Notes for Kick-Off on April 5, 2016

Agenda

We will be starting the new ACTT process with a Kick-Off meeting. This is an open, non-mandatory meeting for anyone who is interested in learning about the Academic Cyberinfrastructure Transformation Team to attend. We will introduce the new team members, structure, and thoughts on how the Team activities will be evaluated.

This is an open meeting, please share with anyone who is interested in learning about the ACTT

Notes

  • Mission: “Our mission is to evaluate and recommend technology services and innovations for teach, learning and research.”
  • Joe is teaching a course on “Design Thinking” this semester. Design Thinking includes an “Empathy Phase”

Q&A

    • Q (Melissa/CNS). How will information and requests trickle up?
      • “I have many day-to-day projects where I would love to have a license that exists on the Midd campus, but not the MIIS campus, or I would like to build a server with 1TB of storage to host a web site”
      • “My research center, CNS, is becoming such a large consumer of storage and bandwidth”
      • “On a request from Laurie Patton, I am researching a cloud services that could host our information”.
      • Answer – Joe – Anyone who wants to make a request for technology or technology services for academic use may approach the team. Happy to be an entry point for requests that may go to ITS or other groups.
      • Jim – we have to account for the resource requests during the budget request process.
    • Q (Melissa/CNS). We are a collection of researchers that become PI on large grants, we need to inform others of the implications on the projects that we are running…  So we can write it into
      • We are giving money to non-Middlebury developers to do things that could be done inside Middlebury
      • Jim: not necessarily opposed to using outside resources…
    • Q (Jim): May be Amy McGill can weigh in on the MIIS budget process and how funding decisions are made.
      • Amy McGill
        • MIIS Research Centers are funded with base productivity requirements
        • Campus community infrastructure is for day-to-day use
        • Research Centers seek their own funding for larger projects that need additional resources, they do typically provide for initial as well as on-going maintenance costs.
    • Q. ACTT contribution to the Strategic Planning Process?
      • t.b.d.
  • Q (Melissa/CNS).  Is it too early to start making suggestions for agenda items?
  • Q (Melissa/CNS).  I would love to explore the ability to share licenses across campuses.  We pay out of grant licenses for Tableau, for image processing software…  I drool over some of the licenses that the Geology department has.  This is not a simple request, but I would love to tackle it as a subject.
    • A (Zach/ITS-SR): Let’s talk; more productive if we can get an idea of the specific titles you’re interested in, so we can check what licensing models are available.
  • Q (Melissa/CNS).  I would love to talk about our data storage and access to bandwidth.  Because we use satellite images, large data sets, we are becoming something of a hog on the MIIS systems.   I would like to open a discussion on how we can meet CNS’s research technology needs including storage, bandwidth, and some security issues.
    • Joe: Has anyone done a “needs assessment for the department”?
      • We don’t have a department, we are a research center within a larger campus.
      • I have done a casual needs assessment. 13 TB of storage, external drives, google drives, drop boxes… Need access across three offices.
      • Jim:  ITS can help with a needs assessment and identify appropriate technology solutions, perhaps on campus or in the cloud, ideally consistent with other larger IT initiatives for Middlebury and work with CSN to identify, implement solutions.  We did this for the Middlebury DC office a couple of years ago that included the CSN operation there for example.
  • Q (Bob/MIIS).  Working toward equitable cyber infrastructure across VT and Monterey campuses seems like a an appropriate activity for the Team.

Actions

Joe to build form for collecting evaluation requests.

Stacks & Tracks the WRMC Radio Hour celebrates National Poetry Month with guest DJ, Karin Gottshall

Join us this Wednesday, April 13, 2016 at 12p-1p when Stacks & Tracks, the Special Collections & Archives radio show, celebrates National Poetry Month with Karin Gottshall, poet, Visiting Lecturer in English and American Literatures, and director of the New England Young Writers’ Conference at Bread Loaf. It will be music to your ears, promise.

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Wednesdays 12p-1p, live at 91.1FM or live-streaming through iTunes or online.

ACTT In-Progress Project Presentations for RStudio Server and the Academic Cyberinfrastructure Inventory

Tuesday, April 12th from 3-4pm
LIB 105A or Polycom 712833

The new ACT Team process includes in-progress project presentations. These presentations are meant to inform the community about how things are going, what has been done and what still needs to be done, what is going well and what are the challenges.

Agenda

In this meeting we will have two presentations:

In-progress project presentations are open meetings, anyone may attend. Please feel free to share the invitation with anyone you feel is interested in the topics discussed.

 

Middlebury’s Google Apps for Education – Account status

As we continue to integrate Middlebury services with cloud providers like Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, we are aware of possible account conflicts that may arise. In particular, on Monday, April 25th, we will begin automatically syncing Middlebury Google Apps accounts for all students, faculty and staff with @middlebury.edu or @miis.edu addresses. This may result in conflicts for those who have been using stand-alone Google services with an account that you set up to use your Middlebury address but was not provisioned by ITS in our Middlebury Google Apps instance.

What if I have registered my @middlebury.edu address for stand-alone Google services?

If you have been using stand-alone (i.e. not Middlebury Google Apps) Google services with your @middlebury.edu address, you have what Google considers to be a “conflicting account”.

How can I tell if the account I’m using now is a personal or institutional account? 

Try logging out and logging in again. If you enter your Google account password at Google’s login page, that’s a personal stand-alone account and the above considerations apply. If instead you enter your Middlebury e-mail and password at our new login page, that’s an institutional account and you’re all set. You can also watch this video.

Do I need to do anything now?

Yes. Watch the video above and follow the steps to determine if you have a conflicting Google account. If so, it will be much easier to download your documents prior to the sync. This provides you with an archival copy of all documents for which you are the owner.   After the sync, you will be able to place desired documents into your Middlebury Google Apps account.

To download the documents you own:

  1. Login to the Google account that uses your Middlebury email address.
  2. In the upper right corner, click on the icon for your account and click on the “My Account” button.
  3. In the “Personal info & privacy” column, click on “Control your content”.
  4. In the Download your data section click on “CREATE ARCHIVE”.
  5. Under the “Select data to include” section, click the “Select none” button to clear all of the selections.
  6. Click the check box for “Drive” and click “Next” at the bottom of the page.
  7. In the window that appears, leave all options as they appear and click the “Create archive” button. You will see a progress window. When the archive is complete, you will receive an email from Google at your Middlebury email address that indicates the completion of the archive process.
  8. In the email, click on the “Download archive” button.
  9. You will be taken to a Google login screen. Login.
  10. You will see the archive. Click on the “Download” button.
  11. Look in your downloaded files location. You will find a folder named “Takeout” which will contain your files.

After the accounts are synced, any Middlebury-related documents (Docs, Sheets, Slides, or files in Google Drive) that you created with your personal account need to be uploaded to your new Middlebury Google Apps account.

The download process removes all sharing and converts the Google documents to Microsoft format: Docs to Word, Sheets to Excel, and Slides to PowerPoint. If you wish to share these as collaborative documents again, you must first upload (drag and drop) the files to your new Google Drive, then click on them and open them in the Google version of the application. You will then be able to share the document with others.

What if I wait until after the sync occurs?

You will still be able to download your files, though it is a more cumbersome process. ITS can provide assistance if you have not done this prior to the sync.

Can I still access Google’s services for my personal use?

You can choose to maintain a separate account for your personal use of any Google services under a non-middlebury.edu address. If you have multiple Google accounts, the username that appears at the upper right corner of most Google services will help you ensure that you’re using the intended account.

What if I have questions about this?

Please email any questions about this change to helpdesk@middlebury.edu.  Or create an helpdesk ticket.

Defining and avoiding conflicting accounts
https://support.google.com/a/answer/185186

Help with your conflicting account:
https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/1699308?rd=2

Moving your personal data between accounts:
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1109839?hl=en&ref_topic=30035

 

Welcome to “Self-Service” Software Installation

ITS has been working on options for our customers to install licensed software on their college-owned computers using convenient, “self-service” methods that provide control over when the installations take place. (We are not licensed to provide software on personally owned computers, only college owned.)  To learn how this works on college Windows computers, please visit  KACE Self-Service information.  If you have a college Mac, visit Mac Self Service information for details.

Initially, we have made a few of our most commonly-requested Adobe products available through self-service for both Mac and Windows platforms, as well as the new Microsoft Office 2016.   We will be working to add software titles in the next few months.  Please note that not all software is purchased with licensing to be available for every computer on campus.

Self-service installations work best when you are here on campus using a wired (Ethernet) connection to our network.  Use of VPN or wireless connections may work but they will be much slower and are more likely to experience issues.

We are excited to offer this new service and want to hear about how it worked for you.  Feel free to share your feedback, questions, or concerns with our Technology Helpdesk.

AIDS Memorial Quilt Panel on Display

A section of the AIDS Memorial Quilt will be on display on the second floor of the Davis Family Library, beginning the week of April 11 through the end of April. All interested members of the community are invited to visit the display.

More: AIDS Memorial Quilt Panel on Display April 11-29, Davis Family Library

AIDS Memorial Quilt

(Photo of AIDS Memorial Quilt courtesy of the NAMES Project Foundation)

Weekly Web Updates – April 4, 2016

New School of the Environment Homepage

Designed by College Communications and coded collaboratively between our two offices, the Middlebury School of the Environment has a new homepage. The header and footer designs also carry through to the interior pages.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

Digital Surrealism as Research Strategy April 5th

Please join us Tuesday, April 5th at 12:15 PM in the CTLR Lounge for a lunchtime discussion with Kevin Ferguson on some playful and interdisciplinary approaches to digital scholarship that use technologies developed in other fields (like the medical imaging software ImageJ) to answer humanistic questions. Lunch will be served, so please RSVP here. He also has some free time during the day on Wednesday, so if you’d like to learn more about ImageJ or chat with him email Alicia Peaker with your availability.

Most digital humanities approaches pursue traditional forms of scholarship by extracting a single variable from cultural texts that is already legible to scholars. Instead, this talk advocates a mostly-ignored “digital-surrealism” that uses computer-based methods to transform film texts in radical ways not previously possible. The return to a surrealist and avant-garde tradition requires a unique kind of research, which is newly possible now that humanists have made the digital turn. I take a surrealist view of the hidden in order to imagine what aspects of media texts are literally impossible to see without special computer-assisted techniques. What in the archive is in plain sight but still invisible? What in the cinema is so buried that our naked eyes are unable to see it? Here I present one such method, using the z-projection function of the scientific image analysis software ImageJ, to sum film frames in order to create new composite images. I examine four corpora of what would normally be considered rather different types of film: (1) the animated features produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, (2) a representative selection of the western genre (including American and Italian “spaghetti” westerns), (3) a group of gialli (stylish horror films originating from Italy that influenced American slasher films), and (4) the series of popular Japanese Zatoichi films, following the adventures of the titular blind masseuse and swordsman living in 1830s Japan.

Kevin Ferguson is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing at Queens College (CUNY). He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on college writing, contemporary literature, and film adaptation.