Students buried their heads deep into their textbooks, studying for summer session midterms in the futuristic pods of the remodeled Charles E. Young Research Library.
But just a few yards away, about a dozen staff members gathered together, deeply engrossed in their own summer project: the YRL Hackathon.
Hackathons are typically day-long events dedicated to collaborative computer programming, said Annelie Rugg, the director and chief information officer for the Center of Digital Humanities. Thursday’s event was put on by staff in the Center for Digital Humanities, UCLA Library and the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design for the first time.
The challenge facing the small group of UCLA staff members was to take two faculty research project ideas and turn them into working prototypes, all in less than a full work day.
Among the selected project proposals was David Shepard’s, a visiting assistant professor of digital humanities.
After spending last year studying how people communicated with social media during events like the recent Egyptian and Libyan uprisings, Shepard decided he wanted to develop a tool that could look at what people were tweeting about and discover relationships between the tweets over time, he said.
The other project idea came from Agnes Stauber, head of digital media at the Fowler Museum. Stauber’s project, which would be an exhibition in the Fowler Museum, was to gather tweets, Facebook posts and images about Shirdi Sai Baba, a popular Indian saint who has both Hindu and Muslim followers, and map them out geographically on a website to analyze how the saint became a global phenomenon, Rugg said.
The hackathon participants quickly realized that the similarities of the two projects would allow them to find a similar solution for both when they came in on Thursday, Rugg said.
The UCLA staff members, experienced in Web design and programming, combined their skills, focusing their efforts on a couple of projects for a short period of time, Rugg said. “(The hackathon) sort of breaks that multitasking habit we all have and allowing you to “˜monotask’ for a little bit,” she added.
Hackathons yield results that can lead incrementally to a bigger project, Rugg said.
“You can actually do something significant without a huge time investment.”
Rugg started organizing the Hackathon at the end of last school year with Todd Grappone, an associate university librarian for digital initiatives and information technology, and Anthony Caldwell, director of technology for the department of architecture and urban design.
The three staff members collected proposal submissions earlier this summer, eventually narrowing them down to two projects, Rugg said.
For most of the day, the participants would brainstorm and discuss the projects and then break off into two teams to work on the actual websites.
One team focused on designing the parts of the website that users would interact with and the other programmed the behind-the-scenes technical aspects, said John Lynch, instructional technology coordinator for the Center for Digital Humanities.
Working only a few feet away from each other made it easy for the two teams to coordinate with one another throughout the process ““ a perk of the hackathon, Shepard said.
“The more often you can get feedback, the less work you have to do,” Lynch said.
Throughout the day, Lynch would roll backward in his blue and white swivel chair to consult with the two men who were programming the technical side of the website to make sure they were all on the same page.
The technical team consisted of Shepard and Yusuf Bhabhrawala, a senior instructional programmer at the Center for Digital Humanities. The two both donned olive green shirts and blue jeans, giving them the appearance of wearing a team uniform as they typed away at their keyboards using the coding languages Java and MySQL to develop the projects.
By the end of the day, the hackathon did not reach its final goal as neither project had a working prototype, Rugg said.
Taking the coding and designing from the Hackathon, both projects will move forward, Rugg said. The Center for Digital Humanities will help Stauber and the Fowler Museum continue with the project, she added.
Shepard said he will continue to code his social media tool and hopes to use it in a class he will be teaching winter quarter about analyzing social media.
The biggest obstacles were a lack of manpower and a limited amount of time, Shepard said.
But the organizers learned from the experience, Rugg said.
Rugg plans to hold another Hackathon event sometime this fall and plans to reach out to faculty members across campus to submit new proposals for technological projects, she said.
Next time though, she said the organizers will try to plan more ahead of time.
“There’s something about spending several hours together focusing on a single or a couple different challenges and hashing them out,” Rugg said. “Blocking everything else out for a day ““ there’s something special about that.”