France III: Beginning the Research
It has been a week since we arrived in France. This week saw the beginning of the research project that I am working on while I am here. ENS Cachan is a wonderful campus [caption id=”attachment_46” align=”aligncenter” width=”150”]
[/caption] but unfortunately the building that houses the STEF lab is currently under renovation, so we’re working in temporary housing.[caption id=”attachment_47” align=”aligncenter” width=”150” caption=”The "box" where we're temporarily housed.”]
[/caption] Nevertheless, it’s nice to see your name on the door, 
and an office is an office.
My hosts, Christophe Reffay and Eric Bruillard were at a workshop at EUROCALL, the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning, this past week in Bordeaux so I was left to fend for myself.
My days are spent largely working with Eclipse to extend my Knowledge Space Visualizer (KSV) to handle other types of data. Here’s what my screen usually looks like:
The data from the Simuligne corpus are very rich. They consist of mail, forum, and chat data from higher education. Thanks to a strong background in dealing with XML (thanks, Bob McLean, for supporting an independent study course during my doctorate that allowed me to become familiar with XML processing), I was able to parse (using a java DOM parser) both the reduced and the full data sets from the MULCE site.
After about three days of work, I was able to get some of the first visualizations of the Simuligne data set done that show the relationship between the semantic and the social networks:
I look forward to improving these representations and working with Christophe to refine the sorts of analyses we are doing. I am hopeful that this work will yield something that we can publish in an upcoming special issue of Educational Technology and Society!
This past Friday I delivered a seminar on the work that I did for my doctorate. I was happy with how the talk went, particularly because I delivered the 90-minute talk in French (thanks to Christophe for helping with the translation of the slides).
It is wonderful to be reminded of how enjoyable research can be when one isn’t always in crisis mode.