[Announcement from he-sl listserv]
Hello, Colleagues,
I’m attaching here and
pasting below a job description for a graduate student or faculty member who
would work with a team of faculty and professionals on developing a digital,
interactive Map of Community Writing. We are excited about this
opportunity for a graduate student to work on the map development, perhaps even
as part of a masters thesis or doctoral work. Faculty are also most
welcome to apply. Please circulate to any graduate students and faculty
who may be interested in applying. This is an unpaid position. Feel
free to email me off list with any questions.
Many thanks for your
help,
Veronica
Map
of Community Writing Developer Role Description
Last
updated: 8/17/17
We
are looking for graduate student or faculty member to take a leading role in
developing the Map of Community Writing. The Map will collect information about
community writing people, organizations, products, and artifacts and map their
locations and relationships over time, enabling people in the field to track
its evolution and build new connections as well as providing an archive of
important work that might be otherwise ephemeral. The person in this role will
lead the technical development of a “minimally viable” version of the map—one
that illustrates its core components in a way that’s rough around the edges but
offers real value to users and provide evidence to funders of the project’s
viability and importance.
The
ideal candidate will be comfortable with and excited about building interactive
websites and interested in becoming more involved with the field of community
writing. This project will offer you the opportunity to efficiently develop
your technical skills, produce a compelling product that is valuable to the
field, and develop relationships with leaders of the community writing and
computers and writing communities across the country, who will support and
benefit from your work. It could serve as the basis for multiple research
projects and should be able to attract substantial grant funding over
time.
What
you should have
• Experience with and
comfort in learning more about HTML/CSS and Javascript (including, hopefully,
JQuery). You don’t need to be a coding ninja, but code shouldn’t scare you, and
you should be excited about learning more about how to build things with code.
• Familiarity with and
interest in community writing and literacy as a field of study and practice
• Familiarity with and
interest in network and geographic visualizations tools for understanding and
supporting the development of academic fields and social movements
• Have a solid visual
aesthetic and basic ability to design page layouts and simple graphics that
reflect it
What
you should be excited about learning (if you don't know)
• Elementary web application
development. We’re not talking about writing elegant, scalable code. We’re
talking about learning the minimum needed to make the map work, and today’s
frameworks and libraries set that bar lower than ever before. To do the
application development needed for the next version of the Map, you’ll need to
learn:
◦ A client-side framework
for building the user interface. This probably doesn’t need to be more
complicated than Bootstrap, which someone with basic Javascript
and HTML/CSS skills can pick up in an afternoon.
◦ A simple backend web
framework. If Javascript is your language of choice, this would probably be
something like Express.
(If you prefer to use another language like Python or Ruby, that’s great too.
They have their equivalents.) It will probably take a week or so to get
comfortable with this.
◦ How to install a simple
webserver and database, such as Node.js and SQLite,
on your computer and a server. A long afternoon.
• Some key libraries and APIs
◦ Leaflet –
This is the Javascript library we’ve used to create the map visualization and
interface so far. It’s slick and not too complicated. An afternoon to get
going, with more to learn overtime.
◦ A library to visualized
connections with the map as a network. There are several options here, the
easiest to learn of which may be SigmaJS. Probably the same time commitment as
Leaflet for getting something basic running, with fewer advanced features to
learn over time.
◦ The could be all you need,
but you might want to consider whether Typeform forms might be helpful at the
beginning for gathering Map entries, and the Google Maps Geogcoding API could be
helpful for converting addresses and the like into
This
may sound like a lot, but we think you’ll find it manageable if you just dive
in and stick with it. Don’t be overwhelmed by the choices of what to learn. We
have people who can help you choose! You can learn the basics of everything
listed here in a month to six-weeks, and there are myriad online learning
resources to support you. The bang for your tech learning buck should be very
high.
This
is an unpaid position, though our team hopes to gain grant funding after this
“minimally viable” stage.
For
inquiries and questions about position details, please contact Darren Cambridge
at dcambrid@gmail.com.
--
Veronica House, Ph.D.
Associate Director for Service-Learning and Outreach
Founder and Chair, Conference on Community Writing
Incoming Editor, Community
Literacy Journal
Program for Writing and
Rhetoric
317 UCB
University of Colorado Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309
