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About Me and A Project Idea

About Me:

I’m a second year PhD student in Philosophy at the GC, and an Adjunct Instructor at Hunter College and City College.  I’m interested in social and political philosophy, though my interests within that field are still varied.

I’ve just recently quit my job – a Macintosh computer technician – at a company called Tekserve, where I worked for over eight years. This was a much anticipated move, though it still feels really weird not to be there 3-4 times a week. It certainly feels nice, however, to be able to concentrate fully on my schoolwork now.

I am also a musician; I play bass and sing in a band called The Fear And Trembling. If I did not play music regularly I think I would go insane.

 

Project Idea:

1. To create a database for research that also has elements of a blog.  This app (maybe?) would be accessible through a computer, tablet, smartphone, etc., so I guess it would have to be both browser-based and application-based.

The rough format of the database would be:

  1. An archive of user-uploaded material accessible through the database. The material can be tagged however the user sees fit to provide intuitive searching and grouping.
  2. The user will be able to interact with any material that is uploaded; so, in the case of an article, the user will be able to highlight bits of text within the digital file.
  3. The user will also be able to attach the uploaded material to a blog-type interface that is part of the database. This will allow a user to attach a review of an article to the article itself (one example), and when the user searches for the article the attached post will accompany the article. These blog posts can also be tagged for easy retrieval.
  4. Since it may be difficult to get a free digital copy of everything that is needed for research, the site could potentially have the capacity to directly import purchased digital files from Amazon.com or something like that.
  5. Otherwise, the site will also have an import feature for material taken directly from hard storage.
  6. The site could potentially also host the researcher’s work in progress, along with citations.
  7. Ideally, the database content would be stored somewhere in a cloud, with the option for periodic hard backups to a computer that allows a user to work offline and upload the new content when a connection is reestablished. I guess there would be some sort of sync option.

 

I have two other project ideas that I mentioned in class, but they are not as well thought out. I will include them later when I have a better understanding of their function.

 

 

Posted in Motivations.

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2 Responses

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  1. Amy says

    Hey Laura — I’m sure you’ve heard of this, but just came across this music blog/app/social networking site that made me think of you: http://cashmusic.org/

  2. Michael Mandiberg (they/them) says

    Is this meant for private research or the public display of a research process? Take a look at http://www.documentcloud.org. The nice thing about that site is the role of collaboration. It was originally geared towards journalists, but I think it may do some of the things you are talking about (for libre documents). I would suggest you give it a whirl, and see how it works.



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