Jean Bauer

Category: design

  • Tales from the Port: Part 2 — Migrating the Database

    —

    by

    jabauer
    in , , , ,

    In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have promised to write a blog post every night this week. The port has been going well, but I’ve been working late each night, and it’s just too hard to write clear English prose starting at midnight. So here, at last, is the promised post on migrating Project Quincy’s database…

  • Tales from the Port: Day 1 — Dry Dock

    —

    by

    jabauer
    in , , , ,

    Welcome to my one week blog series, Tales from the Port, chronicling my rewriting of Project Quincy from Ruby on Rails to Django. This series may be a little rough around the edges — I’ll be writing it every night after I accomplish my goals for that day. But I wanted to give people a…

  • Republicans of Letters

    —

    by

    jabauer
    in , , , , ,

    Here are the slides for my January 26th talk at Brown University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, “Republicans of Letters: Historical Social Networks and The Early American Foreign Service Database.” The abstract ran as follows, “Jean Bauer, an advanced doctoral candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and creator of The…

  • In Pursuit of Elegance

    —

    by

    jabauer
    in ,

    I wrote this for the HASTAC Scholars’ forum on Critical Code studies, which I co-hosted in January. To see the post in its original context, click here. *********************** One of the older jokes about programming states that every great programmer suffers from the following three sins: laziness, impatience, and hubris. Laziness makes you write the…

  • Do You See What I See?

    —

    by

    jabauer
    in , , ,

    This is the abstract for my talk, “Do You See What I See?: Technical Documentation in Digital Humanities,” which I gave at the 2010 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science. The actual presentation was more informal and consisted of a series of examples from my various jobs as a database designer. The slides…

  • As We May Code

    —

    by

    jabauer
    in

    Since the debut of the iPad, I can’t stop thinking about path dependency. These virtual keyboards separate letters from numbers from symbols onto three distinct screens. While using my iPhone, I find myself spelling out words like “between” because I’d rather keep to the letters keyboard than switch back and forth to write “b/w.” Everyone…

  • Introducing DAVILA

    —

    by

    jabauer
    in , , ,

    I have just released my first open source project. HUZZAH! DAVILA is a database schema visualization/annotation tool that creates “humanist readable” technical diagrams. It is written in Processing with the toxiclibs physics library and released under GPLv3. DAVILA takes in the database’s schema and a pipe separated customization file and uses them to produce an…

  • The Design Bug

    —

    by

    jabauer
    in ,

    Edward Tufte should come with a warning label. Since I took his course a year ago last October, I have been bitten by the design bug. I realized the depth of this obsession last night while putting together a projected syllabus for a summer course in the History Department. Just a simple word processing document,…