writing – Page 10 – Erhardt Graeff

RIT Information Technology Honors Thesis

26 May 2006Erhardt Graeff

I won an undergraduate research grant to work to build a prototype of a web platform in Ruby on Rails that would enable users to add personal annotations to government documents and share them with other users. I continued work on the prototype and wrote up the documentation in Spring 2006 for my honors thesis.

Documentation

graeff-2006-honorsthesisdocumentation

Abstract

This undergraduate Honors capstone project involves the creation of the novel web application called .GOVernator. The purpose of this social software tool is to allow users to “markup” government documents, like the Bill of Rights, with XML tags using an interface that does require in-depth knowledge of XML. The application is programmed using the Ruby on Rails framework with JavaScript and its implementation in Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), XHTML, CSS, XML, and XSLT. The resulting program is prototype for allowing users to create an account via registration, navigate their own home page allowing them to select government documents to markup (a.k.a scrutinize), and then use a browser-based interface for adding XML tags to government documents—storing tag names to a database for later analysis. All program functionality, except for the critical markup functionality, is in place. Help documents are also still needed to guide the user through interaction with the application’s interface. The future of the project is further development (programming) of the .GOVernator web application, a case study involving 10-30 users, and a proposal to the Lab for Social Computing as an adopted project for school year following this publication of this paper.

Attempting to build the Semantic Web: The Ontological Approach

14 December 2004Erhardt Graeff

Award

This paper won the 2007 RIT Institute Writing Contest in Technical Writing.

Full Text

graeff-2004-semanticweb

Introduction

When father of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee first envisioned the World Wide Web, he imagined it as “an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help.” (1998, Introduction, para. 1) However, what amassed was a mess of poorly formed HTML documents boasting animated GIFs and information displayed without regard for meaning or context. What Berners-Lee was wishing for, and continues to wish for, is a better World Wide Web—a Semantic Web. This ultimate realization of the Internet’s potential is something that Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are still working on. With millions of users and billions of documents, the web is constantly growing and evolving. The W3C hopes that it evolves into the Semantic Web—and that hope lies in something called an ontology. (Clark, 2002)

A Modest Faux Pas

24 September 2004Erhardt Graeff

Script

graeff-2004-modestfauxpas

Synopsis

Mark is a high-schooler plagued by strange dreams and urges. He thinks he might be a cannibal. He “comes out” to his friends Kerry, Tim, and Phil, who have very strong and very different reactions to the news. In the end, Mark finds the strength to be his true self despite Tim’s outrage.

I, Archive

8 February 2004Erhardt Graeff

Artist’s Statement

graeff-2004-iarchivetheorypaper

Synopsis

The purpose of this performance art piece is to illustrate a few archival concepts, the barriers and nuances of archive, specifically. The basis for the experiment is in the simple scenario of “Question & Answer.” I, playing the archive, put myself in the position of interviewee three times. Each time I am asked questions. The first two times, the questions are identical. The third time they are altered ever so slightly. For this to occur, of course, the questions must be scripted which raises a few philosophical questions. Even more questions are raised when users of the archive are privy to an example of someone else’s method of interaction with the archive. And then, how do the users react/interact when they are witness to a previous session via a pre-recording as well as a concurrent video example via a live recording from only a few moments earlier.