Month: January 2015

Project idea: VTArtWorks

Kurt Luther Leave a comment

Sponsor:
Prof. Bob Leonard
VT School of Performing Arts

Project description: The Community Arts Network (CAN) was a website focused on community-based arts that was highly active from 1999 to 2010, until it had to close down due to lack of funds. All of the material on the site — thousands of news articles, essays, resources, forum discussions, etc. — was archived but is not easily searched or discovered. Prof. Bob Leonard, a VT professor and one of the original leaders of CAN, is looking to revive it by creating a new online social hub around the CAN archive, to be called VTArtWorks. The new hub will provide social tools to allow community-based arts enthusiasts to connect, share news and events, and have discussions. Beyond this, it will investigate new, valuable, unobtrusive ways to integrate these new activities into the existing CAN archive; for example, exploring ways to surface relevant documents from CAN to provide historical context to a conversation about an upcoming local performance. The key challenge here is develop a technology that enriches people’s social interactions around a common interest (e.g. community-based arts) by making connections to a large digital collection of potentially relevant supplementary materials.

Project deliverables: An online social hub oriented around community-based arts that is tightly integrated with materials from the CAN archive, fostering new conversations about current events and issues but also allowing discovery of and connections to older, relevant discussions and ideas.

Skills: Web development, digital libraries/archives, online communities, performing arts

 

Project idea: Crowdsourced display at Lane Stadium

Kurt Luther Leave a comment

Sponsor:
Prof. Ben Knapp, Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT)
http://www.icat.vt.edu/

Project description: We want to create a mobile app that, during nighttime events, will allow the crowd in Lane Stadium to use their cell phones to create a giant, collective visual display for photos, videos, messages, etc. Each cell phone screen represents one “pixel”. Since attendees have assigned seats, we know roughly where each pixel is located. The goal would be to let fans download the app to be part of the display, but also perhaps collaboratively suggest and generate content to display. Think of the photo mosaic posters comprised of many individual images. Aside from the user interface, there are important technical challenges involved in synchronizing the apps even when wireless coverage is spotty. We have the cooperation of the stadium staff to turn off the lights and try this out during a major event.

Project deliverables: Functional, usable mobile app that can be deployed to large numbers of users (100+) in a stadium setting and provide a crowdsourced display of (possibly animated or interactive) visual content.

Skills: Mobile app development, graphics, wireless networking, social computing.

 

Project idea: Civil War driving tour of Southwest Virginia

Kurt Luther Leave a comment

Contact person:
Paul Quigley
Director, Virginia Center for Civil War Studies
pquigley@vt.edu
540.231.9090
History Department, 405 Major Williams Hall, #0117

Project description: The Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, housed in Virginia Tech’s History Department, is creating a new driving tour of Civil War sites in southwest Virginia. Places like Gettysburg and Bull Run are a long way from Blacksburg, but our own area contains many sites of interest that Civil War enthusiasts would like to learn more about. We have begun to assemble information about local Civil War sites (e.g. Smithfield Plantation, here on Tech’s campus, and the Battle of Cloyd’s Mountain in Pulaski County) and are looking for a student team to help us develop a website/smartphone app to make this information available to the public. We also hope to make the website/app interactive, allowing users to suggest other significant sites, or to comment/discuss on the sites already included. Some sort of user rating system might also be good.

Project deliverables: The specific deliverable is negotiable. Eventually, we would like to see the tour available in a number of forms: website; smartphone app; audio files; print brochure. This semester, it probably makes sense to begin with either a website or a smartphone app—depending on the student team’s skills and interests. The website/app should provide users an easy way to (a) find the locations of Civil War sites; (b) acquire information about those sites; (c) post their own comments.

Expected impact of the project: The driving tour will be widely used. The Center will promote its use as a centerpiece of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies’ public outreach efforts among Civil War enthusiasts across Southwest Virginia and beyond. Interest in Civil War history is high and this tour will fill in a gap, allowing people to learn about the lesser-known Civil War history of this region in convenient formats.

Required skills of the team engaging in the project: web design, smartphone app design, perhaps google maps

URLs to follow for additional information: http://www.civilwar.vt.edu

Type of project: website/smartphone app