iSchool Capstone

Award Winner

2016

Shark Share Global

Sharks are enormously important to our ecosystem, yet poorly understood. Researchers seek to understand and study them but are hampered by siloing, wasted research opportunities, and underdeveloped collaborative networks. Shark Share Global is a website and database that facilitates sample sharing and collaboration between researchers around the world. It is custom-built to encompass the needs of researchers- bringing the technology solution as close to their existing processes of sample cataloguing as possible- to ensure a low barrier to adoption. Open only to accredited shark and ray researchers, it is a simple, elegant solution to a sprawling problem, introducing a formal research collaborative tool where none have existed before.

Slate

From hardware setup to data acquisition and analysis, depression researchers go through a long, convoluted process to understand electroencephalogram (EEG) data (popularly called brain waves) collected from patients. Acquired data is often messy and difficult to process, and analysis can take from hours to days to return results. Our project, Slate, aims to change that by providing a platform that streamlines this process, and provides a fully interactive 3D model to visually digest the data. Slate is a cross-platform desktop application that consists of two parts: an EEG data processing tool, and a data visualization tool that allows depression researchers to view and analyze brain signals obtained through a non-invasive, commercial EEG headset. Slate utilizes real-time modeling and neuroimaging techniques to allow more meaningful understanding of EEG data in the process of interpreting and identifying depressive patterns in research, with the goal of ultimately serving patients.

Small Hotel Management System

Once one of our team members, Jason, travelled to the west coast of the US and stayed in a small and cozy hotel. He was surprised to see the front desk making notes with her pen and paper and her pc monitor being surrounded by sticky notes. Apparently those notes weren’t helping much as she was still busy browsing through pages and sticky notes for a piece of information. Jason couldn’t help but wondering: is there a information management tool that he can build, without too much investment, to help those small hotels to do their business in a snap? This is what our project aims to tackle: to usher small hotels, who are still managing their information manually, to a technology based information system built with an open source relational database and an intuitive user interface. Our goal is simple. We want to offer hoteliers a solution to run their core business functions more efficiently, and to make their life much easier.

Snahul stsobojib sp’ijilal sjol yo’tan jlumaltic (Tseltal House of Wisdom) - Collection Management

The Tseltal Maya are an Indigenous people living in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico who are inheritors of a rich Mayan culture but experience extreme poverty. One of the many challenges they face is the loss of language and culture in the face of encroaching globalization and assimilation into the Mestizo culture. The Tseltal House of Wisdom will hold what will be the world's largest collection of Tseltal language materials. However, the current conditions in which the materials are stored, as well as a jungle environment, present the difficult task of organization and preservation. Through a partnership with the One Equal Heart Foundation, we traveled to Chiapas to assess their newly constructed building and collection to offer recommendations for Collection Development, Classification, Environmental Controls, and Technology. We hope the Tseltal House of Wisdom grows into a vital resource for the community as they continue to strengthen their language and culture.

Snahul stsobojib sp’ijilal sjol yo’tan jlumaltic (Tseltal House of Wisdom) - Community Engagement Programming

Imagine working with a community that has no word in their language for library. The Tseltal Mayan people in Chiapas, Mexico have recognized the benefits and necessity of a community knowledge house. Currently, potential materials are stored across 600-square-miles and need to be collected in a central location and organized. More than an archive, this location is meant to be a community center where Tseltal cultural materials can be accessed and shared. In conjunction with the One Equal Heart Foundation, our team designed recommendations for increasing access and collection development in order to support the community’s cultural and linguistic preservation. The delivered manual of recommendations includes examples of indigenous and Latin American libraries to inspire community leaders as they envision the future of their knowledge house.

Soul of Seattle

Seattle is undergoing a state of great change, both in its demographics and economic prosperity. Soul of Seattle is a documentary project that studies and investigates how underrepresented entrepreneurs of color within Seattle’s Central District area are responding to these changes, both economically and culturally. In interviewing entrepreneurs and community leaders within the Central District, Soul of Seattle has documented themes of history, culture, entrepreneurship, and technology through the lenses of personal stories and experiences. We have examined technological innovation and how community members have been using it to improve their businesses and relationships within their community. We hope that Soul of Seattle will serve as a call to action for would-be entrepreneurs looking to establish themselves in the Central District as well as serve as a source of inspiration for people everywhere, regardless of their background, to seek out and cultivate their own stories within their own backyards.

Sound Expansion: Music Taxonomy and MIRs Redeveloped for Music Streamers

This research-based Capstone deals with the current music streaming community and the fact that streamers of music are at an informational disadvantage when it comes to accessing sounds for their latest projects. With little resources available due to the niche-oriented information needs of these specific streamers, acquiring these sounds can be a difficult practice and thus, leave them with scarce options. After conversing with fellow streamers, it appeared that their needs were in fact, quite varied enough to warrant several potential current MIR methods to be revisited based off recent research of the topic. Understanding current MIR research as well as the relative information needs of specific music streamers could benefit these music streamers, as well as current music information retrieval and their current algorithms, would they need to broaden their horizons for queries, and finally, revamped taxonomies that may spring from potentially more streamer-friendly services in the foreseeable future.

Space Management in the Archives: What goes where? How? And why?

University of Washington Libraries’ Special Collections is the largest repository of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. After receiving a Capital Projects Award from UW Libraries to fund the installation of compact shelving in a room in the sub-basement of Allen Library, it added 3,000 cubic feet of shelving space for its archival collections. With newly acquired archival collections arriving daily and available space at a premium, the department needed a plan for how this new space was to be used and a person to help implement that plan. For my project, I analyzed collection data, environmental reports, and staff input to develop a criteria for determining which collections should be moved into this new space. Using that criteria, I identified collections to be moved, prepared them accordingly, and moved them to the new space-updating database records and creating a shelf-list and shelf-map in the process.

Spanish Langage Collection Development Evaluation

I partnered with the Yakima Valley Libraries (YVL) in order to assess and evaluate their Spanish-language collection and how they select for that collection. Around the United States and Canada, there has been a trend of low number of library materials in Spanish even when the community in which the public library serves has a significant Spanish speaking population. There are many interwoven factors as to why this occurs including funding and community interest. YVL has made extraordinary strides in improving their general collection development and want to continue to improve their Spanish-language materials and services. My project provides an evaluation of how well their existing Spanish-language materials are circulating and suggestions on how to improve the collection in order to better serve their Spanish speaking community.

Spokin

Spokin is an experimental online civic network created by the non-profit research and development organization, Third Place Technologies. Spokin’s purpose is to allow users to connect with organizations, projects, events and many other happenings that they believe that they are connected to within their communities. This is where our specific capstone project comes into play. Our project is to use a JavaScript visualization library called D3 that will allow us to create a way of visualizing the connection between different people and organizations in the Spokin user network. This will allow their audience to be able find new users and organizations to connect with by looking at how their current connections compare to others.