Community Coordinator for Edinburgh
Open Knowledge Scotland
I help with organising Open Knowledge Meetups and Open Data Maker Nights. This definitely has nothing to do with my PhD supervisor being the OK Scotland Ambassador.
I help with organising Open Knowledge Meetups and Open Data Maker Nights. This definitely has nothing to do with my PhD supervisor being the OK Scotland Ambassador.
Presented "Palimpsest: location aware electronic literature" and panellist on "Writing Different Together". I think this was my first talk to over 100 people.
Something something linked data something social profiles something context-aware self-representation on the web doodah online personas social machines uhhhh decentralisation.
I guess I'll update this when I'm feeling more sure of myself.
Graduation expected: July 2016 (funding runs out) / late 2017 (more realistically)
Publications: See /pub
Humoured Supervised by: Ewan Klein and Dave Robertson.
At SocieTea we sit around on Thursday evenings and drink fancy teas, make tea puns, and don't force anyone to socialise who doesn't want to. I'm proud to have facilitated this. Even though I'm no longer in charge, I still host a suitcase of tea, cups and saucers, and a tea urn, under my desk in my office.
Helped under 19s prepare projects to present to judges at the Festival of Code.
Created a location-constrained community noticeboard as part of a hyperlocal digital newspaper (via a Wordpress plugin). The cool part is, you read and write to the noticeboard through scanning a QR code that's on a giant wooden totem pole in the middle of a field. I can't take responsibility for the totem pole.
Taught basic web design and development, including responsive design and progressive enhancement, to students from a variety of (mostly non-technical) backgrounds. Marked coursework.
Core classes taught concepts from architecture, philosophy, art, sociology, media theory, political sciences, choreography, design, history, literature... and who knows what else. My eyes were opened to a million new ways of thinking about the world. I started to understand 'research by practice' and the value of play. There was still a lot of artsy crap I couldn't accept, but it was mostly okay. I took electives inside my comfort zone, from the School of Informatics (Advanced Natural Language Processing and Multi-agent Semantic Web Systems). I worked on group projects with an awesome and diverse bunch of people from whom I learnt a lot.
(I cleverly wrote this thesis in Google Docs, but I might translate it to HTML and link to it one day).
I worked with a couple of people in the English Literature department to build Palimpsest, a web app (with Python and JavaScript on Google AppEngine) that shows you historical texts based on your location as you walk around a city. I spent most time on the authoring interface, for plotting texts onto a map. The project is still going, though it's morphed now and outgrown the code I wrote. I'd intended to develop this into a full blown interactive fiction engine and authoring system that let you draw the world map onto a real map, so that players could navigate the story by moving around IRL. I didn't pull that off, but I mocked it up.
Poster: "CakeBomb: An Online Collaborative Community", from my final year dissertation.
Wanting to see undergraduates behave and be treated as producers, empowered to shape their own education, rather than passive consumers who pay for course material and expect to be spoon fed, I dogfooded this concept and committed to even more things. Mostly hassled other students, organised a few events, spoke at a few conferences as a token-proactive-undergrad, and complained too much about the structure of my degree. That's how I remember it, anyway.
This is one of the best things I've ever done. Noteable achievements include:
Getting most undergraduates at Lincoln to engage was like pulling teeth, but I think the UoL Computing Society is still going. Arranged hackathons, social events, mentoring buddies, networking and careers stuff and all that jazz.
Because I didn't have enough to do with my summer. Dominant memories of this are answering weird essay questions about why open source software is better.
Worked on internal administration tools for recruiting, awards, and managing outreach events to universities, and trained non-technical staff to use them. Ate a lot.
Poster: "Google Writer: A Mashup".
Set up an RFID sensor on the outside of a parrot cage, and some patterned, disc-shaped RFID tags inside, and a small Java programme to play a different genre of music depending on the tag placed by the sensor. And tried to train a parrot to use it. The first part worked pretty well, the last part not so much.