Course Home and Latest News

Project 3, Part One Demo

November 18, 2008

For those who stayed for the demo last week (and those who didn't), the demo's changes and files are here.

Project 2 Turn-in Procedures; Project 3

November 13, 2008

Tonight we'll go through the turn-in procedures for Project 2 (scroll to the bottom), and the description for Project 3, which you'll begin working on tonight after any remaining projects are presented.

Be sure to look at the next news item on Chicago STC scholarships, if you haven't already.

Chicago STC Scholarships

November 10, 2008

From STC Chicago:

Check Your Differential Girdlesprings

October 30, 2008

Fun from YouTube

Examples from October 9 Class

October 10, 2008

I've added the SQL code for building the email address book database, plus the example form and PHP script for inspecting $_POST at the bottom of the WeekSeven page. Enjoy.

Social Opportunity

September 18, 2008

Mark your calendars and plan to attend the Humanities Open House on Wednesday, September 24 from 4pm to 6pm in the Kemper Room Art Gallery on the 2nd floor of Galvin Library. Hors d'oeuvres, soft drinks, and beer/wine will be served. Come meet new and returning Humanities faculty, staff, grad students, and undergraduate majors.

Two Opportunities, and Requesting Page Deletions

September 17, 2008

1. Eben English, a Reference & Digital Services Librarian at Galvin Library, has grant funding to pay students to mark up texts for IIT's Voices of the Holocaust project, using XML and specifically the Text Encoding Initiative's XML schema. Email me for details, and I can put you in touch with Eben.
2. Experimental Sound Studios is looking for a PR Manager whose responsibilities fit right in line with the abilities of students in tech comm, particularly regarding website maintenance and so forth. Again, email me at karl.stolley at gmail for details.

Pages for Deletion: Please post any pages that you would like deleted from the wiki at DeleteMePlease.

XML Transformations; Using the Wiki

September 11, 2008

Tonight we will be going beyond the work of merely marking up XML and look at how an XML document can be transformed, via XSLT, into other XML vocabularies or even into an XHTML document for display on a web browser. The experience you have with this will likely help you refine your XML vocabulary for this first project.

However, we'll spend most of our time together tonight workshopping your first projects, which are due--with presentations--next week.

I also want to talk a bit about the wiki usage. Some of you (like AnushkaP and ChrisL) are doing a great job of keeping your pages organized and labeled appropriately. Others of you are making a mess. In a class on Information Structure and Retrieval, I expect you to keep an information architect's mindset throughout--and make it easy for me and for everyone in the class to find your reading responses, sample projects, and so on. Make meaningful titles for your URLs, and follow the CamelCase naming conventions for the site. A look at the PageIndex reveals quickly who's doing this well--and who's not.

Also, please make use of the wiki formatting language, and particularly for your XML projects, add the simple markup to add syntax highlighting, line numbers, and a download button. The formatting makes your pages easier to read, and your code simple to download and test.

On a related note, unless you genuinely are making a minor edit to a page, provide a detailed description of what you have done. Now that I've gone through and commented on pages now, it will help me (and you) keep your progress straight as we look back over what you claimed to have done.

Deeper into XML Territory

September 4, 2008

We have some important business to address tonight. The first concerns access to journal articles, which turned out to be--at least for the Sapienza article--way more of a hassle than I'd anticipated. We'll talk about what happened, and why, and how we'll avoid this problem for the semester. We'll also talk about the reading that you were able to do.

The second order of business is to discuss the XML reading for this week concerning DTDs and XML Schema--and why you won't be expected to write either of those for Project 1, but why as information architects and technical communicators you need to be aware of such things. We'll also briefly talk about incorporating other namespaces in your XML documents (which we didn't get to last week).

Finally, we'll be workshopping your draft XML for Project 1. See this week's notes and activities for details.

First Night of Class

August 21, 2008

Welcome to the course website for COM541: Information Structure and Retrieval. You'll want to bookmark this site for future reference; beyond containing the policies for successful completion of the course, it also contains the course calendar with each week's class agenda and readings and activities for the next meeting. We'll go over both the policies and the calendar tonight.

One of the other important orders of business tonight will be for everyone to register on the wiki. A top-secret password will be given in class that you'll need to register; please set your username as your first name and last initial (e.g., Karl Stolley is KarlS). This will keep help everyone clear on who's doing what on the wiki, while also avoiding having this site show up in a Google search for your full name.

(By next week, edit your page with a short introduction to the class, and then add your name on the Course Members page in alphabetical order. See the WikiHelp page for more information on using the wiki.)

Also, if you don't have a Delicious or other social bookmarking account, you'll need to register for one. You'll use the tag com541 to mark links you find that are of relevance to the class--anything from XML tutorials to news stories with an information architecture or structure angle to them. Starting next week, your com541-tagged Delicious bookmarks will appear on the wiki.

Finally, we'll spend just a little time tonight talking about XHTML and microformats, which some of you may be familiar with. That will launch us into hitting XML hard and fast next week.

Again, welcome to the course.--Karl

2008 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS)

August 21, 2008

Have a look at the call for papers for this local conference, and please consider submitting. It's great experience to have as graduate students, and I'd be very proud to see IIT Tech Comm/Humanities students on their program. The deadline for submitting a proposal is August 31; the conference itself is November 1-3, which is over a weekend.