The UK Joint Academic Coding System (JACS)
"The Joint Academic Coding System (JACS) is owned and maintained by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) and the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and is used for subject coding of provision across higher education in the UK. JACS was first introduced in 2002/03 (UCAS year of entry 2002 and reporting year 2002/03 HESA) to replace the two different classifications systems previously used by the two organisations. JACS is currently used to code the subjects of both higher education courses and the individual modules within them across the full range of higher education provision.
Since the range and depth of subjects available for study in higher education is not static, it is necessary to review JACS on a regular basis to ensure that it is current and up to date. A first review of a subset of subject areas resulted in JACS 2.0 introduced for 2007 year of entry (UCAS) and 2007/08 reporting year (HESA).
A second review of JACS has just been completed, leading to the production of JACS 3.0 for use from 2012/13 (UCAS year of entry 2012). The intention of this review was to understand any new developments in the identified areas that may not have been reflected in the JACS 2.0 classification and/or to identify anything that was otherwise missing or incorrectly classified.
A number of subject areas were identified as needing review. It was also intended that particular attention be paid to ensuring that JACS was suitable for coding foundation degree provision. Investigation was also undertaken as part of this review to see whether or not JACS could also be used for classification of research."
(Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, UK)
1). Owen Stephens JISC MOSAIC JACS extraction utility: W614, 2011
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Internet as Art: In the digital age, the medium is the new message
"Just as video and computer technology attracted pioneering artists in the 1960s and 1970s, the Internet today is inspiring artists to tinker with the possibilities and boundaries of the World Wide Web. What started as a playful and often tongue-in-cheek experimental venture by a few code-savvy artists in the early 1990s has grown into a global art movement that is attracting attention from museums and private collectors. Karlsruhe-based media museum Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie, or ZKM, has been running a series of net.art exhibitions. Berlin's Digital Art Museum recently showed the video performance 'Hammering the Void,' by Gazira Babeli, the pseudonym for an artist who exists only in Second Life, an online virtual reality game.
Among the artists who first saw the potential for creative uses of the information superhighway were Belgrade-born Vuk Cosic and Amsterdam-based artist duo Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, who perform under the pseudonym jodi on the Web. Their early digital works, much like the art being made today by Italian duo Eva and Franco Mattes - who call themselves 0100101110101101.ORG - often imitated or at least paid ironic homage to the clandestine machinations of computer hackers."
(Goran Mijuk, 29 July 2009, Wall Street Journal)
Fig.1 'T-Visionarium’ (2003-08), by Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
WinDirStat: Windows Directory Statistics
"When in 2003 I came across the KDE program KDirStat (http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net), I was fascinated and enthusiastic about it, as it is probably the same with many others. I had been thinking of writing a disk usage tool before, and saw: that's it!
SequoiaView (http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/) was around, but KDirStat's concept of coupling a tree list view with a treemap was unrivaled, and I didn't find anything equivalent for MS Windows. So I wrote WinDirStat, using Mark Bruls, Kees Huizing, Jarke J. vanWijk, and Huub van de Wetering's papers on squarified treemaps (http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/stm.pdf) and cushion treemaps (http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/ctm.pdf).
I didn't worry too much about the functionality but simply cloned KDirStat. The pacman is not my idea, the extension list is. I tried to size and position each GUI element optimally and to avoid modal dialogue boxes. The program should output much information while requiring few user input. When I thought it was complete, I gave it to my sister and watched her interaction with the software. That gave me another two weeks of work to do. This procedure, together with the testplan, secured WinDirStat's quality.
Meanwhile, a colleague of mine wrote Disc Inventory X (http://www.derlien.com/), a clone for Mac OS X.
That's the story so far. Oliver has taken responsibility for the project, many translations have been contributed. I've largely switched to Linux and observe WinDirStat's amazing download numbers. I hope we can provide some new version slowly but surely."
(Bernhard Seifert, 2010-07-28)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Practice vs praxis: modelling practitioner-based research
"Praxis, for me, involves the critical and inextricable meld of theory and practice. Thus practitioner-based research is concerned with processes for theorising practice ... In moving creatively into our practice we are fundamentally concerned to develop new knowledge, to challenge old beliefs and to speculate on the 'what ifs' of our concepts and processes. For the arts practitioner, this new knowledge is made in the context of and challenge to the history, theory and practices of the relevant field. The research function for developing and extending knowledge is judged on the outcome of the research, which synthesises, extends or analyses the problematics of the discipline. It is important to realise that this creative work resembles pure and applied research in any field. As Richard Dunn says; 'a work of art or design is embedded in or deforms the theory and practice of the discipline' (1994:8)."
(Robyn Anne Stewart, 2003, USQ ePrints)
1). Stewart, Robyn Anne (2003) Practice vs praxis: modelling practitioner-based research. In: 2002 International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) World Congress, 19-24 Aug 2002, New York, USA.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Theory building through DNA visualisation
Drew "Berry's animations function as a tool for representing activities occurring within our bodies that could otherwise only be seen at a magnification of 100 million times. What distinguishes these works in the context of the moving image art form is the creation of a visual landscape that is extraordinary, strange and other-worldly, even though viewers are armed with the knowledge that they are scientifically exact. To follow the virtual camera through this strange world reminds them of the constant energetic presence of their own seething, pulsing, cellular functions. Watching these works, viewers become strangers in their own skin, inhabitants of a foreign landscape. Berry uses this synthesis of scientific and digital technology to create a holistic sense of the world beneath people's skin, sending a ripple across the viewers' bodies as they interact with the work, enlivened with the knowledge of their organic relation to the alien world on screen."
(Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Australia)
Fig.1 Drew Berry (2003). 'Body Code' 3D computer animation displayed as single-channel DVD projection; stereo audio. 8:34 mins; colour. Sound design: Franc Tétaz. Collection: Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Courtesy: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) and the artist.
[These animations demonstrate the potential of design practice for revealing insight that might not otherwise be revealed. In this way preoccupations with visual fidelity and scientific accuracy must recognised as being only peripherally important.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
