This semester, I have the pleasure of working with our graduate students on two advanced classes. I am using this semester to push forward our curriculum both in the areas of data visualization and mobile development.
On this site, you will see the course materials as they develop for the SXTXState project. This is the 6th year of this project, and we are changing things up a bit. We hand selected five participants to maximize their time preparing and attending SXSW. We will begin posting content on the SXTXState.com site very soon.
A new aspect of this course is the grant we received from AEJMC and the Knight Foundation to work on a mobile platform using Ushahidi. You can see more about the project under the Knight Grant Info tab on this site. We are very fortunate to have this support for the project. I will plan to use this blog to record our activities throughout the semester, share tips and ideas as well as code, as to what we develop. We will be discussing the strategy and implementation of a mobile platform that we and our networks can use during SXSW to crowd-source and share the story of the event.
Right now, I am focused on hosting. My plan is to experiment with an Amazon EC2 installation. I did a test install on my Bluehost account, and it worked, but had a few glitches, mainly using Clean URLS on a virtual host. So, this will be our first foray into an Amazon hosting environment, installing each of the technologies we need by hand. Luckily, Ushahidi’s Wiki has some instructions for doing this.
We will also have to determine Responsive or Native App. Ushahidi has a GitHub repository, and it has code for an iPhone app. But I am thinking we might just go with a Responsive Web app, customizing the code with Media Queries for the different size screens our users might encounter. The students and I need to play with the Mobile Plugins that are available for Ushahidi to determine if that functionality will work for us.
We plan to have a Hackathon in Feb, and we need some suggestions for local professionals who can assist us with this. Any ideas, send them our way. croyal at txstate dot edu.
And we need a name for the Mobile platform. The grant title was Bobcats@SXSW, but that’s still up for consideration.
In addition to these technical aspects, we also need to consider strategy, features and design. There’s a lot ahead. And that doesn’t even count the things I am going to be doing with my other class in Data Visualizations. You can follow along there at advanced.cindyroyal.net. It should be an interesting and enlightening semester, and we’ve got a great group of smart and curious students to work on these projects.