Ursila Ali

Projects. Records. Thoughts

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Future Plan to go back to Tibet, incase matters improve

150 Tibetans were asked what the future holds for them, most of them answered that they dream of returning to see their homeland once in their lifetime.They might obtain citizenship and continue to comfortably live in their chosen country of residence, but their heart,they say still belongs to Tibet. 

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Future political stand for Tibet according to Tibetan youth

There are more than 35,000 Tibetans all over the world who have registered as Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC)  members and who appear to be in favor of complete independence for Tibet. Tibetans as a whole have an unquestionable faith in the Dalai Lama and the solution that he proposes. This is very clearly represented in the above figure where 88 percent of the TYC youth stand for genuine autonomy for Tibet as proposed by Dalai Lama. Only 7 per cent are in favor of complete independence and unsurprisingly it comprises of young Tibetans below the age of 35 years as found in the survey. 

Source: Socio Political and Economic Conditions of Tibetan Refugees in India-A Case Study of Dharamsala, http://www.vifindia.org/

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First time voters from North Indian settlements

There are 37 Tibetan settlements scattered all over India. The settlements are divided into agricultural based, handicraft/industrial based and scattered settlements. Below is the electoral data gathered for first time voters from 4 settlements in North India. (Some of the data for two settlements is unavailable, hence has been left blank)

Source: Lobsang Wangyal, TibetSun

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Political stand of Tibetans in India

The political history of Tibet has always been tumultuous. The past 50 years of Tibet being under occupation by the Chinese,has impacted social, cultural and economic life of the Tibetan community. For many Tibetans the occupation meant a stagnation of the development of their people as well as curbing their freedom to evolve as a community. The mass exodus left Tibetans questioning their chances of survival. However, these people who had left their homeland, proverbially had their roots cut off, were able to build themselves a home away from home around different parts of the world. According to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, Tibetans are the most prosperous refugees in the world. Economically, they have been able to thrive and survive, it is however, the confused political identity that has restricted ensuring an overall success of a peaceful social and economic life in different countries around the world. A solution to this dilemma, is according to the Tibetans, will be access to citizenship in their countries of residence. The data below has been collected from various sources and reports to determine the political stand taken by Tibetans. These statistics will be helpful in understanding the Tibetan struggle for the homeland and also determine the general mood of the Tibetans towards the Indian state.

Tibetan Diaspora 

Approximately 122,078 Tibetans, including those born in Tibet and those of Tibetan ancestry, live in exile in Asia and Oceania, Europe, and North America, according to a census conducted in 1998 by the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in Dharamsala, India (The CTA website now puts the figure at 111,170).

Meanwhile, China is home to about 5.4 million Tibetans, according to the 2000 Chinese census, with less than half of them in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) and most others in communities now absorbed within western provinces of China.

Source: 2007, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants 2006, UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2008, Office of Tibet, New York, personal communication 2006, Canadian census data based on response to the ethnic origin question 1998, Survey by the Tibetan Government in Exile 1998, Survey by the Tibetan Government in Exile 1998, Survey by the Tibetan Government in Exile 2008, Office of Tibet, London, personal communication 2006, Australian census data based on ancestry question 1998, Survey by the Tibetan Government in Exile 2006, New Zealand census data based on response on ancestry question, Survey by the Tibetan Government in Exile

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Understanding StoryMap JS 101

What is the concept of StoryMap JS? Telling stories through maps It is an interactive multimedia tool that can make any simple text story look more dynamic on the web page. If you have a story that lists multiple locations then yo can use StoryMap to track the events in the story. Not only can you establish the location on an interactive map, but you can also use multiple media like videos, photos, blogposts to explain the story further.

The image above shows the story map tracing the ivory trade hub across continents.

The above StoryMap uses a Youtube Video to trace the journey of the Olympic Torch before the Sochi Winter Olympic games. To create a StoryMap you need to see whether your story is multiple location oriented. Do not make a Storymap with just one or two locations.If the story lists chronological events, you can stick with Timeline JS. Creating StoryMap is fairly simple. You need to connect the map with your Google drive by logging into your Google account. This will ensure that your work is saved in your Google Drive. After connecting to yor Google account, you will see a format that is not unlike a Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation. There are slides that you can edit and customize according to your preference.

In the above image, at the bottom right corner, 'SlideOptions' tab enables you to provide an image or color that will be the background for your text. You can put as many slides as you want. However multiple locations cannot be put on a single slide, Some problems face by me when creating my StoryMap were: 1.My story revolved around three main locations. For my story (Roundup of Anti World Cup Protests around Brazil), chronology of the events was much more important than the locations, I could have easily used Timeline JS. 2. While StoryMap gives multiple options for a specific location, there is also a flipside. Multiple locations can leave you confused as o which exact location would be most suitable. After typing 'Rio, Brazil' into the Search box, I got atleast 4 options.

3. I stuck to the basic StoryMap theme, where I did not experiment with including images or colors as background. Initially I tried, however the size of the images was either too big or too small or the image bled out from the sides, giving a messy look to the slides. For example:

4. StoryMap also takes time to establish the correct locations. In the image below, it has confused Tehran, Iran, with a location from India. This may be a programming flaw.

5. Captions should be kept short and simple. Text as well must follow this rule. In multimedia content, images and videos speak for themselves, It becomes important to understand that this is not a text story.anymore, we can get creative with different media given to us.

My story stuck with the basic theme provided by StoryMap JS, but you can get creative with the design as well. -Using a different Font and Font Size makes the post look livelier and more interesting.

-Instead of a vertical design you can opt for a horizontal one as well. It looks more compact.

FYI You can use StoryMapJS to tell a story with photographs, works of art, historic maps, and other image files. Because it works best with very large images, these are called "gigapixel" StoryMaps.

Source: storymap.knightlab.com

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Understanding RebelMouse 101

RebelMouse is a social media aggregator and a curation tool where the users can create a personalized web page that features their social media activities. It can be used by individuals, marketers & agencies and Publishers & Media. The website explaines its functioning as - "Unlike conventional approaches that focus on managing content workflows within specific channels, RebelMouse liberates content across sites, social, apps and ads, and amplifies engagement with intelligent recommendations, social calls to action, real-time trending alerts and more." Following is a guide to use Rebel Mouse to increase your web presence and manage social media efficiently. 1. The home page of Rebel Mouse gives you options to log in through Facebook, Twitter or Google account. 2. I signed in through Twitter. Once you sign in using your respective social media account, you will see a page curated with posts made in those social media accounts.

The image above shows my Twitter and Instagram feed also the pages I follow on Twitter through Twitter lists. I will explain below how I was able to do so. But, your web page will look like this. 3. To add new social media pages to your site, click on the top left corner. It will open a side panel, and below that you will find Dashboard options. The multiple options will allow you to customize and bookmark your site just as any other blog. Click on 'Sites'. You will arrive on a page that looks like this.

Under the social feeds section, add all your social media accounts. Now,here I noticed some of the the limitations of RebelMouse. a) A lot of content on our social media has privacy settings that may not be displayed on our personalised RebelMouse website. In such a case, can RebelMouse pull selective feeds from our wall. b) I wanted to remove my Instagram account from the social feeds, but after clicking on the option of 'change', I was redirected back to the 'Sites' page. Further there isn't any option of 'Delete'. c)Not all of my social media could be included in the given list. They have Flickr and Linkedin as an option but not 'Pinterest' or 'Storify' 4. After setting up my pages, I decided to sort out all my posts based on sub-topics or themes. For this I went on the option of 'Sections' in Dashboard.

'Sections' sorts out contents on basis of Tags you have used in your social media. The image also shows a list of my site's most popular tags i.e. tags that have featured more often in my social media posts. 5. How to add Twitter Lists to your RebelMouse page: Since I am an avid follower of digital social media news from across the world, I have created a list about the same on Twitter. The List serves as a curated group of Twitter users which share the same interest in Digital social media news as me. A link to my Twitter List: https://twitter.com/UrsilaAli/lists/webbubble To add this list to my RebelMouse page and manage it as a separate site, I went on the option 'Sites' again and clicked on 'Launch a site'. After giving it a title (which you have to make sure isn't used by any other admin), I then went on 'Content Sources' to add my Twitter List.

I wanted to organise my Twitter Lists in 'News' and 'Popular'. For this purpose, I again created 'Sections' and put in the relevant tags. But an issue that you will go through as well is to see if these tags have truly helped lift the relevant content from the internet. Tags could overlap that would lead to repetition of feeds in both the sections.In such a case, how relevant are the sections created on basis of tags afterall.

Another problem I faced after entering all the relevant information was that the site took time to lift the feeds from different websites. But, RebelMouse is a newly launched website that is yet evolving and will hopefully address the bugs as mentioned in this blogpost. FYI: Founded in 2012 by former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry, RebelMouse powers more than 500,000 sites around the world and was named by Fast Company as one of the 10 most innovative companies in social media and advertising. (Source: rebelmouse.com)

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Anti World Cup Protests in Brazil

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Two decades too less - A timeline

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Timeline

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Data Visualisation 101

As somebody new to the concept of data visualisation, I found that creating data for web was pretty much a cakewalk especially after given the right set of tools. No longer were we manually making charts and graphs (as in the case of powerpoint presentations), but we were simply aiding the computer generated code by filling in the right set of fields to visualise data as charts, maps, graphs and timelines. 

Here is a brief synopsis of how I went about learning basics of data visualisation with the help of Google Fusion Tables and Google Playground.

-An excel spreadsheet was created with information of me and my classmates and shared. The information included specifics like age, city, email IDs, state from which they belong, academic record of the past 5 years.

-After 'crowdsourcing', we went on Fusion Tables to enable visualisation of the information. 

-The first information we wanted to organise was the collective age of my classmates. The class comprises of 20 students enrolled in MA in Convergent Journalism at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. This information was attributed to the Fusion Table. 

-To go to visualisation of the data:

Help>Get 'Classic Look'>Visualise

We found that the easiest way to represent the ages would be to show the data through bar graphs. Although we also attempted to show it through a Pie chart. 

Visualise>Bar Graphs/Pie Chart/Scatter>Aggregate>Check 'age'>Change variables/entity to Count

Count will give a collective data of all the ages, rather than individual ages of each classmate.

-Next visualisation was to show the different states my classmates came from. For this purpose I had to check that the states were 'Geotagged'.. This means to checkif they were recognised by Google maps. The names of the states entered by my classmates and me created ambiguity for the software to recognise it. For eg: Jammu and Kashmir was written as 'Jammu & Kashmir' and 'J&K'. Such minor discrepancies led to information hidden from the map.

To show the data through the map:

Visualise>intensity maps> Check Location as States>Check Area as India

-The next visualisation we created was to show the academic record of 3 students over the period of 5 years. For this we chose 'Timeline' method of representation. However, our values in the google spreadsheet for Years 2009 - 2013 were not selected as 'Date/Time', so we had to create yet another table, specifying Value for Year as 'Date/Time' and names of students as 'Number' as their individual percentage. 

Visualise> Timeline 

-To add these visualisations to our blogs, we needed to generate a HTML code that could be embedded to them. For this purpose, we clicked on 'Get embeddable code'. The HTML link was simply copied and added to our tumblr accounts and Wordpress accounts.

Another tool used by us, was the Google Playground tool. Although at first it looked a little complex.Something that is used by coders and programmers. However, after choosing our API as Visualise. We were then given options to choose the manner of visualisation to depict our data. The Google Playground offered much more visualisations than Fusion Tables. However, we stuck with a familiar Pie Chart to show yet again, collective ages of the class.

For this,we had to directly interfere with the HTML code. This meant Changing Fields and Variables within the code without actually disturbing the structure of the code. After making these changes, we clicked 'Run Code' .

With the new data infront of us, we had the task of now embedding this data on our blogs.To do this we clicked on 'Edit HTML' that showed the whole HTML code. We copied it.

Now the task was to put it on our blogs. Wordpress proved to be complicated to accept this code. Next, we tried tumblr. After going to Setting>Dashboard, we changed the language from 'Rich text editor' to 'Plain HTML'.

This enabled greater ease of embedding the HTML code from Playground. 

-All that was left was to press 'Publish' and voila! we managed to create our very own data. 

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Google Playground code

Google Visualization API Sample google.load('visualization', '1', {packages: ['corechart']}); function drawVisualization() { // Create and populate the data table. var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable([ ['Age', 'Students of MACJ 2015'], ['21', 7], ['22', 4], ['23', 3], ['24', 1], ['25', 1], ['26', 1], ]); // Create and draw the visualization. new google.visualization.PieChart(document.getElementById('visualization')). draw(data, {title:"Age wise distribution of students of MACJ 2015"}); } google.setOnLoadCallback(drawVisualization);

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Academic Performance Comparison of MACJ-2015 students

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Statewise distribution of students of MACJ 2015

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Age of students of MACJ 2015