Image Credit: World Poetry Society

World Poetry Poetic Necklace Exhibit, World Poetry Peace Poems, Photos and Art featured in the at Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia

Curated by Ariadne Sawyer; World Poetry Society in partnership with VAHMS, this exhibition will present A Poetic Necklace of peace poems from around the world and photographs from award winning photographers displayed on the walls of IKE Cafe in the UBC Library. 150 gift poems will also be available with a posted address for visitors to” a create a peace poem” and send it to ariadnes@uniserve.com Selected poems will be read on The World Poetry Cafe Radio Show and put in the www.worldpoetry.ca site. Award Winning Photos/art by : Jaypee Belarmino, Zayra Yves, Neamat Haidari, Jesus Salgueiro, Ibrahim Honjo, Janet Kvammen, Yilin Wang, Mamta Agarwal and Caroline Nazareno.

Created by poets Ariadne Sawyer and Alejandro Mujica-Olea in 1997, the mandate of the World Poetry Society is to recognize multicultural and multilin­gual poets and writers, who have written in more than 100 languages spoken in Canada.

Lillooet Room (Room 301) at 2.00PM to 3.00PM

Through instructor demonstration, seminar discussion and hands-on exercises, this class will introduce freely available software and resources used to find, explore, understand and present public data to engage a wide audience.  On the first day, participants will brainstorm and commit to an achievable mini-project that they will work through over the course of the weekend. By the end of the second day, they’ll have a solid understanding of the tools and techniques necessary to make their own data representations relevant to their lines of investigation — and will have already made progress on their personal data project.  This class was presented to journalists, bloggers, civic enthusiasts, activists, researchers and citizens – and SLAIS students.

Josh Rose

I first became interested in Open Data while taking a Data Mining course in 2011 at Syracuse University through SLAIS distance learning. The course covered data mining theory and how machine learning can be used to extract knowledge and solve problems involving large amounts of data. Using Weka, an open-source data mining software application, I learned to pre-process and clean data for analysis before applying different machine learning concepts like classification, association rules, and clustering, to gain a clearer understanding of underlying patterns in data sets. For a final project, I combined Vancouver’s bicycle count data and publicly available weather and gas price data to show patterns of bicycle use in Vancouver over time. Currently, in my work as a GAA at UBC Library’s Assessment Office, I work with qualitative and quantitative data from surveys, usage statistics, and gate counts to create metrics to assess the library’s performance and reduce uncertainty in library decision making. I find working with data to be a challenging and rewarding process which I believe will only grow in importance as more and more data is collected and made available in all spheres of our lives. I am interested in attending the Tyee Master Class about Open Data to learn more about practical tricks and techniques for working with data as well as the chance to meet other workshop attendees and see how they are gathering, analyzing, and using data to benefit a larger community. This course will benefit me by allowing continued exploration of open data and analysis techniques, which I hope to use in my current and future jobs.

Jonathan Kift

Ever since I had the opportunity to listen to Andrea Reimer’s keynote at the ACCESS conference last October, I’ve been excited about the possibilities of working with Open Data in Vancouver. I developed a paper on GIS and Open Data for last Fall’s Community Informatics (LIBR 548H) class which I was able to turn into a poster to present at this year’s SLAIS Research Day. I feel that taking open data and making it accessible to the wider public through explanation and visualization is a skill that will be critical for taking my career where I want it to go. In addition, in my year as a co-op student at UBC LSIT (Library Systems & IT), I have had a chance to be part of several presentations to library staff and I feel comfortable in that role.