Skip to main content

CSC 151 2019S, Class 29: Project introduction

Overview

  • Preliminaries
    • Notes and news
    • Upcoming work
    • Extra credit
    • Questions
  • About the project
  • Group composition and construction
  • Playing and brainstorming

Preliminaries

News / Etc.

  • Notes from our student ACM chapter
    • ACM = Associated Colleges of the Midwest
    • ACM = Association of Computing Machinery [this one]
    • Tech internship meeting Thursday at 6:30 in Noyce 3821.
    • Meet with alums, ask questions, small group discussions, etc.
    • Bring your resume and get feedback.
  • Mentor sessions Wednesday 8-9 p.m., Thursday 8-9 p.m., Sunday 5-6 p.m.
  • Folks should think about taking CSC 161 in the fall. It’s a great class, and you get to work with robots!
  • I’m a bit behind (what else is new), so the formal description of the project won’t be released until Wednesday.

Upcoming work

  • Homework 8 due Tuesday.
    • If you write “We each spent at least four hours on this assignment” on the assignment, you will get at least a check.
  • Friday’s quiz: Pairs, Vectors
  • Reading for Wednesday: Design patterns and higher-order procedures
  • Flash cards Wednesday: Pairs, Vectors
  • No lab writeup.

Extra Credit

I would certainly appreciate suggestions of other extra credit activities (preferably via email).

Extra credit (Academic/Artistic)

  • The Magic Flute, April 18, 7:00 p.m. Sebring-Lewis
  • New: Any student research week activity.

Extra credit (Peer)

  • New: Track and Field at home this Saturday. (30 min)
    • Time details forthcoming.
  • New: Women’s Golf at Beloit this weekend.
  • New: SS at Math/Stats seminar, Tuesday, 11am, Science 2517. 1/7th of an ellipse. Learn what it means.

Extra credit (Wellness)

  • TONIGHT: Monday, April 15, 7:30 p.m., Harris Cinema: From the Munchies to Memory Effects: What the Science Says About Cannabis/Marijuana

Extra credit (Wellness, Regular)

  • TODAY: 30 Minutes of Mindfulness at SHACS (SHAW) every Monday 4:15-4:45
  • Any organized exercise. (See previous eboards for a list.)
  • 60 minutes of some solitary self-care activities that are unrelated to academics or work. Your email reflection must explain how the activity contributed to your wellness.
  • 60 minutes of some shared self-care activity with friends. Your email reflection must explain how the activity contributed to your wellness.

Extra credit (Misc)

  • New: CS Internship Hour, Thursday, 6:30-7:30 p.m., Noyce 3821. Free Pizza.
  • Participate in Kinetic Sculpture Competition: Saturday the 27th
    • https://bit.ly/kineticsculpture19
    • You’ll need to build your sculpture in advance.
    • You get reimbursed for up to $200 in supplies, but must present to be reimbursed.
  • Public speaking workshop - April 22 at 7pm in HSSC S3325, with Kathy Clemons-Beasley ‘05. “Kathy is the Global head of Leadership and Manager Development for Blackrock and has been the speaker coach for TEDxGC.”
  • Clothing donation boxes in lounges. Donate!

Other good things

Questions

Why didn’t we learn about vectors earlier.

Lists are often better for many tasks.

Mutation can be problematic. It’s harder to know things about the state of your program when someone else can unexpectedly change the state elsewhere.

    (define stuff (vector 1 2 3 4 5))
    (equals? (vector-ref stuff 0) 1)
    ...
    (equals? (vector-ref stuff 0) 1)

    ; If the ellipses are
    (define more stuff)
    (vector-set more 0 "hello")

Did you know that you had erroneous code in the example for f?

Odds are good that I have erroneous code somewhere.

About the project

Goal
Do something new and interesting with a prototypical set of DH “data”.
Collaboration
In a group of one to four people. Why one? Some people don’t like to collaborate.
Length
Over a two-week period (plus a little more).
Sanity
Using about four hours per week for each group member
Products
Proposal
Code
Short paper
Lightning presentation
Data
OCR’ed S&B archives from the 1960’s, available on /home/rebelsky/Desktop/SandB
Opportunities
Improve it! (That is, turn the word-like things into words.)
Better version of topic modeling.
Visualize data
Simpler statistics and evolution (e.g., most common words)
Information on nearby words
Automatically add XML tags (hah)
Generate random S&B articles using text statistics
Write something that identifies all of the headlines (and does something with them)
Reminder
The tool is not the end product; you should do some post-analysis

Group composition and construction

Two issues to consider:

  • Combination of skills
  • Preferred approach to the data

What might you do? (See above for preliminary list.)

  • Visualize the changes in the most common words. (For example, we could pick the twenty most common words and do a chart for each of the ten years.) (Multiple visualizations likely possible in the time-frame given.)
  • Identify all of the headlines. (And maybe use them for further analysis.)
  • Emotional analysis of the text (plus visualization)
  • Tie to common historical context.
  • Evolution of particularly meaningful terms over the ten year period. (E.g., pronouns, “diversity”)
  • Use of proper names and what (emotional) terms appear nearby.
  • Use of political terms and the context in which they appear.
  • Statistical generation of mid-60’s S&B articles.

Sam’s summary for grouping

  • Visualization
  • Text generation
  • Emotional analysis and/or patterns
  • Other

What skills would be useful?

  • Combining different skills leads to more intersting/better projects; different combinations will lead to different approaches. (Different views, too.)
  • Math/Stats - Good at dealing with numbers
  • “Words” - Particularly good at writing/speaking
  • Leadership
  • Creativity - Idea generation
  • Code expainer - Someone who can explain difficult code concepts
  • Algorithmicist - Someone who can turn the algorithms we develop into code.
  • “Devil’s advocate” - Someone who is willing to challenge the status quo.

What work styles do you have?

  • Scheduling (weekends, mornings, evenings)
  • Location (don’t live on the same hall as your work group)
  • Talkativity

Colored

  • Purple - I like to argue
  • Yellow - I’m easygoing
  • Green - I’m a leader
  • Red - I can’t work on weekends
  • Blue - I’m an open person

Categories - Primary Focus

  • Visualization - NE
  • Generation - SE
  • Patterns - SW
  • Topic modeling - NW

Playing and brainstorming