making things, helping people make things better
Reinventing yourself is hard, but there are always pathways from what you do now to what you want to do--often it's just figuring out what those pathways are, and how one context translates to another. I've been teaching in higher education, using CMS tools like Canvas and Blackboard (RIP), for the last 20 years. I'm …
Continue reading "Curriculum Design from Higher Ed to Articulate 360"
There's been a lot of talk recently about the future of the college essay in the era of AI like ChatGPT and Jasper. Using artificial intelligence and the vast training material of the web, ChatGPT takes a user-generated prompt and returns an essay, a poem, or other genre of writing that is not only polished …
A series of posts and how-tos on some great ways to set up your Canvas sites This collection of posts showcases some of the key features of Canvas that can be used to help students engage more fully with your course online. Principles of clarity, design, and accessibility drive these posts, which include the following: …
Creating an engaging and useful Canvas home page In 2018, Canvas launched a tool faculty can use to develop more advanced design aspects in course creation--it's not very pretty, even four years later, but it can be useful if you're willing to dive in and explore. Here is a home page for an asynchronous online …
I have been a big fan of small multiples ever since I learned how to make them--at some point, the enjoyment I take in seeing them come together will fade, but for now, I'm all in. A friend (hi, Tina!) recently asked how I got small multiples into the static viz, and I thought this …
Continue reading "Small Multiples in Tableau, Details in Illustrator: A Quick How-To"
In this post, I wanted to talk a little about my research design process. As I mentioned last post, I knew I wanted to create a network visualization, and I also knew I wanted to test Clover's theory about the self-consciousness of horror as a genre. What would I need to do this? My approach …
I've been pretty silent on this space for a while now, because all my time has been consumed with finishing my degree project for MICA's Data Analytics and Visualization program. But the end is in sight! What have I been up to? Basically, tearing my hair out. But also, working with a lot of IMDb …
Continue reading "When Your Darlings Bite Back: A Century of Horror Film about (Un)Making"
Downloadable Session HandoutDownload Active reading is an essential skill for students to master, especially in higher education. Your students should not just be memorizing things, but synthesizing ideas with other ideas, including their own, to develop new concepts and deepen or problematize narratives already in play. In the literature classroom, and in the writing classroom, …
I spent the last few days trying to figure out parts of networkx, a python package for network diagramming--with some success! I had some old data from an earlier attempt at using networkx with tokened text from IMDB summaries and synopses. That code basically took each text chunk, tokened it out, dropped stopwords, and then …
As the python scraper continues to do its thing, I've started to play around with some of the resulting data. There have been a few bumps along the road (read: several major potholes), including difficulty pulling in large chunks of text from the synopsis page of each relevant film; I think it's also a problem …
Continue reading "Data Play: Horror, Art-Horror, Meta-Horror"
Tonya Howe 