Category Archives: Programming

Alexander Library Historical Photography Database

The Alexander Library at Rutgers University has an extensive historical photography collection, but intellectual property policies at the University level are preventing library archivists from adding these to the RUCore System that makes resources available to the public.

In order to make accessing the images simpler for University departments/clients who have received clearance  to use the images, the University Archives needed an in-house database that uses a simple browser interface.  The link below is a proof of concept that provides both simple and advanced facet searches.

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Teaching at Rutgers

I’ve taught college classes in photography before, but after joining the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers I branched out to teach other subjects that, at their best, are also an interesting blend of the arts and sciences.

I’ve advised student groups on their Information, Technology and Informatics (ITI) capstone projects and I’m also teaching E-Commerce and Web Design classes for the department.   In addition to the ITI program courses I’m also teaching Public Speaking for the Department of Communication, which is one of the core courses for the College Avenue general education program.

 

 

NLP and HP

A while ago I was doing a mockup of an HP Lovecraft full text index for a MLIS class.  After the  brainstorming and initial design process I decided I was just building another version one of the many Lovecraft repositories already available online.

However, I’m bringing the project back to the todo list after learning some more about the Stanford NLP Link Parser and Carnegie Mellon Parser   And the text analysis possibilities of R and Python.   It would certainly be interesting to experiment with the fantastic proper nouns and eloquent sentences.  Just imagine the opening sentence of “Call of the Cthululu” being processed by the link software…  (It turns out it does a great job.)

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

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