iSchool Capstone

Award Winner

2016

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.

SPSInteractive

In today’s society, we make most of our decisions by comparing all of the options side by side. When it comes to public schools, though, this is virtually impossible. As it stands, there is no convenient, simple way for the average person to compare every Seattle public school side by side. SPSInteractive, which is sponsored by Microsoft’s Civic Technology and Engagement department, aims to fill this void by providing a suite of interactive visualizations which make it easy to compare all of the schools in Seattle. We include test scores information, graduation rates, demographics, and many other metrics which are necessary to examine when studying a school. Not only will this help parents decide which school is the best fit for their child, but it will also help policy makers form a better picture of the Seattle Public School System, and make the best possible decisions for the next generation of students.

SPYRAL

Companies around the world are investing in cybersecurity but are not confident in their security controls as the technology landscape is ever changing. Spyral, our risk scoring framework, aims to provide operational cyber awareness for companies by providing them the fastest actionable insight into their risk posture. National Vulnerability Database(NVD) provides a vulnerability score for different software flaws. Spyral extracts this vulnerability score from NVD and superimposes it with other operating environment factors such as number of machines in environment, cloud infrastructure, and affiliation with external entities to come up with a risk score contextual to the company. Spyral is also industry agnostic and does not take special regulations into consideration to provide an unbiased scoring based on only the operating conditions. This information is going to be presented in an information visualization dashboard which will provide quick insights into their risk posture.

Spyro

Spyro: Empowering Familial Genetic Research Through Data Visualizations The field of precision medicine is projected for rapid growth in the next decade and genome analysis is at the forefront of this trend. However, current genome analysis tools have various issues: they have high learning curves, they are visually unappealing, and they have no easy way to compare multiple individuals’ genome data. In response to these issues, we have partnered with Spiral Genetics, a Seattle-based bioinformatics startup, to develop Spyro, a user-focused genome visualization tool. By leveraging Spiral Genetics’ next generation sequencing data, our tool allows researchers to utilize a comprehensive set of features in a simple, intuitive interface. Researchers can analyze an individual’s genetic variants, as well as make comparisons between multiple individuals. Because Spyro is focused on representing variant detection, researchers in this field can quickly adopt our tool and start analyzing.

Standardizing Library Instruction Across ENGL 1304 Course Sections

The Baylor University Libraries need to provide relevant, meaningful library instruction sessions for 90 course sections of ENGL 1304: Thinking, Writing, & Research, a first year English course required by most of Baylor’s undergraduate programs, without overloading any single librarian and creating continuity between instructing librarians. In this project, I explore the content/practices currently used in ENGL 1304 library instruction sessions and the needs/expectations of their graduate level student instructors, who teach 60% of the sections. The gathered information is used to create a set of new standardized learning outcomes that form the foundation of an instruction request form.

Steam Achievement Classification & Analytics Project

Classification, whether it be for groceries, books, music or the countless other commodities that require effective browsing and retrieval, bring with them the challenge of organizing materials in a coherent manner. Console and computer games are no different in that respect, but provide an additional challenge. As an interactive medium, games are largely defined by the choices and actions that players are allowed to make. The Steam Achievement Classification Analysis Project is a quantitative exploratory analysis that utilizes the rewards given to players in the form of “achievements”, and by way of text-mining and clustering games based on those achievements, provides insight into how thematically similar games differ in the tasks players are directed to accomplish. As the research shows, although existing tags and categories can reasonably define groups of interactive games, those groupings can often belie serious variations in the interactive dimension of those games.