Check out GB’s CV, interests, and more What can I do for you?
My world ... Cambridge, Mass. Harvard, MIT, and Central Square
Originally from New England, life lead from here to Monterey, to Davis, to Los Angeles, to Lexington, KY, and ultimately back to New England. Along the way there were lots of trips abroad, primarily to Europe. One dreams of settling down on the French Riviera (Juan-les-Pins, please) or camping in Scandinavia or those great hikes in Germany. It's all good!
Being in Cambridge led to a faculty affiliation at Havard University as a Senior Common Room member in Adams House and to a new phase of consulting for small- and large organizations, in better data use and improved work/data flows.
Digital Storytelling – it’s what’s been missing in information- and data science.Published Nov 26, 2021
Years ago, someone at Mitsubishi, Cambridge Labs, noticed folk on a coffeebreak were doodling on napkins, sketching ideas, and re-arranging those napkins to tell a story. That person went on to study the role of storytelling in problem-solving and communicating ideas to others. Meanwhile as desktop computers became more powerful, tools for creating mixed-media sites became easier to use ... and people created lots of websites. But the trend in web-based communication is to follow-the-leader, using the same design, the same message, often the poorly-designed means to try to sell something.
Tell your story: digital storytelling as scrollytelling emerged as a meaninful way to combine digital data (text, images, sound, video, interactive data visualizations, and more) into a comprehensive unit. I specialize in this area, from the front-end client/user experience to the back-end programming and data services site.
Check out the whitepaper on data science and visualization ... coming shortly.
Welcome to an online portfolio ...
Slide pages over to view ... comments are always welcome
on research projects and opportunities.
Please be encouraged to visit my
C. V. site.
And the Spring
Minimalist Version.
Thanks for visiting | Merci bien de votre visite.
Academic & Work Chops: An experienced professor-for-hire Why your company or university should hire me.
The technical world is not just computing, nor mining customers' data. There are issues of theory, practice, ethics and how to think about the problems we address. An experienced programmer, web designer, professor conducting research and teaching undergraduate-through-doctoral level students has skills that are hard to describe. But they're useful. Check out the cv and send any questions. | je suis à la recherche d’un emploi... après une préretraite un peu malavisée pour raisons familiales ... je suis prête à partager mes compétences ...
Please visit my pdf CV , including these unedited student comments. Hope to hear from you soon. Cheers -GB.
Feux d’artifice! Fête nationale de France Published July 15, 2019
Asa, my nephew, and I headed to the Champs de Mars long before the fabled fireworks finally fired. [Okay, I like alliterations.] Seated with the expectations of a fine view, kinda behind the tower holding the tv cameras, we had a blanket, dinner, and champagne. Our neighbors were a nice family with a couple of young kids who preferred sitting the (our) blanket to the grass and they were welcome to it ... and before long we found ourselves squeezed about 5 feet away from our own blanket, to the amused, drôle comments of those who watched the slow infestation of fellow celebrants. Regardless, all was in good sprits and fun. Then the Dutch family of impossibly tall high school aged boys, stood up in front of us. Literally a wall of backs ... blocking our view.
Nevertheless ... the fellow-feeling of thousands upon thousands of folk, enjoying an amazing live concert, then the most amazing fireworks demonstration, and equally amazing, those thousands quietly & calmly all heading their own ways after the fantastic show in the rather unlighted park would be a lesson to us all. ... and then the Firemen’s Balls: How can the fun version of real democracy of people, the organs of state reflecting their majority will, and a party be all bad? : )
Travel Blog and Pix Coming soon ...
When travelling I take lots of pix and then review the day or week writing a stream-of-consciousness blog. The link will appear here shortly.
Free software? Yup. Published Nov 25, 2021
Everyone loves OpenSource materials - especially when they work, are easy to install and to use. I write lots of stuff for the fun of it - partially as teaching tools for classes, and partially just to see.
Project Cataloguer: museums, libraries, archives, and businesses that use controlled vocabularies for describing materials often end up with poorly created or half-done records when projects include volunteers or busy staff or they create great records that represent only a tiny proportion of the collection. One tool offered here is a Cataloguer tool to facilitate creating records ... [more to come].
And how about searching those records to output either a .json file or a fresh webpage?
And scrolly telling? Sure. Here's a project underway for First Nations to tell a story, not just add more digital objects to an endlessly growing pile of them, without context, without understanding, without a goal. And more stuff to come.
Latest paper: Linguistic Register and Covid-19 Published 2021
The flurry of conflicting news reports and Trump’s confusing reaction led to confusion among all of us. For medical practitioners the reaction was different: research and public-access info sources, like JAMA, New York Times and other sites dropped the pay-wall to allow everyone access to news and data as they became available.
As a researcher in language issues in full-text retrieval, it seemed important to find improvements in search engine design to get the data about covid to those who needed it - and in ways that the end-user could understand those data. It makes no sense providing biochemical reports to the public and fluffy press pieces about the need to wear masks to front-line medical staff. An ISO standand about linguistic register was revised but then languished. I adopted this model in a retrieval engine to parse a number of these temp-access journals to form a test corpus. Using an interactive information visualization I wrote using d3 I explored the linguistic trends and unexpectedly social noise, er trends, in the data. Here’s a link to the pdf pre-print version. Comments are always welcome.
The original corpus was created before Covid - it was a combination of English, French, and Cree languages and the goal to was explore the intersection of learners of language and search engine behavior. Note that register is not just genre!
Get to know some computing/tech fundamentals Course Materials
Particularly in online teaching, materials for teaching students and “training the client”, benefit from multiple formats and delivery media. For instance in the Computing for Data Science course I teach using Python, there are a lot of Jupyter Notebooks that combine the lesson and are live how-to and question guides. Sometimes we need to fill-in gaps in experience and knowledge by creating a kind of white paper: a mini state of the art review of main themes. One cool tool, imho, is the multilingual video and closed-captioning tool that makes it very easy to convert and publish lessons with multilingual support. [The github and other links will appear here so you can snag a copy.]
Other interests: Rare Book Arts & Illustrations
The alphabet, abjads, abugidas, and ideographic forms of writing are all symbol systems. And so is programming, writing the great American novel, and any signs created to preserve an idea. The integration of writing-as-symbol with [more traditional forms of] graphics is the record of the development of skill, of transmission, of the arts, and of history - and this is what rare books and manuscripts offer. It’s easy to just admire the whole but it’s the parts and their subtle differences that provide such satisfaction.
Paleography, typography, calligraphy: check out the growing collection of writing examplars from around the world - developing here.
 From l’Encyclopédie de Diderot |
 John Seddon’s 1695 Penman’s Assistant |
 Pali Manuscript, Burmese Kammavacca | |
A candidate project: Shoshone Tribal Scrollytelling Nov 25, 2021
Lots of images and media don’t do that much - making them available online is the first step but without context, without integrating materials from larger academic and research libraries, and without local input, online collections aren’t as useful as they could be. With Vanessa Rayes & Anastasia Wiegle and The Neva Knowledge Center, we're creating a toolkit to help folk overcome technical and management issues in creating participatory scrollytelling. The project creates the software, the how-to guide for volunteers to create their own materials for contribution, and, importantly, integrates these local resources with Library of Congress and other collection materials - to tell a fuller story. Project materials will be available for free. If you want to participate, too, just drop me a note.
Information Visualization text book.Published 2019/2020
Lots of texts exist on the topic of information visualization - but very few consider the aesthetics and ethics of data, the beauty and design, and how the whole can be integrated on the job. Creating visualizations isn’t that great a challenge anymore but knowing what you’re doing is.
From a library catalogue:
Description
Introduction to Information Visualization: Transforming Data into Meaningful Information
is for anyone interested in the art and science of communicating data to others. It shows readers how to transform data into something meaningful - information. Applying information visualization in research, service, teaching, and professional life requires a solid understanding of graphic design and the aesthetic along with hands-on skills and knowledge of data principles and software. This book is applicable to students in all domains, to researchers who need to understand how to create graphics that explain their data, and to professionals and administrators for professional development training. Website Designers and Human-Computer Interaction researchers will appreciate the backstory of designing interactive visualizations for the web. ISBN: 978-1-5381-1834-4. Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield.
Thanks for visiting...Gerry Benoît, Ph.D.
Teaching data science, visualization, programming, rdbms,
statistics, research methods, philosophy of information, and more across the
information science and data science curricula. I've consulted for many large and small institutions in systems analysis, integrating systems, and getting more from their data.
Teaching now for UC Berkeley's Data Science program and for SJSU's Informatics program. Drop me a note!