On Memorial Day, my colleague Sam and I came in to set up our cubicle and work! Fortunately, it isn’t a typical cubicle and there is plenty of desk space and board space to hang things up using pushpins. It looks great.
But, I officially began week 2 by reading a TON of related work to my project. It’s amazing how much experience other researcher have had in the field. It is so easy, using tools such as the ACM and Google Scholar to find similar work using foreword and backward citations. Also, there are some great tools out there such as Mendeley to organize all of what you have read and what you plan to read. I have enjoyed the papers that I have read using these new tools because I have had a hard to keeping organized and taking good notes on the papers in the past.
On Tuesday, I spent many more hours reading and I met with both of my mentors. In our meeting with Katie Siek, Sam and I learned of delicious places to indulge in healthy, delicious food and satisfy our sweet tooth. For most of the meeting, we did talk about research, I promise! I went into the meeting a bit unsure of my specific objectives for the summer. I came out of the meeting with pages of notes worth of information but a feeling of being overwhelmed with all there is to do in these short 10 weeks. I really felt happy to be more certain about my deliverables and the tasks that I need to accomplish in the long run. I will write a paper for the end of the summer, describing my REU contribution to the project. We discussed our ultimate deliverables being a full paper to be published with TEI or Obicomp about the way that we design and build our own artifact with all of our experience to support it. Also, three was great news that we could possibly be co-authors on Ben and Katie’s feature paper on this project. In the afternoon, we met with Ben, our graduate student mentor, and he ironed out more of the short-term details and goals. Also we decided that our team goal could be to do enough for Sam and I to be co-authors on his paper! I’d love to be on two publications. In addition, Ben helped us while Sam and I were struggling to write our outlines and citation trees using ShareLaTeX! Everyone should know to begin projects using the sample project and not the blank project until you are extremely experienced. That made a world of a difference for me!
On Wednesday, I spent hours working on finding more related work and properly recording everything and writing it in ShareLaTeX. I still feel a bit confused about where I want to go with my artifact project. I want to do something with scrapbooking and I am attempting to incorporate health but I’ve hit a wall. One of my ideas is to put an accelerometer on a healthy lifestyle scrapbook to detect how often it is used. The scrapbook will consistent of photos of food made and activities done that help one’s health. The other idea is to attach the same sensor but attach an LCD screen to the front to count how many people have opened the scrapbook to give the family member a sense of how rich their family history is and put more value on the book of memories.
On Thursday, a lot of my concern about finishing my outlines and everything due tomorrow subsided! I am so relieved to be done. Yesterday, Sam had the great idea to work together on our outline and paper because we are basically writing the same thing anyway! At first, I wasn’t sure about it because I had already written the whole thing but she focused on different things in what she had done and our joint effort improved our efficiency and outline overall. I look forward to working together on our project. I didn’t realize how much work it was to create four levels of backward and forward citations! But, it was an incredibly educational and interesting process to go so far into how interconnected research can be in one specific field. Later in the afternoon, we met with our graduate mentor met and discussed our plans for planning, budgeting and creating our artifact.
On Friday,