Alexandra Sichel Brown ‘13
Genevieve LeMoine, Curator/Registrar, The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum
In 2014 the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum will host a new exhibit celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Donald B. MacMillan’s Crocker Land expedition (1913-1917), based in Northwest Greenland. The Museum recently acquired a collection of journals, photographs, equipment, and research specimens from the family of Elmer Ekblaw, who was a geologist/ecologist on the expedition. Alexandra Brown spent the summer working with Museum staff to develop an interactive component for the upcoming exhibit based on Ekblaw’s personal journals, including a blog that shares the highs and lows of the expedition.
John Butterworth, III ‘14
Robert Greenlee, Professor, Department of Music
Nathaniel Wheelwright, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Natural Sciences, Department of Biology
The bird family Columbidae consists of more than 300 species of pigeons and doves. Some of these species use rhythm as an important signifier in their songs, and the rhythms of their songs are often organized in ways akin to rhythms commonly employed by humans. John Butterworth spent the summer transcribing the coos of pigeons and doves from around the world using Raven software to measure and analyze the sounds. He collaborated with Robert Greenlee and Nat Wheelwright to summarize the findings and report on them.
Article:
Ornithologist and Musician Team Up to Solve Birdsong Mysteries
Sether Borden Hanson ‘13
Ericka Albaugh, Assistant Professor, Department of Government and Legal Studies
Sether Hanson and Ericka Albaugh collaborated to produce maps of language spread in West Africa using ArcGIS. Certain languages spread beyond their ethnic “core” and become nearly universal lingua francas in a particular region, others spread but do not become singularly dominant, still others stay connected to their ethnic group almost exclusively, and others recede to fewer speakers than their ethnic group and are replaced by another neighboring language. Sether and Ericka’s summer work included creating a “language spread” variable of six language groups in West Africa so that they could map the shifts due to geography, war, boundaries, and education. The results of their project include maps to enable more detailed analysis of the data.
Richard Andres Hopkins ‘13
Allen Tucker, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Natural Sciences Emeritus, Department of Computer Science
Second Helpings is a regional food “rescue” operation based in Charleston, SC. Its volunteers pick-up food at supermarkets and deliver it to churches, food banks, and senior centers in Beaufort and Jasper counties. Richard Hopkins and Allen Tucker continued their work on a mobile app, Homeplate that will allow Second Helpings’ volunteers to accurately report via mobile devices the quantity of food that is picked up and delivered each year. Their work added functionality to the Homeplate app making it possible for the volunteers to directly enter information into the app at each pick-up and delivery stop in an attempt to replace the manual process that is currently used.
Article:
There’s a Bowdoin App for That: Computer Science Prof. and Student Design App for the Common Good
Min Sun (Sarah) Lee ‘14
John Lichter, Samuel S. Butcher Associate Professor in the Natural Sciences, Department of Biology
Eileen Johnson, Program Manager and GIS Analyst, Environmental Studies Program
Sarah Lee worked with John Lichter and Eileen Johnson on an ongoing project, “Ecological and economic recovery and sustainability of the Kennebec and Androscoggin rivers and their common estuary and nearshore marine environments.” She performed GIS analysis on historic fishing grounds along the coast of Maine and integrated historical records of fishing landings into the research along with the location and distribution of historical fish populations.
Somya Artidiang Mawrie '14
Dhiraj Murthy, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Somya Mawrie spent the summer in the Social Network Innovation Lab working with Dhiraj Murthy and SNIL staff to develop and deploy a number of surveys and interview instruments. She also conducted and documented both face-to-face and virtual ethnographic interviews and gained hands-on experience in transcription and qualitative coding practices. Additionally she worked with a trust dataset that was developed by other student researchers during the academic year.
Alexander Robert Pensavalle ‘14
Dhiraj Murthy, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Alex Pensavalle spent the summer in the Social Network Innovation Lab working with Dhiraj Murthy and SNIL staff on a wide variety of projects. These included the development of applications to collect real-time data from a variety of social networks, working to prepare and transform collected data for analysis and visualization, developing innovative tools to allow for the visualization of collected and created data, as well as exploring a number cutting edge techniques in the fields of machine learning/classification and natural language processing. He learned versatility through exposure to a variety of tools, methods, databases, and programming languages for the desktop and web-based environments under the mentorship of the lab’s resident programmer.
Rachel Nicole Pollinger ‘15
Eric Gaze, Director of the Quantitative Reasoning Program, Center for Learning and Teaching
Meridian Stories is a series of monthly digital storytelling competitions for Middle and High School students utilizing digital content creation to accomplish curricular goals. Each competition challenges teams of students to create short-form stories using images, words, video, and music in the service of core curricular objectives. Rachel Pollinger and Eric Gaze spent time researching and curating the core mathematical curricular goals for Middle and High School students. They developed ten mathematical challenges, developed championship round challenges, and participated in the design and implementation of focus groups to determine the efficacy and engagement of the proposed mathematical challenges.
Niliezer Delia Vazquez ‘14
Brian Purnell, Assistant Professor, Africana Studies Program
Niliezer Vazquez worked with Brian Purnell to chart new immigrants’ settlement patterns as well as changing urban community demographics. She created group-focused charts and intergroup comparative charts. Additionally, she used the Library’s Social Explorer database to generate maps to depict changing immigration patterns in major cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles); declining “Rustbelt” cities (Detroit, Pittsburg, Youngstown); emerging “Sunbelt” cities (Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Diego); and mid-sized to small metropolitan areas (Portland/Lewiston, ME; Minneapolis, MN; Sioux Falls, ND), which did not have noticeable immigration populations from the global regions (Africa, Southeast Asia, Central and South America) that fed the post-1965 immigration waves.
John Robert Visentin ‘14
Eric Chown, Professor, Department of Computer Science
As an assignment in Computer Science 281 (Mobile Computing) in Fall 2011, Rob Visentin and Stephanie Bond (Gibbons Program, Summer 2011) began work on an app designed to provide location information to anyone wandering around Bowdoin’s campus. The app contains a map of campus with interactive buttons at each building to direct users to more information, photos, descriptions, departments, hours, etc. Rob continued work on the app with Eric Chown to make some improvements, including displaying the user’s current location using GPS, offering self-tours of buildings based on one’s location, and posting a list of events happening that day. The app will be available to purchase from the Apple App Store in Spring 2013.
Article:
There’s a Bowdoin App for That: Rob Visentin '14 Builds New Campus Guide