Week 3

This week I received a log file representing a portion of system-generated log data of Teacher BRIDGE object use. This log data file contains data primarily related to chat object use in Teacher BRIDGE and includes time, date, username, object changed or used, and IP address information.

After outlining the project requirements and checking in with Mary Beth and Jayne about the game development project, I decided to focus on the visualization project for the remainder of my time here.

I began reading papers on visualization and user interface issues and I wrote some scripts to parse the log data file into meaningful categories to eventually feed into a database. I am enjoying the opportunity to learn more about Perl and shell scripts, which I imagine will come in handy at multiple points in my academic career.

This project is inspired by themes similar to that of IBM's Babble

Carolanne Fisher and Penelope Sanderson's Exploratory Sequential Data Analysis

as well as work of
Danyel Fisher

In my spare time I have been reading literature and my roommate Eva and I have picked up knitting. This week I went out to lunch and dinner a lot with Mary Beth and Jack's students and I enjoyed their company. Eva and I have been asking the PhD students a lot of questions about their experiences in graduate school and their suggestions for prospective students.