The HiPerCiC initiative creates custom web applications for users through collaboration between computer science students and domain specialists. For the Fall 2015 semester, six digital humanities projects are planned for the ID 259 course involving this work, including tools for exploring 1924 Paris music, an online art museum, a dance video archive, and archaeology research website. Preparation for the course involved developing training materials and frameworks for 3D modeling, maps, and other technologies to support the projects.

1. ID 259: HiPerCiC: Collaborative Web Applications
Rodney LaLonde ‘16, Jonathan Featherstone ‘17, Omar Shehata ’18
Advisor: Dick Brown
HiPerCiC
The High-Performance Computing in Context (HiPerCiC)
initiative creates custom web sites (called apps) for the needs
of specific users, through interdisciplinary collaboration.
Typically, teams of undergraduate CS students and end-users
(called the domain specialists) interactively design and
develop HiPerCiC apps, each person bringing their personal
expertise to the effort. The programmers build HiPerCiC apps
over a foundational framework of code called Hipercore, in
order to speed development, simplify upgrades, and facilitate
software sharing between apps. Over two dozen HiPerCiC
apps have been created to date for persons across the St.
Olaf campus.
Abstract
The High-Performance Computing in Context (HiPerCiC)
initiative creates custom web sites, called apps, produced
collaboratively by computer science (CS) undergraduates
working with users of those apps. Many HiPerCiC apps
originate in an interdisciplinary undergraduate-research
course, ID 259. The Fall 2015 offering of the course will focus
on five applications in the Digital Humanities, supporting work
in Computational Linguistics, English and American Studies,
Musicology, curation of Dance videos, and a digital approach
to Archaeology. This poster describes preparation for the
course, including programmer training-materials development,
exploration of 2D, 3D, and geographic information system
(GIS) technologies for visualizing and displaying data and
objects, and improvements in the Hipercore framework
software that forms the foundation for building HiPerCiC web
apps.
Training Materials
Central to the success of any course is planning. The goal of
this area of research was to create the perfect six-session set
of materials and homework to empower students with new
abilities in key areas of web-app development and
deployment. These areas include: database management
systems, such as PostgreSQL; data representation and
collection through text, graphics, charts, maps, 3D models,
and more using Javascript, HTML5, CSS, and others; a
framework to connect these two through Django with
Hipercore’s additions as well as Python; and web servers
such as Apache and Lighttpd. Formulating detailed and
concise guides to these areas and creating extensive
documentation of HiPerCiC specific projects was the
cornerstone focus of preparation for the ID 259 course.
ID 259 Interdisciplinary
Course
Most HiPerCiC apps have originated in the interdisciplinary
course ID 259, HiPerCiC Collaborative Web Apps, taken by
CS students and domain students who form interdisciplinary
teams to create custom web apps for particular professors. All
students learn project-management materials and develop
technical writing skills. When a project team is not meeting for
planning and feedback, CS students on the team learn
HiPerCiC technologies and construct a project’s software,
while the team’s domain students pursue relevant independent
projects. Increasingly, HiPerCiC teams in ID 259 also interact
with students in other courses in the domain, who provide user
feedback and ultimately use the software for their coursework.
Fall 2015 Course Projects
Hipercore improvements
The process of preparing for the upcoming offering of ID 259 has led to several technical
improvements in the Hipercore framework, which forms the foundation software for all HiPerCiC
apps, as well as better documentation for Hipercore. Making more and more useful features
become available within Hipercore enables teams of HiPerCiC developers to produce better
apps in less time.
Computational Linguistics
HiPerCiC teams have collaborated with Prof. Rika Ito
(Linguistics) for several years on computational linguistics
projects aimed at examining word usage, including
construction of concordances (KWIC indices), gathering of text
samples from the web, and creating crowdsource capabilities.
The new ID 259 HiPerCiC app in computational linguistics will
incorporate the earlier efforts and add big-data style analysis
of large, established corpora (prepared text data sets). One
such dataset may be COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary
American English, compiled by Professor Mark Davies at
Brigham Young University. This resource would provide
counts and frequencies of words, phrases, and collocates in
one of the most widely used corpora on the web, furthering
exploration and discovery.
Six main projects related to the Digital Humanities are planned for the
Fall 2015 offering of ID 259:
● an interactive tool for exploring the music of 1924 Paris
(Prof. Louis Epstein);
● a virtual museum of artifacts of interest in English and American
Studies, compiled by students (Prof. Mary Titus);
● a curated collection of decades of Dance performance videos
(Prof. Anthony Roberts);
● an online interactive catalog of artistic ceramic coffee cups
(Prof. Kathrine Fisher);
● continued study in computational linguistics (Prof. Rika Ito)
● website for an innovative digital approach to archaeology research
(Prof. Tim Howe).
3D Rendering
Research into 3D rendering and object manipulation was conducted for the purpose of
supporting Tim Howe’s archaeology research, Mary Titus’s virtual museum, and other projects.
To prepare for the course, background research was conducted into 3D object technology to
provide an expandable framework that would be developed further in the ID 259 course.
Everything from affine transformations, representations of spatial orientation, to what file format
would be most sustainable were all researched. Due to its importance in 3D printing the STL file
format was chosen to be supported first, with different rendering and manipulation techniques
analyzed for further development in the course.
Geographic Information Systems
Research into geographic information systems (GIS) was conducted for the purpose of
supporting Louis Epstein’s 1924 paris research and course and several other projects. Various
technologies were researched both for the visualization (e.g. Highsoft AS and Leaflet) and
storage (e.g. PostGIS and GeoDjango) of GIS data to lay the groundwork for further expansion
in the ID 259 course. Interactive representations of data, such as interactive maps and charts,
can be an extremely powerful tool for researchers. We created a good framework using
highcharts and leaflet to build an interactive map to illustrate the music scene of 1924 Paris.