Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 2)

St. Louis has long been  known for its  cultural crossroads, particularly when it comes to music. From blues and jazz to rock and hip-hop, the city has played a significant role in the development of American music.  I picked this specific  topic because I genuinely enjoy music and I didn’t necessarily have a specific background in the area or when it comes to the information of music venues in St. Louis. There are many different artists and venues that have helped shape St. Louis for its music history culturally and locally. 

Many music  sites in the St. Louis area have typically made diverse pathways between different border and cultural dynamics and backgrounds. Things like segregation and more black music that are common to this day that have shaped the way black and other urban areas are represented.

Question 

The main question that I am looking at is How have St. Louis’s music venues changed , and  are effected by, the city’s cultural and social changes  over time? More recently state of smaller, independent venues that are just as  important as the ones that are highly represented. 

Main view 

I’m going over this topic more geographically looking at things such as the culture looking at things like the physical space within the venue and who preformed at these said places and the community around them. 

Technology

For this project I used technology like google maps to show the visual spaces of the venues and the area. Although it’s mostly beneficial for navigation you can also use this tool to create your own custom map for plotting data.

( google maps and local St. Louis music venues) 

These are very beneficial because it gives descriptions and visuals of each of the sites the two mentioned above were primary example. Each one of these will include some historical information and photos over time with google maps the street view can also be helpful especially when taking into consideration the neighborhood landmark view to notice the changes over time among the area. 

Conclusion 

Overall this project was more of an overview for different music venues within the area and more interesting how they have changed over time and how we can use technological tools to visual the changes and differences of different music venues over time.

In groups of 4-5, take turns sharing about your project. You should provide some background on your project (what drew you to this topic? what do your group members need to know to understand your project?), your driving argument or narrative, the kinds of sources you’re using, your choice of technology, and how that technology fits with the content of your project. These are all works in progress, so you don’t need to have it all done! But you should talk about your progress so far, any challenges you’ve run into, and how you envision the final product.

When you’re not presenting, listen attentively to the presenters and fill out a peer review form for each one. That form will help presenters know how clearly they’re articulating their argument and identify potential challenges and ways to strengthen their project. It also lets them know where they’re doing a good job!d

Peer review form

On Monday, we talked about three aspects of civic technology that help to make the government more accessible and effective for its constituents: govtech (how the government makes itself available), public data (providing access to data that impacts constituents), and participatory democracy (grassroots efforts to render government more effective). Today we’re going to hone in on public data.

Public data offers the means to hold governments accountable, to understand how data informs decision-making, and to examine and sometimes contest the ways data is collected. It also informs reporting — every day, we see headlines that utilize data to make an (often inflammatory or click-baity) argument. Being able to track down the source of that data allows us to engage critically and thoughtfully with the news as well as with the government.

For today’s lab, we’re digging into some data-driven headlines about the St. Louis metro. Working in groups, explore your assigned article and work through the prompts in this form. You’ll be looking for 1) the argument the article is making, 2) how the reporter is using data to support that argument, 3) the source of that data, and 4) some thoughts about whether or not the article makes good and accurate use of that data.

NB: You might have to dig a bit to find the source of the data! Some articles might not link to it at all, and others might link to aggregators. Do your best to figure out the earliest origin of that data. (E.g. if the article links to an aggregator of crime statistics, try to figure out who actually collected them — local police departments? the FBI? a private company?)

Lab 15 form

Articles:

• STL ranks #1 for fatal hit-and-runs: Poll
• A shortage of luxury homes is keeping St. Louis hot
• Housing markets facing greater risk of decline concentrated in California, New Jersey, Illinois, and Florida
• Madison County School District 12 ranked least equitable district in Illinois
• Agricultural hub: St. Louis ports handle 50% of U.S. crop movement

After playing through a couple of text-based games for Monday, we’re going to try our hand at game design. On Monday, we discussed games as texts, as something for us to study like we would a piece of literature or a historical moment. (Is that a buzzkill? Maybe. But when you start digging into a game, sometimes you discover whole new layers that you didn’t realize were there! So it can also make the game a much richer experience.)

Games can be all kinds of things — not just entertaining, but instructive, exploratory, philosophical, and more. A good game has at its heart a problem, a question, or a story, something that drives the player to keep going.

Today’s lab is split into two. First, we’ll spend some time brainstorming and storyboarding. This is your opportunity to think through what your game will do in the big picture: what is its story? What’s the problem that the player’s trying to solve? What world are you immersing them in, and how can you convey that? You’ll use this Google Form to flesh out the answers to those questions.

In the second part of the lab, we’ll take those initial thoughts and start putting them into Twine, a tool for building text-based games. Twine games are built with a series of passages, which you link together to create pathways through your story that the player can choose from (or be guided through, or move through randomly depending on your game’s logic). Here are your goals for today’s lab:

1. Head over to Twine and start your story by clicking on the “New” button and giving it a title.
2. Create at least three “passages” in your story, again using the “New” button, and add a little content to each of them.
3. Link each passage to another, either in the form of a player choice or in a guided format, where the player only has one link to click. (You should have at least one choice represented in your passages.) Your passages don’t have to be sequential.
   • You create links in Twine with double brackets. So [[Test page]] would generate a link to a passage called “Test page.”
   • You can format text using the built-in editor, but you can also use HTML and CSS if you’d like.
4. At the end of class, export your draft story by going to Build >> “Export as Twee” and upload it to WordPress as a media item. (You can send it to me in an email if you want to make sure it goes through.)

Spatial analysis is a method that uses mapping and geographic information systems (GIS) to analyze the relationships between people, places, and resources. Those relationships dictate what kind of access people have to things like grocery stores, banks, employment opportunities, green spaces, and more. Spatial analysis is a great tool for exploring concepts of spatial justice. In this lab, we’ll explore the spatial relationship between SIUE and the town of Edwardsville.

There are lots of tools we can use for spatial analysis. The most common one is ArcGIS, which is a proprietary (that is a paid) platform. We’ll be using a free tool. Those are sometimes less versatile (although you can do an awful lot with them!), but they also allow us to keep our data and our analysis regardless of whether we have access to a particular platform, and they’re often easier to use because they’re not as complex.

Understanding the Lay of the Land

1. Go to https://mymaps.google.com and sign in. Hit the Create a New Map button.
2. Navigate to Edwardsville. Using the push pin button, drop a pin onto the university and label it.
3. Use the search bar to search for a particular kind of amenity – for instance, restaurants, grocery stores, or parks.
4. Use the + button to add the results to your map.
5. Make some observations: what does the distribution of those pins look like? Where are they clustered? Are they in proximity to the university? Are they distributed evenly throughout the area? Are they all grouped in one spot?
6. Make sure you share your map with all group members before the end of class!

Thinking About Access

1. Pick the closest pin to the university and grab its name or coordinates. Head over to Google Maps (the regular kind) and get the directions from the university to that place.
2. Look at a few modes of transportation. How long would it take to drive there? Bike there? Take public transit there?
3. What would it cost to get there? Think about gas, parking, transit fares, exertion, and other costs that might crop up.
4. Now go back to your original map and look through the pins you added. Which one would you most like to go to? That is, which one would best serve your needs?
5. Do the same thing for that location, mapping out directions and analyzing costs.

Reflecting on Resources

1. What are the implications of your analysis? Is this an example of good access to resources, or are there challenges here? Is this an issue of spatial injustice?
2. Reflect a little on your spatial analysis lab. What observations did you make? Have the things you noticed impacted how you experience SIUE and/or Edwardsville? How do you think they might impact others’ experiences, whether they’re students, faculty/staff, or community members? What do you think has caused the patterns you identified? If there’s an element of spatial injustice in what you observed, how might it be addressed?

Today we’re looking at creative ways of representing data. Although algorithmically generated data visualizations can of course incorporate creative elements through choices like color palette, background, and surrounding context, they’re also limited to specific, familiar forms: a pie chart, a network graph, a scatterplot. Creative data visualization allows us to play with new forms of visualization, and in so doing, move from data viz as exploration to data viz as argument or as narrative.

Today’s lab is based on the Dear Data project, in which two friends visualized data about themselves every week for a year. They each responded to a shared theme or prompt each week, but they did so individually, categorizing and visualizing their data in often radically different ways.

We’re going to visualize some of our own data. For the next 24 hours, track a piece of data about yourself. That data can be anything: how you spend your time throughout the day, what contexts you hang out with your friends, how often you call your family, or even just your steps.

Once you’ve got a set of data, try your hand at a creative data visualization. Think about what forms might make the most sense for your data — if it’s time-based, maybe you want to overlay a pie chart on a clock. Maybe you want to draw your step count on a map. Think also about what you find visually appealing and engaging. You’re not bound by the aesthetic of a particular tool! Bring it with you or take a picture to share in class on Monday.