A Photographic Journey through a Literary Hackathon
Last week I participated in my first Humanities Hackathon called CODEX, organized by Jennifer 8. Lee from Plympton, a literary studio, and is now in its third installment. The hackathon took place on the 3rd floor of the prestigious MIT Media Lab building in Boston.
I will be writing a couple of posts about my experience at the hackathon and the project that I worked on.
This first piece is a photographic travelogue of my time at the hackathon.
Snow Covered Campus
I took a red eye flight from San Francisco and did not sleep on the plane as I remained utterly absorbed in Dostoevsky’s world.
I arrived on the morning of Friday, February 10th and after a quick breakfast and shower went out for a walk to explore my surroundings. I found the campus completely abandoned and it turned out that classes at both MIT and Harvard had been canceled due to the severe and recurrent snow storms.
Ready..Set..Party
CODEX had organized a fun opening night party on Friday with lots of food, drinks, and MIT Press book giveaways. Along with writing our names on our name tags, we also had to write our favorite book. This definitely turned out to be a great conversation starter as I met many new people and had great conversations with them about their beloved books and authors. Currently enrolled in a course on Southern writers, I chose William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying as my favorite book for the evening. After having closely read three of Faulkner’s novels, I feel as if I have been living amongst his characters in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
Later in the evening MIT Libraries director, Chris Bourg, gave a wonderful talk about the serendipity of reading, the growth of digital libraries, and democratizing access. Chris joined MIT in 2014 after serving as an Associate University Librarian for public services at Stanford.
Saturday, February 11 — Hack DAY 1
The hack day began promptly at 10 am. I arrived around 9:45 am and was surprised to see the room already full with eager hackers. I ate a hearty meal of pastries and coffee to fuel myself for the long day ahead.
The morning officially began with a word from a few of the sponsors and presentations about potential projects and ideas. It was interesting to see that many people in industry and academia are trying to solve similar problems in Digital Humanities. Hence CODEX serves as a great platform for everyone to combine their efforts and come up with innovative solutions.
For the hackathon project I decided to build a web visualization of authors influence. It seemed like an idea that would be easily accomplished in the short span of the hackathon. Using the tools provided by the Codex organizers, I spent a few minutes building a paper prototype.
The ping pong ball in the middle represents a searched author by the user and the green dots around the ping pong ball stand for the authors that influenced the searched author. Upon hovering on the green dots, a dialog, indicated by the yellow post it notes, will open up and reveal a short bio of the green dot authors.
I ended up naming the project Influence Tree and will publish another post about the details of the project.
We were served a sumptuous lunch and a hefty dinner. There were also a considerable number of snacks available throughout the day.
I was able to get most of the code working by the end of the day. We had to clear out the room at 10pm but I was still buzzed from hours of intense coding. I decided to spend some time walking around MIT Campus before heading back to the hotel.
I was pleasantly surprised to see many art installations, posters, and events inside the campus buildings in regards to the current political situation.
Sunday, February 12 — Hack DAY 2:
Day 2 started at 9 am but I arrived close to 10 am as I had gone to bed around 4 am. I was not adjusting too well with the coastal time difference. In the morning I made a few minor adjustments and mainly worked on the presentation as we had to submit our final projects on Devpost by 2 pm.
The swag for this hackathon was every book lovers dream. Not only did they give away books by notable presses but also had loads of goods by Out of Print Clothing and Litographs.
The presentations started at 3 pm and lasted two hours. There were a total of 23 projects that were presented and I found each idea to be very clever and imaginative. I will publish another post about these projects to give a taste of the kind of things that are being worked on in the field of Digital Humanities.
Another snow storm started around the afternoon and resulted in the cancelation of all evening flights. I had to rebook my flight and hotel and ended up spending an extra night in Boston.
We had to clean up after 5pm and said our last goodbyes to everyone!
CODEX was an amazingly energizing and fulfilling experience. It was wonderful to interact with likeminded tech bibliophiles and gain insights about current practices and tools utilized in Digital Humanities.
The extra night in Boston gave me the opportunity to try Boston’s famous clam chowder. I was initially a bit disappointed that I would be leaving Boston without tasting its speciality. And just like the CODEX Hackathon, it certainly did not disappoint!
In my next post about CODEX, I will write in detail about my project Influence Tree and also talk about the other projects that were presented at the hackathon. So Stay Tuned!
