Search
Loading
November 30th, 2018
You know it’s going to be a good week when your university’s head basketball coach crashes your Monday morning class as a guest lecturer. That’s what happened recently to students Alex Ishac (Chandler, AZ) and Rebecca Hanna (Chicago, IL), who are two of the 53 individuals enrolled in the “Engineering in the World of Data” Learning Community at Purdue University.
Purdue Men’s Basketball Head Coach Matt Painter crashed a class of the first-year engineering course, ENGR 103, which was held in Mackey Arena to demonstrate the application of data science in sports. The course, “Developing Your Data Mind,” was designed by Libraries faculty Michael Witt and Nastasha Johnson as a part of the learning community, in collaboration with colleagues from the Purdue College of Engineering, Department of English, and University Residences.
Painter spoke to the class about how data drives the decisions he makes as a coach—everything from recruiting to scouting opponents to shot selection and how individual players position their bodies on the court. Andrew McClatchey, statistical analyst for the men’s basketball team, also talked to students about the state-of-the-art technology and techniques in sports data collection and analysis and his experience in pursuing a career in data science.
In the course, students were learning how to make effective decisions using data. The night before the lecture, they joined the faculty of the learning community for popcorn and to watch the movie “Moneyball,” which is about the 2002 season of the Oakland Athletics baseball team that set a record for winning 20 games in a row by employing data analytics.
“The learning community brings together a cohort of first-year engineering students who have a shared interest in data science,” said Witt. “It gives us the opportunity to incorporate experiences outside of the classroom to bring the material to life.”
In addition to ENGR 103, students in the learning community take special, data-themed versions of required first-year engineering courses, including ENGR 131 and 132, “Transforming Ideas to Innovation I & II”; the English course ENGL 106, “Academic Research and Writing”; and ENGR 195, “Computational Methods of Data Science for Engineers,” which is a specialty course just for the learning community.
“Being in the community means that you take these classes together with the same group of students, resulting in opportunities to form close relationships with each other,” Ishac noted. “We’re learning while forming these friendships, and then we have activities like going to Mackey Arena and getting to talk to Purdue’s men’s head basketball coach and the team’s data analyst. I think the idea—to make these types of connections to interesting people who we can learn from—is really impactful,” he said.
“Our focus was to provide students with an early exposure to data science ideas and applications with an emphasis on how engineers use data to make evidence-based decisions,” said Engineering Education Professor Tamara Moore, who leads the learning community with Witt. “The instructors worked together to align the curriculum so that students would learn many facets of engineering in the world of data from the appropriate experts, integrated across these five courses.”
Another example of a learning community activity was the students’ recent participation in Purdue’s annual Dawn or Doom conference. Students attended presentations and ate lunch with one of the conference speakers, as well as discussed whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about advances in technology and its impact on their lives.
“I really enjoyed the ‘Presenting Data Effectively’ talk at Dawn or Doom,” Hanna said. “All the events that the learning community hosts are fun, and I learn something new. Although the learning community requires some extra work, I think it is definitely worth it,” she added.
Ishac concurs there is significant return on his investment in the “Engineering of the World of Data” learning community.
“The chance to be part of the ‘Engineering in the World of Data’ learning community the past several weeks has made my Purdue experience so far incredible for me,” he added.
Upcoming activities for the learning community include a field trip to the Cummins Technical Center to learn about product testing and simulation data, as well as “Learn Python with a Python” programming boot camp, in which students will be introduced to the Python scripting language by working with animal-management data and visit with an actual python from Columbian Park Zoo.
The “Engineering in the World of Data Learning Community” will begin accepting applications for the 2019-20 school year in January. It is open to incoming students admitted to the First-Year Engineering Program or to Pre-ABE in the College of Agriculture. For more information, visit www.purdue.edu/learningcommunities/profiles/engineering/engineering_data.html.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, UncategorizedNovember 28th, 2018
Take a break from final exam stress with the Fall 2018 Hicks Undergraduate Library Study Break events. Pet therapy dogs or learn about the tradition of Purdue “Senior Cords” and decorate your own corduroy swatch to show your Purdue spirit! Cookie decorating and other crafting activities are also part of the Fall ’18 Hicks Study Breaks’ lineup.
All events are free and open to all Purdue students and are held in the Hicks Library’s main common area.
In addition to the above-listed events, art-relaxation stations, puzzle stations, bubble wrap, and a Lego station will be set up around the library.
Filed under: events, general, UncategorizedNovember 28th, 2018
Courtesy of Abbey Nickel, Purdue Marketing and Media
Imagine being able to open a time capsule with just a click of a button.
The newly launched Purdue Campus Facilities and Buildings Historic Database allows users to take a closer look at the metamorphosis of Purdue’s buildings over the years that goes beyond just maps and illustrations.
Neal Harmeyer, digital archivist in Purdue University Libraries’ Division of Archives and Special Collections, debuted the historic online database this month that documents the historic grounds and structures of Purdue’s West Lafayette campus. The project took five years to complete.
Using an interactive map, researchers will be able to find and sort campus buildings by architects, contractors, university president at time of construction, building materials and keywords. Each building has data related to his specific history, including construction information, renovation information and images from various stages of their use.
Harmeyer has helped lead the creation of the exhibit, which was funded by a 2013 gift from Richard Funkhouser, professor emeritus.
Through studying the history of Purdue’s facilities, Harmeyer said the intention of the database is to help researchers understand and visualize Purdue’s growth over the years — and perhaps study how those facilities will impact Purdue’s future.
“The Historic Database will provide all members of the Purdue community the opportunity to experience the West Lafayette campus from an entirely new perspective,” Harmeyer said. “As the university has changed over its existence, the places Purdue students, faculty, and staff have visited, studied and lived have also changed. For the first time, there is a resource to search and study the physical campus, re-visit, and even share those experiences.”
Haymeyer said data has been gathered from archival collections, reports and publications regarding all known structures throughout the West Lafayette campus history. Priority is given to academic buildings, but the project encompasses non-academic buildings as well.
The database is entirely online. Digitized campus maps have been created to visualize the history of campus. Meanwhile, Purdue Libraries information technology staff have worked alongside those from Archives and Special Collections to create a database to incorporate that information.
Harmeyer hopes the database is also used for educational purposes in addition to traditional research.
“For example, Purdue Polytechnic or Engineering faculty can use the database to learn more about construction materials and building techniques over time,” Harmeyer said. “Or, political science students can analyze building numbers in micro or macro scales to determine economic trends in campus buildings infrastructure.”
And, of course, former Purdue students can check out just how much campus has changed since their days at the university.
The University Development Office and Archives and Special Collections are partnering to provide donor information data for different buildings on campus. All information related to donors is maintained and managed by the development office, and information is being added or amended in the Database incrementally.
Harmeyer said the database will continue to be maintained, and information will be added on an annual basis to reflect new buildings or demolition of older buildings.
Purdue Libraries’ Geographic Information Systems and Digital Programs also assisted with the development of the project. Explore the Purdue Campus Facilities and Buildings Historic Database at http://collections.lib.purdue.edu/campus/.
Editor’s Note: The article is also posted at www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2018/Q4/travel-back-in-time-with-purdue-archives-new-online-building-database.html.
Filed under: general, SPECNovember 27th, 2018
To prepare for the release of the 36.3 issue of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Purdue University Press interviewed contributor Jay Michaelson about religion, writing, and more.
Michaelson is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, where his work focuses on the intersection of queer studies and Jewish theology. His scholarly publications include “Queering Kabbalistic Gender Dimorphism,” “Hating Law for Christian Reasons: The Religious Roots of American Anti-lawyerism,” and “Chaos, Law, and God: The Religious Meanings of Homosexuality.” His books include Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (Trumpeter, 2009) and God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality (Beacon, 2011). A book based on his doctoral dissertation, Jacob Frank: From Jewish Antinomianism to Esoteric Myth, is presently under review. He holds a PhD in Jewish thought from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a JD from Yale Law School, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination.
Michaelson’s article “Queering Martin Buber: Harry Hay’s Erotic Dialogical?” appears in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, volume 36, issue 3.
“In certain gay subcultures, Harry Hay’s philosophy is well-known and actively practiced, and yet there’s very little awareness there of its close relationship to Buber’s. At first, I was interested in possible influences; as the research went on, this morphed into an interest in phenomenological affinities and differences, and how the two thinkers could complement one another.”
“As an “alt-ac” with a long-term visiting position at Chicago Theological Seminary but a primary career outside the academy, there’s a certain freedom in being able to write scholarly articles on a wide variety of subjects, and I certainly make use of that. In addition, I’m interested in bridging discourses between “high” philosophers such as Buber and outsider thinkers like Hay. I’m not sure Hay is (or deserves to be) taken seriously by proper philosophy scholars, and yet there’s something quite interesting in his eroticizing of the dialogical that I think is worthy of analysis.”
“It depends on the work. In the case of this article, I was interested in trying to assess, based on the textual evidence, how these similar but divergent dialogical philosophies might be experienced in practice, rather than solely on the page. I think that’s informed by my work in the contemplative world. At the same time, I’m extremely wary of imposing any of my own experiences onto the subjects at hand.”
“I feel like I’ve written a book on that subject.… I think for many people, myself included, the Buddha Dharma provides a less theologically freighted set of contemplative practices that can enrich a Jewish communal and ritual life. The questions Buddhism asks about suffering and the end of suffering are complementary to those Judaism asks about justice and relationship to the Divine. I see them as having different conversations.”
“In terms of the work, I think there’s a constant awareness of the justice impacts of any idea under consideration, including those in this article. For example, for all of Hay’s genius, the problem of essentialism, which I discuss in the article, is particularly glaring in the context of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and threats to democracy. As soon as one group of people declares itself intrinsically different from and better than another, we’re in trouble.”
“Certainly this particular article reflects my own identity as queer person on the one hand, and on the other as an American Jew who encountered popularizations of Buber at an early, formative age.”
“I’d be happy simply to introduce mainstream Jewish studies scholars to considering the sex-negative and implicitly queer-negative elements in various forms of philosophical discourse. There have been some excellent encounters recently between queer/LGBTQ studies and Jewish studies, and I’d be thrilled for this to be another of them.”
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies is a triannual publication that produces original, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, issues on special topics, book forums, review essays, and the occasional forum on Contemporary Critical Jewish Studies. Shofar reaches an international readership with an impressive range of reliably robust offerings primarily in modern history, literature, culture, and the arts. Shofar’s special issues have covered a wide range of timely subjects, including Diaspora and exile in modern Jewish culture, the transcultural generation in Israeli literature, race and Jews in America, and Holocaust and genocide cinema. To learn more about or subscribe to Shofar, visit: www.shofarjournal.org.
Filed under: UncategorizedNovember 14th, 2018
Libraries faculty members Clarence Maybee and Michael Flierl are collaborating with their Purdue colleagues in the University’s innovative and touted IMPACT program.
Transforming OSHA material to make it engaging for Purdue students studying construction management is a daunting task. But, according to Purdue Libraries Associate Professor Clarence Maybee and Assistant Professor Michael Flierl, through IMPACT—Purdue University‘s “Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation” program formally established in 2011—Libraries faculty and staff have helped other Purdue faculty members do just that: make what may seem like tedious (but nevertheless integral) content motivating for college students.
One example is Flierl’s work with James Jenkins (associate professor of construction management in the Purdue Polytechnic Institute) to redesign a construction management course. Through the course, students are able to earn important career-advancing certification from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA); however, federal law requires faculty teaching such courses to base their pedagogy on specific OSHA materials.
“When Professor Jenkins and I initially met, he showed me a manual printed in green and black ink, then said, ‘This is what my students have to deal with. They are just not engaged with this material,'” Flierl explained. “Through our work together in IMPACT, we changed that. Professor Jenkins and I created a variety of different ways to make the content the students were required to learn more dynamic. For example, we incorporated information literacy concepts into hands-on, gaming activities, as well as developed open-ended problems for them to solve.”
Flierl’s work with Jenkins is just one illustration of how the campus-wide IMPACT program has been employed at Purdue. Highlighted in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s October 21 “Education’s 2018 Innovators Special Issue,” IMPACT was described by George D. Kuh, professor emeritus of higher education at Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, as a “textbook illustration of how to successfully deliver timely, substantive, high-quality professional-development experiences over an extended period of time to a particularly discerning audience.”
At the tactical level, through their work in the program, faculty learn how to refine learning outcomes and are equipped with new and innovative tools to engage their students, Maybee explained.
“Libraries faculty have been involved with the program from the very beginning,” he said. “Of course, librarians are interested in the information literacy part of learning and improving instructional design to incorporate information literacy, which improves the learning experience if you do it right. But that isn’t the only thing we have done and are doing in the program. As Michael mentioned, we help instructors think through their pedagogy. We have had a lot of success with that.”
According to the IMPACT website, since 2011, “IMPACT has grown into an institutional transformation program positively impacting every college/school with nearly 9 out 10 of all undergraduate students taking at least one IMPACT course.” The latest data from the program (listed at the bottom of the IMPACT website, www.purdue.edu/impact) show that more than 580 courses have been transformed and over 330 Purdue instructors have participated in IMPACT.
Maybee, who based his 2018 book IMPACT Learning: Librarians at the Forefront of Change in Higher Education (published by Elsevier), said he has been working in the program, along with colleagues from the Center for Instructional Excellence, ITaP (Information Technology at Purdue), as well as faculty from across the University, since he joined IMPACT in 2012. Their investment is proving to be fruitful for faculty and students. The Chronicle’s piece states, “[a]ccording to a recent outside evaluation, Impact-affected courses generally have higher end-of-course final grades and fewer students who withdraw or earn Ds and Fs.”
“In this collaboration, we have used information literacy concepts and instructional design principles to help transform such foundational courses as COM 114 (“Fundamentals of Speech Communication”), English 106, and Tech 120 (a foundational course in technology), which are important building blocks for thousands of Purdue students,” Maybee added. “Overall, Libraries faculty, and the many others involved in IMPACT here at Purdue, have enhanced students’ learning experiences significantly.”
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, generalNovember 7th, 2018
Join Purdue Libraries for “The American Soldier Transcribe-a-Thon,” a Digital Humanities event in commemoration of Veterans Day.
From 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13 in the Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE) Library (Stewart Center, room 142), individuals are encouraged to come and transcribe original and uncensored commentaries written by soldiers who served during World War II and were asked to reflect on their service.
The transcribed commentaries will be saved and made available digitally to students and scholars around the world, providing an important resource for future research.
“These commentaries provide a wealth of information about the soldiers’ lives, their hopes and anxieties about returning to civilian life, and their thoughts about the Army,” explained Purdue Libraries Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities Matt Hannah.
“The American Soldier Transcribe-a-Thon” at Purdue is sponsored by Purdue Libraries and is open free to the public. No technical expertise required, but participants are asked to bring a laptop computer on which to transcribe. Registration is available at https://go.lib.purdue.edu/events/americansoldier.
The annual event is organized by Virginia Tech, and many individuals and entities across the U.S. participate every year.
Learn more about the project at www.zooniverse.org/projects/tkotwim/the-american-soldier/about/research.
Filed under: events, general, HSSE, UncategorizedNovember 6th, 2018
“A Look Back” is a new exhibit in the Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE) Library that pays tribute to Purdue University’s first Library in University Hall.
The event “Celebrating the History of Purdue Libraries”–to highlight the display and commemorate Purdue Libraries’ history–is set from 3-4:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 8 in the Periodical Reading Room on the first floor of the HSSE Library. The event is open free to the public.
At 3:30 p.m., Purdue Libraries Professor Judy Nixon will provide a brief background about the exhibit and introduce David Hovde, Professor Emeritus, Purdue University Archives and Special Collections. Hovde will share his work on his book about the history of Purdue Libraries. At 4:15 p.m. attendees can take part in a tour of the 1913 stacks.
The display in HSSE Library was designed by Nixon, Director of Purdue Libraries Facilities Nanette Andersson, Library Assistant Pat Whalen, and the “A Look Back”-exhibit planning team.
“A Look Back” is part of the Purdue University’s Sesquicentennial Celebration, 150 Years of Giant Leaps. Learn more at takegiantleaps.com.
Filed under: general, HSSE, SPEC, UncategorizedNovember 6th, 2018
Parrish Library’s Featured Database will give you a very brief introduction to the basic features of one of our specialized subscription databases. This time we’re featuring Nexis Uni, brought to you by LexisNexis, from RELX Group.
Link: http://guides.lib.purdue.edu/az.php?s=71213 is the alphabetical list of the databases specially selected for those in a business program of study. Access the databases off-campus with your Purdue login and password.
Focus: Nexis Uni features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis – including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790.
Tutorial: Click here see the basics of using the Nexis Uni.
Start with this hint: The Guided Search option allows you to target particular types of content in your search such as news, legal cases, or publications.
Why you should know this database: The Nexis Uni interface offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as alerts and saved searches, and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Related Resources
Some other databases you might want to explore, are:
This Featured Database comes to you from the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics. If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact parrlib@purdue.edu. Also let us know if you know of a colleague who would benefit from this, or future Featured Databases.
Since usage statistics are an important barometer when databases are up for renewal, tell us your favorite database, and we will gladly promote it. Send an email to parrlib@purdue.edu.
Filed under: database, general, MGMT