Hackathon 

One of VUE’s goals is to build a community of scholars on campus who are actively involved in using modern methods of data visualization in order to further their understanding of their own data and to create new ways of presenting conclusions to both scholarly and general audiences. We host hackathons to bring local scholars to expand the data visualization community for humanity and social sciences across campus.

2019-2020: Next VUE Hackathon - Postponed due to COVID-19. Date: TBA

Application Deadline: The 2020 Spring Hackathon has been delayed and will be rescheduled when we are able to safely reconvene on campus.

Anticipated Date: Late Fall, 2020
 

Winter 2019: VUE Hackathon - March 2nd

Hackathon Date: March 2nd
Application Deadline: February 15th

The Research Computing Center (RCC) at the University of Chicago held its first VUE Hackathon to foster the understanding and exploration of data visualization for research within humanistic disciplines. The project aimed at building a community of scholars who shared an interest in how data visualization could help their research work in contributing to humanistic knowledge and mode of inquiry.  We helped researchers take the first steps to identify and to solve data visualization problems. We welcome members of the University of Chicago research community of all levels to apply to participate in this hackathon. The event took place at the Crerar Library Zar Room.

Prior to the main Hackathon event, we held office hours on February 22nd for participants to discuss about possible/available projects and about data preparation. 

On March 2nd, 28 participants came to the Zar Room and worked on the following projects: 

  • Comparison of media coverage between US and China on social inequality led by Prof. Xi Song from the Department of Sociology. This project was to complement one of the VUE supported project of Prof. Song. 

  • 1919 Chicago Riot - Geocoding of incident locations and georeferencing of the old map eventually used for https://1919map.rcc.uchicago.edu led by Prof. John Clegg from the Department of History. This project was one of the VUE supported project of Prof. Clegg. 

  • Visual comparison of scientific texts by Goethe and Candolle led by Agatha Kim from the Department of History. This project was one of the VUE supported project. The final project website is here. 

  • Quantitative analysis of political speech by populist leaders around the world to explore the rhetoric commonalities and differences among those leaders led by Prof. Stokes from the Department of Political Science. 

  • Relative impacts of malaria in different nations across sub-Saharan Africa.

Pictures from the event are here.