STA Blog

Project 0: The Kiowa Calendar Project

By

Project 0: The Kiowa Calendar Project

Project Started On: February 9th, 2024
Project Wrapped Up On: March 8th, 2024
Staff Guidance: Stacy
Link to Website: https://kiowacalendars.org/

 

Skills learnt: Github Large File Storage, Storage of assets on server, Using the Terminal beyond cd, mkdir, and pwd, .gitignore in github, a minor css fix, downloading thousands of images with 1 command, utilizing local servers (MAMP)

Introduction

The Kiowa Calendar Project aims to educate the public of the Kiowa Indians visual accounts of their history. The website collects and organizes entries from 15 Kiowa calendars that are currently held at museums. The website hosts about 3000 calendar images that were previously hosted on a 3rd party image hosting service.

Project Purpose: In order to eliminate dependency on 3rd party servers, LAITS decided to migrate all the 3000 images to a local server like GitHub Large File Storage.

 The Process: 3 main steps
When I started working on this project, I felt like I had to climb a tall mountain. However, looking back, each stage was equally exciting and challenging. These were the 3 processes involved in this project:

The Project Process had me asking these questions:
Q. How do I download Images who’s links are specified in a text file?
Q. How do I write a script that alters the location of the image in the csv file?
Q. How do I test the website to see if it has been deployed successfully?

 

1. Downloading all images using their links on the KiowaCalendar Website
– I was provided with a CSV file that contained all of the links to currently existing images on the website.
– I pulled the link section of the CSV file and converted it to a TXT file
– Now, manually downloading the images would have been extremely tedious and time consuming.
– So, after an hour’s research and Stacy’s guidance, I found that a single command in your terminal will help you download as many files you want to your local device as long as the links are in a .txt file.

 

                                        wget -i filename.txt  -O

 Terminal window command to implement step

 

2. Writing Code that would append the CSV file to point to your local server
– Creating a git branch is important
– Earlier, the CSV file had a list of hyperlinks that was hosted on the 3rd party server.
– Since we are migrating it to a local server, we would want to change the path of where these files were stored.
– I utilized a python script to change the path of the files.

 

3. Deployment
– In this stage, we pushed all the changes we made into the github repository and merged it with the main branch

 

4. Testing & Debugging
– A day after the website was deployed, I found some bugs in the website. Some images were broken and there was a CSS styling issue which took away from the user experience.
– Over the last leg of this project journey, I worked on procuring the missing images and adding them to our image folder and fixing the CSS styling issue. It was one line of code!!!

 

Overall, this project was extremely insightful in helping me understand the various parts of the software development cycle! I’ve learned so much about standard practices in industry, utilizing git branches to work on different versions of the project, testing & debugging your code! I am also very grateful that the first project I worked on was being deployed live.

Week 9

By

STA Roster Poster Spring 2024

Client/Prof: LAITS
Completion Status: Started on Jan 23
Staff Guidance: De’sha
Completed on: March 20

Since my last post we totally changed our approach to this project. We wanted to take a more physical-object post, so eventually a drawstring backpack with STA buttons at a carnival was chosen.

 

And that’s a wrap on the 2024 STA roster poster!

Week 5

By

Week at a Glance

This week, I worked through the UTFC banners I was assigned, the Shape and Pattern Training module, and How to Manipulate Shapes training module.

UTFC Banners

Programs: Illustrator
Mentor: De’sha Bass-McClellan

I was assigned to the 10.3 Gatineau/Ottawa border and 9.6 Les îles Sous le Vent dans l’archipel de la Société Lingco Banners. After review throughout the week, both were approved and completed in Basecamp.

 

9.6 Les îles Sous le Vent dans l’archipel de la Société 

 

10.3 Gatineau/Ottawa Border

Shapes and Pattern Training

In this module, I learned about the effect that shapes can have on conveying a certain meaning about the design. Following the KB training, I was introduced to geometric vs organic shapes, shape psychology, Gestalt theory, and visual hierarchy.

The first part of this assignment included creating shapes based on their “personality”.

Free and at peace. This shape has just come back from vacation.
Powerful and confident. This shape has just been promoted.
Energetic and active. This shape just wants to go to the gym.

 

 

Following an introduction to theme and personality, I worked on an assignment that related to visual hierarchy.

 

 

 

 

The tutorial also covered making a pattern and creating organic shapes using pathfinder and the curve tool.

 

 

 

How to Manipulate Shapes

 

In this training module I learned to transform shapes, and better take advantage of Ai tools that create complex shapes.

 

Spring 2024 Week 6

By

STA Roster Poster Spring 2024

Client/Prof: LAITS
Completion Status: Started on Jan 23
Staff Guidance: De’sha

Last week I was going back and forth on how to proceed, which yielded this pretty crazy draft:

And then De’sha put forward this idea, which is meant to feel more cohesive:

So I’ll be working more on that in the days coming up!

Texas German Retractable Banner #11

Client/Prof: Margaret Blevins
Completion Status: Started on Feb 20
Staff Guidance: De’sha

Started on a new TGDP banner! This one is about Texas Germans and the Inter-War Period. Below is the first draft I finished, and in the next drafts I hope to edit things to look more balanced (especially at the last section).

STA Blog Banner Updates!!

Completion Status: Started on Feb 15
Completed on: Feb 20

Updated our blog banner with caricatures from our new STAs, Raaga, Diya, and Shriya!

Week 35 – Thang Truong

By

Week 35: AI is taking over

Project: Whisper AI

Started on:  Feb 19, 2023

Staff Guidance: Chris

Description: This is a very interesting project where I need to dive into the world of AI and text-to-sound capabilities of AI’s model. The main task of this project comprises of exploring different values for a parameter of the Whisper AI model, especially the hallucination silence threshold. This parameters sets out the time limit for when the model can seek past that duration and reprocess at that point after it encounters moments of silence. Therefore, in this project, I need to loop over different parameters and examine the quality of the output in terms of text and the time it takes to output. If at some values of the threshold that we can see improvement in the time and significant changes in the text output, then we can conclude we have found the value that optimizes the model and give us the best result.

 

Step by Step tutorials

  • 1) Install Open AI Whisper AI
  • 2) Write out a function to extract 10 minutes of the videos
  • 3) Write out a function to utilize the Whisper AI model to transcribe the video
  • 4) Capture and export the text of the generated caption into a text file

 

Shriya – Week 2/12 – 2/16

By 

UTFC Banners: 10.1 Québec & 9.5 Port Villa

START: Feb 7, 2024 

COMPLETED BY: Feb 14th, 2024

DESCRIPTION: This week I was tasked with creating UTFC Banners for two different units. 
 
10.1 Québec 
Step 1. Images Cutout
For this section I started with these three images and used photoshop to erase the background.
  
From here I put the cutout images into Illustrator and used the image trace feature 
to create vectors of each of the images. 
  
Once I had image traced versions of these photos I created a layout that would compliment 
the banner text and center Tex & Tammy.
 
 
  
  
  

9.5 Port Villa
I repeated the same process for Port Villa to get this final result:
  
 
  
   

WHAT I LEARNED:
Through this process I learned a lot about being very attentive to detail. 
Going through multiple rounds of feedback and iteration for these banners, I was able to learn the expectations for these projects and how to apply them properly.