is so specific it is very difficult to find exactly what you are looking for. There is so much information that the data tree is almost too cluttered.
I think all of the different kinda of analysis on this site are very useful. They all make it very clear at which word or number is the biggest, or most used. I think the least helpful was the bubble graph because although it was clear which bubble is the biggest, it is difficult to tell where the mid sized bubbles fit in. The most useful graph I would say would be the data tree because it makes it very clear where the words belong. It shows you what the most used word is as well as gives you ample amounts of data to use.

For the text analysis and data visualisation exercise I plan on looking at the book Alice in Wonderland. I find the movie and book very odd yet interesting. I think a scattered wordle will look great with the words from Alice in Wonderland. I am also planning on using wordle to get most of the information about the word frequency, but I also have decided to use voyertools because I used that recently for an essay and it was very helpful. I feel like I can work that site in to help with word count as well as find some of the more interesting words.

...Word Clusters Were Being Created

Screen Shot #1:
What's the point of a college education?
When I read the article I believed it told students that college is meant to set you up and prepare you for sittuations in the job world. It does not necessarily prepare you for a certain job because things frequently change within jobs. When I looked at the wordle, I noticed that life, jobs, and education came up a few times. This tells me that the article is saying if you have a good education that sets you up for a good job you will be set for life. This is the deceiveing part becaus that is not what the article is necesarily about. The text in the worlde is very motivational because it uses words such as "life, philosiphy, think, different, and mind".
I was correct with my guess in which word would show up the most. I guess it would be "education" and that word showed up 11 times.

highest frequency word: "a" showed up 38 times
highest content word: "education" showed up 11 times
Things I changed:

• layout: from "any which way" to "half and half:
• colour: from "indian earthy" to "blue meets oragne"

Screen Shot #2:
Blog from last week

I know that this blog is about the article on "What's the point of college education" because I wrote the blog last week. I think the word that will show up most often is the word "paragraph" because I used that a lot of times at the beggining of my blog to describe what was going on in the article. When I put  my blog into wordle I was right, "paragraph" (used 11 times) was the word most often used so I took it out and the next most used word was the word "article". This was used 6 times throughout the blog. From this article I can only really connect that the blog is about an article. I would also guess that the author of the article has a last name of Stemedel because that name is also quite large. I do try and use as many different words when I write as possible which is why I believe there are quite a few words that are mid-sized. I did not change anything in this wordle to do with the layout because I thought it all looked good.

highest frequency word: "the" showed up 44 times
highest content word: "paragraph" showed up 9 times

Screen Shot #3:
George Orwell's 1984

This was a very long article which I did not read all of. From the wordle I can tell that there is a man named Winston and he is possibly at a party looking at a woman. I get this because the words "eyes, moment, one" come up often making me think of a man looking for a women, observing her beauty and thinking of this time as the one moment where they will be able to talk.

highest frequency word: "the" showed up 5805 times
highest content words: "Winston" showed up 455 times and "party" showed up 270 times.
Things I changed:

• colour: from "indian earthy" to "moss"
• font: from "owned" to "loved by the king"

Screen Shot #4:
Steve Jobs' 2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford
Seeing as this is a commencement speech I figured that it would focus mainly on life after college, jobs, and future families. After putting the speech into wordle it seems that I was mostly correct. The word "life" was used the most in this speech probably because most good commencement speeches talk about life and what will happen after people graduate. "college" is another big word i'm guessing because Steve talked about his time in college as well as other people's time at the school.

highest frequency word: "the" showed up 96 times
highest content word: "life" showed up 15 times
Things I changed:

• font: from "milk paints" to "yramirP"

Screen Shot #5:
Representative Poetry
Since this poem is so short pretty much all of the words are on the wordle. The word "thou" was used a lot which made me believe that this was a love poem to a lost lover. When the writer writes "thou" it means they are talking about someone not directly too them. When they say "thee" it means they are usually talking directly to them. I removed the words "thou" and "well" and I was left with "lov'st" as the word most used. "lov'st" I believe means "loved" which brings me to prove the point of the lost lover.

highest frequency words: "well", "what", and "thou" showed up 5 times each
highest content word: "lov'st" showed up 3 times
Things I changed:

• layout: from "mostly verticle" to "half and half"
• colour: from "kindled" to "heat"
• font: from "laegue gothic" to "steelfish"

Screen Shot #6:
Social media from Facebook
This is a message that was sent between a group of members on the rowing team about a meeting that we held on Wednesday at 1:30. Just by looking at the wordle it is easy to assume that this is what the message thread was about.

Screen Shot #7:
An essay I wrote
This is an essay I wrote on "The Book of the Dutchess". It is all about a dreamer and reconnecting himself to life through his dream. I took out the word "Dreamer" because it was dominating the screen. It changed the layout quite a bit. Now the screen emphasizes the word "life" which is a key part in the story of "The Book of the Dutchess".

Screen Shot #8:
Text of My Choice
I studied this in my second year. It is Milton's "Paradice Lost". I thought it was a very interresting peice and I thought it would be cool to find out what the most used words are. I was not suprised to see that the word "hell" came up a lot because Milton in this text talked about heven and hell constantly and the struggle that sinners go though once they move on past life.
Things I changed:

colour: from "moss" to "firenze"
text: from "goudy bookletter 1911" to "lucida sans"

...I was learning about Texts, Objects, Annotations, and Metadata

I found the article on "What's the Point of a College Education" very intriging because of the fact that I am currently in university and because I agree with a lot that this article is saying.
Part 1:

Point form list of annotations I added:

• 2nd paragraph: I thought of myself already disagreeing
• 4th praragraph: my thinking had changed by this point. I at this point agreed with what Janet D. Stemwedel, the author, was saying
• 5th paragraph: "Because everyone's doing it". I thought this was a very strong question to ask. This is very true in the world. People do things because everyone else is doing it. Also, most high end jobs require you to have a university/college degree to be considered for the job even if the degree you got doesnt neccesarily have much to do with the job
• 6th paragraph: I never thought about how much the world changed, and how someone who got a degree in computer science in the 50's would've learnt a lot of different things from someone who just graduated in computer science. 
• 7th paragraph: I did not understand what a start-up was. I later found out that people can join a start-ups company where they will learn how to build softwear
• 8th paragraph: I disagree with this statement because I believe that anyone with a comput science degree will have little trouble finding a job. The demand in the computing world is so high because new updates and programs are made every day. 
• 13th paragraph: I did not know the back story on King Theodoric and I liked how Stemwedel opened up the topic and told people to go look it up if they're interrested.
• 20th paragraph: I took this paragraph in meaning that it all depends on how the individual uses their mind. 
• 21st paragraph: A college/university education gives individuals facts. It fills your brain up with facts that they can use in the future to help them in certain sittuations. For example, job interviews or even a friendly argument between friends. 

This article put me throught a thought process of agreeing and disagreeing. In the end it turns out that Stemwedel has pulled me onto her side by presenting a very reasonable argument about college and university. By creating the sence of everyone being indivuduals by using their mind it made me think about what my university experience is about. I think that university is a place for teacher to present students with a topic and for them to see where the student takes it. The more outgoing (but on topic) the student can be the more they've used their mind to think like an individual. University/college shouldn't be a place where everyone has the same opinion because having different opinions means we are thinking for ourselves and therefore will be more indapendent and successful in the world outside of school. I believe Stemwedel was trying to get this point across in her article when she said, "...a really good college education prepares you for life" (Semwedel, par. 23). This proves that the student isn't just working for the present, but they are working for the future.


Terms:

Start-ups - learning how to build softwear up to a level where a person will have enough knowledge to go work for a big time coorperation.
King Theodoic - a man on science who worked on translating the works of Aristotle into Latin. Later suffered a horrific death.

Metadata:
Things I noticed on the physical article was that it is simple. It is black and white so no one can interperate anything but the words on the page. All of the key points are bolded and at the beginning of paragraphs or even paragraphs on their own. Also, the paragraphs are short and easy to read making this article idea for people who don't like concentrating for a long time.

Part 2:
The digital objects I chose were a projector for a physical object, a digital text of "Harry Potter and the Sourcerer's Stone", a digital image of Machu Picchu, and a video of a boy named Mike Tompkins singing an accapela version of "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry. I chose the projector because the criteria was to find something that was in the room. There want much in the room except for computers and the girl beside me had chosen a key board so I decided to do the projector that was hanging on the ceiling. I chose "Harry Potter and the Sourcerer's Stone" because that is one of my favorite books. I chose the picture of Machu Picchu because I think that is one of the most mysterious beautiful places on earth and I would some day like to visit it. I chose The video of Mike Tonpkins because the first time I head this song I fell in love with it! It is amazing and so well done that I would like to share it with as many people as possible.

Digital projector:

The creator of this object was Niepce de St.Victor. He used a light sensative solution and 2 sheets of glass to create the first projector. This was used to convert smaller images to a larger form on a bigger screen. 

Harry Potter Book:

Picture of Machu Picchu:

Video of Mike Tompkins:

Mike Tompkins acapella

...There Was A Lesson About Remediation

At first, remediation seemed far to confusing to put any time or effort into, but after a while my partner Zohra and I decided to try and learn what this "remediation" thing was. First it started off by trying to figure out what we were supposed to do in the lab on Tuesday September 21st. It was a difficult 2 minutes where we were both attempting to find a specific example of something that has been remediated. We went through a few topics and eventually settled on the book and movie "Holes".

                

We chose this because, although we both do not read a whole lot of books, we just happened to have read this book at some point in our lives. To find information about this book and movie we used google to identify certain aspects of the questions that we were asked about this project. Google brought us to a few sites. We also used Google books to find the actual book on the Internet.

The book "Holes" was a popular book used quite often for book reports in elementary school. This favoured book soon became known and achieved the John Newbery Medal. The success of the book obviously made its way into the movie industry because in 2003 it was released onto the big screen with big expectations! "Holes" was budgeted at $20 million dollars and ended up raising over $71 million making them over $50 million dollars in profit. The book was a hit and later so was the movie. With this book turning into a movie the remediation that is being performed is complete absorption of the other type of media. In other words, the novel is being taken out of context and placed into a movie. The lacuna that is being filled in this circumstance is there is now no need for viewers to imagine the characters or scenes in the story now that the book is a movie. Even now if someone reads the book and has already seen the movie they will have a clear image in their head of what the characters look like whereas before the movie, everyone had their own ideas of what the characters and settings looked like.  

...Was a Closet Filled with Two Things

Jane was an odd girl who enjoyed talking about herself in third person. She had a love for two things in the world;

                                                        rowing 

and...

shoes

Two things that had nothing to do with each other. While Jane enjoyed both her passions she couldn't help but notice that rowing was getting in the way of her shoe loving and her shoe loving was getting in the way of rowing. So one day she decided to whip out her candy apple red pumps and strut her way down to the rowing club where she proceeded to both wear her shoes and row.