Undergraduate Research Dispatch: Seth Lu
This year, BCNM initiated its undergraduate research fellowships, which offer undergraduates the chance to engage in direct research experience with BCNM graduates. Seth Lu was selected to work with Juliana Friend on her project Many to Many: Building an Interactive Ethnographic Archive.
In his own words:
This past year, it is lucky for me to be working on this project with Juliana Friend. Through this interdisciplinary collaboration, I have had the opportunity to work to overcome unique design challenges in the intersection of design, programming and ethnographic study. Although there have been struggles settling the structure of the website, we eventually worked our way to finding a balancing point between the real life scenario and what can be modeled computationally from experimenting the definition of a “conversation.”
As the programmer in the project, I have designed an affordable solution stack and come up with appropriate structures handling various website features like storing multilingual and revisioned dynamic content, featuring a customized and simplified MVC framework allowing fine control over content routing and user interactions.
Finally, I have to say I learned a lot from this project since ethnography was unheard of to me at the very beginning, and I would like to thank Juliana Friend and BCNM for this unique experience!