iSchool Capstone

2020

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Bold Colors

Imagine yourself suspended ten feet in the air, fingers losing grip, and bracing for your inevitable fall, all because you can’t tell the difference between two rocks. At rock climbing gyms, boulders are color-coded to represent the level of difficulty which is a disadvantage for colorblind individuals. Our team saw a need to help this user group participate in this sport with relative ease. Bold Colors is a free mobile web application that uses object recognition and color detection to help users autonomously see their routes before they scale the wall.
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Books for Littles: Collaboration for Growth

Books for Littles (BFL) is an online resource helping parents and educators engage kids with hard topics and social justice using children’s books. My wonderful sponsor, Ashia Ray, launched BFL in 2014. Today, the organization is flourishing, but has become burdensome for one person to manage. I worked with Ashia on a system to enhance collaborative efforts and reduce their individual workload, developing an efficient process for volunteer recruitment and support, a centralized resource describing specific tasks, and detailed documentation for complex tasks. I also researched grant funding to potentially cover future operational costs. Raising Luminaries logo used by permission.
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Breman Museum Google Arts and Culture Project

For this capstone project I partnered with the Breman Museum, a Jewish heritage museum in Atlanta, GA, that is working to broaden their visibility by creating exhibits for the Atlanta roll out of the Google Arts and Culture project. I created two archival exhibits, focused on Jewish human rights advocates, described and uploaded a hundred artifacts to the online collection, and wrote an exhibit creation guide for staff and volunteers. This project brings to light Southern Jewish voices, humanizes the Jewish experience, and stimulates awareness of the collections held by the Breman Museum.
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C-Bike: Bike Locker Management

Cascade Bicycle Club handles 220 of King County Metro’s leased bike locker units and manages over 160 customers who rent these eco-friendly and affordable lockers. Cascade relied heavily on manual transactional processes to facilitate their bike locker leasing program. Our project, C-Bike, has successfully eased the process for this non-profit by creating a secure, data-integrable customer management database for locker administrators, and a clear, concise frontend locker rental webpage for customer inquiries. Through C-Bike, customers and administrators can have swift and more secure interactions, thus ensuring that these resources are quickly accessible to those who need them.
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Castaway

Refugees seeking refuge within the United States are denied entry due to government policies. Currently there are 1.4 million refugees who need resettlement and 37,000 people are forced to leave their homes everyday. The current atmosphere allows for misinformation about refugees to persist and denies refugees accurate representation and recognition. Our solution is a free web-based, open-access information source that educates users on issues and policies concerning refugees while providing them with a holistic range of information. Castaway enables people to identify the problem, gives them the tools to learn and encourages them to take action as advocates.
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Charles Dickens' David Copperfield as Information Object

Documents reflect the historical contexts of their creation, and in doing so, become information objects. The serial novel is a type of information object, but due to re-editioning, reversioning, and digitization, most readers have lost touch with its historical significance. This analysis of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849–1850) uses the lens of information theory, in relation to literary criticism, historiography, and the history of the book, to grasp the serial novel as an information object, arguing that doing so requires intimate familiarity with the physical nature of the book in parts and the historical context of its production.
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ChirpOut

ChirpOut gives employees the ability to anonymously ‘chirp out’ serious issues that they are impacted by and to do so without fear of retribution–they are “canaries in a mine.” Companies can then view these aggregated claims as indicators in data visualizations and address them to create a higher standard for handling workplace concerns and improve the overall quality of the workplace.
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Church of the Gesù

Dr. Ann Huppert and Dr. Pamela O. Long are developing a history of the Church of the Gesù, the first Jesuit church built in Rome. I implemented data organization, performed data entry, and created a Table of Contents for the 16th-century account book. The TOC tracks peoples involved, monetary transactions, materials, and other details relevant to construction that occurred between 1568 and 1581, and establishes a relationship between folio photographs and corresponding pages of the transcription. My work complements the researchers’ architectural and historical expertise, giving them a clearer picture of the construction project and facilitating the capture of data.
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CodeBreakers Tool

Students who choose to learn programming through non-traditional routes face more obstacles introduced by predominantly remote learning. The CodeBreakers (coding bootcamp) website promises that coaches will be available 24/7—a large and demanding commitment. By developing a LeetCode Chrome extension and Slackbot for Codebreakers students, the addition of these tools will assist in offloading some of that weight, streamlining teaching processes, and lessening pain points. We can track impact by analyzing differences in CodeBreakers’ graduates' success rates prior to and after implementing our solution, as well as the feedback from surveys completed by students, usage rates, and performance in mock interviews.
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Coeur d’Alene School District Yearbook Access

For many years, local libraries have been unable to field requests for access to both of Coeur d’Alene’s high schools' yearbooks. The solution has always been to refer patrons to the high school administration. These requests put an added burden on school secretaries and, because of school hours and school holidays, there is limited access throughout the year. Library workers and school administrators will now be able to easily forward requests to cdarchives.org for access to LCHS’s yearbooks. Plans have been created for both the upload of CDHS’s yearbooks and a full marketing campaign.