Inside JMS

Kevin Stoker

Welcome to Inside JMS - stories from the faculty and staff of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies. I'm Kevin Stoker, and I'm here with my colleague Dave Nourse.

Dave Nourse

Great to be here as always my friend,

Kevin Stoker

And we have a special guest today. Dr. Julian Kilker. Member of the Hank Greenspun faculty.

Julian Kilker

Hey, folks, glad to be here.

Kevin Stoker

Well, Julian, I kind of want to start this off, because one of the things that I just find fascinating about you is I know that kind of one of your interests, of course, your research as far as interest is, you know, doing using photography for various things. But I'm always fascinated the fact that you know, every little in and out throughout the state of Nevada, where you can go shoot photos, and that you've traveled around the place, gone to really obscure places and taken photos. How did that begin? And what do you find their way? What, what have been some really exciting finds that you've had?

Julian Kilker

That's a great question. One of the things I really try and focus on, as I focused on teaching here, and doing research is really thinking about the great outdoors, you know, what, what do we have in the state that's both fascinating, largely unique, and also under appreciated, and under appreciated, I think is a really key theme. So at the moment, I'm on a involved with a couple of organizations, when his friends are based in range, which is in central Nevada. And so in that area, for example, there are a lot of really good locations that you can go to that are really off the beaten path. And in fact, I have a photograph that's up on my website, and I can give information about that later on. If you want to see, that'd be great. You can see an image of one of the locations I'm talking about, which is so remote, that there's no sense of human contact after the only sense of human contact is the actual dirt road that you had to drive on. But there are no there's no road noise, there's no artificial lighting. They're not even any overflights from airplanes, because you're near the Nevada Test Site, which doesn't allow overflights. So this type of area, all you see to the south about 150 miles 200 Kilometer ishes is a little sort of dome of light to the south. And that's Las Vegas, that's how far away you are. And being in those sorts of places that are really remote with, you know, where you really feel like you're on your own, you can really appreciate the environment is an example of one of the natural spaces. I mentioned this location, because I think most people looking at this during the daytime, would would find it sort of, you know, it's sort of pretty, there's some interesting, you know, little hills and things here, but it's not beautiful in the traditional sense. For me, the real beauty out in Nevada is oftentimes at dawn dusk, when you know, things are when the light is changing, when it gets really interesting, that's when I do most of my photography as well. There are also other places near to Las Vegas that I can talk about that are more accessible some areas that have beautiful overviews of the city, there's something up near bootleg Canyon, which is actually over on the east side of town, near Boulder City. That's a really lovely spot. And I think a lot of locals have gone up there probably at some point and looked over, you basically look over rolling hills going off into the distance, and there's Las Vegas in the distance. And you can see the entire city, the entire valley. And at the same time, if it's a Friday night, in particular, you've got the planes coming down right over you on the incoming flight path. And in fact, I have another photo here of that environment that I brought with me, which sort of brings together the idea of visuals and data, which I can talk about a little bit later as well. But that's the sort of location that I really appreciate.

Kevin Stoker

So how did you get into photography in the first place?

Julian Kilker

I've always been interested in in the basics of photography, but I didn't come back to it until digital photography was relatively easy to do. Because one of my themes throughout my my career and my hobbies is the idea of iterative design, doing things over and over and essentially optimizing them in the process. And that's hard to do and expensive. With traditional photochemical photography, you end up using a lot of film, and then you have to wait a week or two or three, you know, to get your prints back. And it's hard to optimize based on that one of the key features of digital photography is that you get immediate feedback. You can see what's going on, you can optimize, you can fine tune. And that probably started around maybe 2005 or so where I really came back to it digital cameras were getting good enough and cheap enough that I could start experimenting. And I could also start doing low light photography, the sensors were getting good enough at that time that you could take cameras and shoot in low light and start seeing things quite differently. And again, the desert in particular, the southwest, I think is much more interesting in low light conditions. So the photograph that I just showed Kevin, a moment ago is of a series of planes. It's the flight paths coming into what was then McCarran Airport, it's now Harry Reid airport. And you've got all these flight pads coming in the lights of the planes coming in, in this direct line. And I basically opened the shutter and had it open for 45 seconds as each plane, it was basically triggered by each plane coming in. But there's one plane, that seems a little lost, it's heading off in the wrong direction, then quickly reasserts itself and works its way into the normal flight path to land at the airport. So for me, that's a great example of, of not doing infographics of taking quantitative data, and then visualizing it with a chart or something like that. But actually having the original data being in visual form, and representing it in a way that's relatively easy to understand

Dave Nourse

What I love about this image, and, Julian, if it would be okay, we can obviously talk about the logistics of this later. But you know, we post all of these episodes on the UNLV website, I'd love to include this on the podcast post page, just so listeners can see what we're referencing. What I love about that is if you're familiar with Las Vegas, even if you've only visited, we're all familiar with the Luxor beam into the sky. And what's fascinating is you don't see Las Vegas generally in this picture, but you see the light. And so automatically, if you know, there's some geographic landmark to this. And so you can you can immediately picture where you are, when you're taking this picture. It's an incredible photograph.

Julian Kilker

Yeah, yeah. There's another one. This one was actually at an exhibit that was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities in Nevada humanities, and so on. So this got this was sort of the centerpiece of a larger exhibit that looked at visuals and data. I have another piece called Annie in the shaman, which was shot up near that area that I mentioned, that's remote from Las Vegas. And that particular place, it's near Mount Irish, which has these wonderful petroglyphs is rock art, that's just ancient. And really, when you go there, there's a certain peacefulness and, and you really feel like you're sharing the space with previous generations who were obviously no longer around. It's a beautiful location. And I ended up shooting a photo there that took a long time to prepare, I had to go up multiple times and really set it up correctly. But because near that location is where some of the atomic testing took place, I went into the atomic testing archives, pulled out some footage pulled out some audio data. And so this ended up being a multimedia exhibit. That's essentially a reflection on the quality of data, the uses of data, what's missing in data, essentially, did you see this? You're nodding Dave. Yeah, so Dave, Dave saw this piece, there was a little audio station next to and you could push the buttons in here, the original audio recordings. And in the transcripts of this explosion, there's the countdown that you would expect. And then there is a buzzing sound, which is the actual initiation, the ignition of the explosion. And then there's a rumbling as the blast wave comes closer and closer to where the the observers are. And there's some rather strong language, actually, as people are hit in the chest with this really strong wave, which were later removed in the actual transcripts. And for me, that was an interesting commentary on authenticity, on removing some of the power of that moment, as well. And so I ended up taking that location, I had the moon coming up, it had this sort of echo of an explosion, but I had the transcript basically, light painted on location, as part of the was part of the piece. And Senator Reid came by and looked at it and he started talking with me about Searchlight, Nevada and growing up and seeing the blasts off in the distance. But that's a very powerful piece. And that went on a tour along with the the rest of that particular exhibit, contributed by other people around Nevada. But it got a lot of attention. I got more feedback from that and more commentary and people leaving notes, I had an online forum where people can leave responses and so on. And the idea was to really think about how do we interact with history in Nevada? How do we interact with things that might be unpleasant? How do we deal with data? How do we think about the quality of data and if you've looked at any explosions, in terms of historical footage, or it's used in a movie, you've seen, they have a little, you know, atomic blast, maybe in Terminator two, for example. There's this fake out because they actually sync up the audio and the explosion. So it's as if you were right next to the explosion, they happen to happen simultaneously. Whereas in reality, you'd be at a great distance if you were to survive. And there'd be you know, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds of delay. And so what ends up seeing fake there's no sound when there's a blast, is actually a real sort of POV experience. So I use that actually in the methods class to talk about perspective POV, the idea of triangulation of having multiple data sources. So for me working with multiple types of media, but then linking it back to original data is a way to help people reflect on the larger issues of of doing research of working with data of critiquing data of others. indicating it. For example,

Kevin Stoker

let's let's let's go back and find out about you. Tell me about, you know, where you grew up and kind of what led you to, you know, an academic career. Tell me about your family and everything. Can you give us some background,

Julian Kilker

I'm happy to talk about my my career and work. See, I was born in California many years ago, and ended up traveling a fair amount my parents worked internationally. So I grew up in, in different areas. And by the time I came back to the US, for college, I was on a science track, I was a physics major and ended up doing a thesis on actually data analysis, and ended up building a speech recognition system. And this was relatively early on when this was tough to do, I had to do machine language programming.

Kevin Stoker

This is in your undergraduate, undergraduate. So this was your bachelor's thesis, my bachelor's thesis, and where was this at what school

Julian Kilker

this was at a small school in Portland, called Reed College, and I ended up writing in machine code. So this is really fast, you know, low level code, it's really tough to do. But I learned how to do it. And I was programming something that was dissecting audio samples. So it's what's relatively easy to do now that we have faster processors and faster computers. But I was able to disentangle it's basically what Siri does, but of course, but at a much more sophisticated level, I was doing a very basic version of this. And I was learning how to do essentially frequency analysis. And so really interesting program that I went through. And when I finished that I was interested in teaching, I'd actually been teaching since I was 16. At a computer business, because this business was selling early personal computers, and parents wouldn't buy them for their kids, unless the kids learned how to use them, because they were very expensive time. And so they hired me to teach the kids and I basically learned how to teach doing that walking them through basic things like this. And so when I left, when I graduated, finished the thesis, and I decided to teach physics, and math and I joined the Peace Corps. So I went to Kenya, in East Africa, and taught at a small rural school with no infrastructure, well, no Western infrastructure, no electricity, no running water. And taught sciences. And that was fascinating. It was an incredible experience, because I learned how to work with minimal resources for basically two and a quarter years. Wow. And part of our job as well was when we weren't teaching was to work on side projects, and development projects, community projects, community organization. And so I learned a lot through that about, essentially the use of technology in international development contexts and how oftentimes things would be brought over often from the US, but also other countries and sort of dropped parachuted in, like, oh, you could use this tractor. But then it's hard to use a tractor in this context, they weren't really optimized for location. So I learned a lot about technological design, about program management. And when I came back to the US, I worked in Washington, DC for a while that international public health organization as their public information officer, essentially, I put out their publications,

Kevin Stoker

you hadn't had a background in, you know, public relations or anything like that you came out of the sciences. And then, but then why then did they hire you to do public information then?

Julian Kilker

Because when I went back to DC, a lot of Peace Corps volunteers go back to DC. There's a very strong network there. Okay. I basically made contacts and one of the the heads of one of the organizations had been a Peace Corps volunteer. Also, it happens to be in Kenya. So networking is always really important. But I'd worked on some projects as a teenager in public health, actually. So I had a public health background. I had a basic writing background, and I also had experience working with software. And then desktop publishing was starting to take off. Yeah, yeah. And working with laser printers. Yeah. And after I did that, for a while, there was a lot of sort of change in the organization. I ended up moving into technical writing back on the West Coast, managing translation projects in multiple languages. And then I started in that environment, one of the most, I think, positive and just fascinating environments to work in. They basically saw me working on these projects and asked me to write essentially a small booklet on the importance of translation, the porting of localization and localization, which is basically designing documents and user interface systems. So they can be translated into different languages, optimizing them beforehand. So you see save money on the translations. That was managing projects and French, Spanish, Italian, and German. And I had colleagues that were doing Japanese and various Chinese dialects, because I couldn't handle those areas, but I would manage them and work with really high quality translators who would check each other's work. So I would step in and help out with some stuff, although I didn't know the languages, necessarily all that well, I was helping out on the sort of the, the managerial side. And I started getting into design issues, how do you design documents? What are some of the cultural issues, and that tapped back into my Peace Corps experience, I started going to the local university library and finding resources as I was writing these pamphlets and these sorts of arguments for investing in a high quality job in terms of localization and localization. And that got me into the research side, that's where they looked at me and they said, you know, you're really enjoying going off to this research library, on your own time and doing this. Have you thought about applying to graduate school? And that's when I went off to graduate school.

Kevin Stoker

I know you speak a lot of languages, talk to us about how many languages you speak.

Julian Kilker

I don't speak that many languages I speak, you know, some French and little bit of German, and my Swahili is fading has faded. I would say largely, although I can say a couple of things. Yeah, and that language. But I think it's more having experience in those languages, it's really important to be able to pick things up, as well. But yeah, it's been really, really helpful and useful to to have access to those different experiences and to bring those different experiences also back into the classroom, I would argue, right, so one of the projects we have coming up in one of my classes is to critique a technology. And I'm using technology very broadly here. So I call it a finding from the field go out and find something that that is challenging and sort of analyze it in terms of the concepts that we're looking at. And it could be immediate related technology, but I'm not holding them to that necessarily, if something really gets them excited. And as long as the concepts translate, I'm happy with it. And a lot of times these end up being cultural related their cultural assumptions about how something is used, or should be used, that don't necessarily hold with other groups of people who might have to actually use the technology. So that's where the, the POV issues come into. Play the perspectives come into into play again.

Kevin Stoker

Yeah, yeah. So grad school obviously took place. Tell us about that.

Julian Kilker

Yeah, grad school is interesting I, I looked at multiple places and applied and had had some options that looked really interesting. But I ended up going to Cornell, because it was a large campus with lots of very different subjects that were available. The founder of Cornell, as Rick Cornell, has a statue on the quad. And he basically says it says, you know, in printed on the bottom of the statue, it says I would found an institution where any person can study any subject. And so that ended up being surprisingly relevant down the road, it was a early institution that invited women to come in. It's an early institution that had invited other less represented minorities to participate. So it was a very welcoming institution. And it also encouraged its students, its graduate students to explore classes in different fields. So nominally, I was in a communication department.

Kevin Stoker

So you did major in communication there.

Julian Kilker

Nominally, I was in the communication department. But I took many of my classes in science and technology studies. I was a TA over an engineering program. And I took a lot of classes in anthropology as well. And some in psychology, as well.

Kevin Stoker

So then I got your masters there, and then your PhD there, too. Yeah. Exactly. What was your dissertation?

Julian Kilker

Well, my masters, so it was these were chances to look at different topics and different methods. So for my masters, I did a really intensive survey on privacy and surveillance concerns among international graduate students, and that was a lot of fun. And then at the, the doctoral level I got really interested in this is going back to sort of design issues. I got really interested in how something really obvious was designed, and that was email, essentially, as a communication system is a communication technology. And you look at email, even then you look at email, and it's not the most exciting thing. It's like, Yes, I am sending a memo. And I click Send, and it goes, but behind it, there's there's this really interesting, invisible set of standards that make this operate. And there's a whole system of by proposing, defining and validating standards behind that process that I was really fascinated. And so I got access to some early archives, I got access to some of the earliest email messages that were sent. Starting in some in the late 60s, but largely in the early 70s, where they were using early versions of email systems to actually negotiate what needed to be done to improve the very system they were using. So this was a classic case of iterative design. And it was particularly notable because the early email systems were being developed by primarily graduate students, it turned out the PI's had the funding, but the graduate students were doing the work. And they were based at multiple organizations with very different backgrounds. So there was some military connection, there was some research, university connection, there was some private industry, there were different types of universities that were involved. And so this was basically emerging out of the ARPANET days, the ARPANET was the sort of the precursor to the internet. And there were different cultures at these different institutions that they had to negotiate. So buried within these discussions. There were some technical discussions, but there were a shocking amount to my view, at the time of socio technical concerns, assumptions about how would this be used? Who would use it? Therefore, what standards and fields do we need to store in terms of information? One example was at that time, most people in the field were male. And most people who wrote memos were secretaries were female. And so the standards documents we're talking about, well, it's going to be from somebody that's the mail person who asked the message to be sent. But then should we have a typed by field and she, that, basically, the woman who wrote the message should be, you know, bumped into that. And they're, among the graduate students, there was huge pushback about well, this is a technology it's gonna allow people to, to send their own messages. You know, this is not going to be a traditional sort of secretarial pool, sort of very traditional office environment. And by the way, why do we have these other fields that reflect an office environment, this is a more informal, fast paced type of situation. So these these documents were de gendered. They were, you know, forward looking. And they were addressing concerns about spam, about inappropriate language about sort of community standards early on. And some of the decisions they made have stayed with us to the present day. Other ones, which they tried to address never made it into the actual standards. And we're dealing with the consequences to this day, in terms of how to handle status, spam being being one of them how to secure messages. So so it ended up being a really, really, it was, it was technically a case study, but I had access to years of email messages, which I had to route through and look for patterns. And it was divided into threads in standards that were evolving during the entire time. So I couldn't just say search for you know, this, it'd be a standardized element, all the messages, that is those elements shifted during the course of the multi year project.

Dave Nourse

what's so fascinating about this is you talk to most of our students, you ask them, What is cc actually stands for in an email, right. And the idea of a carbon copy, it's right over the head. Yeah, but I'm, I'm certain kind of in in kind of getting to dig deep into the formulation and the design of email, just how much inspiration was taking from what you said, just sending the memos from one to the next.

Julian Kilker

It got me really interested. So that that whole process, which you know, of course, like anybody doing, doing a dissertation, I immerse myself in for quite a while, it really got me thinking about the design of other communication systems. So what cultural values are embedded in them? Which ones seem to be invisible, because it's just a technology, you know, this is the way the technology operates, we have certain assumptions, but they're buried in there, and which ones are can be challenged, when you're dealing with standards, when you're dealing with software, you can push back, you can say this, this, you know, system doesn't work for me, it might work for you. But it doesn't work for me, it needs to have these other characteristics. And software, at least in theory, can be shaped relatively easily. It's not a tangible piece of hardware of physical artifact that needs to be rebuilt or modified. That's difficult to do. You can push out standards updates very quickly, as we've seen recently, over the net, right? Twitter can sort of you can have propagated changes propagate relatively rapidly. So that got me really interested in larger issues of design, and thinking back to the translation experiences and the languages and so on. I started thinking about what assumptions are built in that are creating problems. So one of the pieces I wrote relatively recently it's called Beyond accessibility. It's in First Monday have sort of a fun place to put it but it addresses a deeper issue of how do how do we address exceptions. There's, there's a focus now on dealing with make maybe 80, trying to solve 80% of the cases, or maybe 90% of the cases if we're really lucky. But what happens to edge cases. And oftentimes edge cases are viewed as problematic, oh, we shouldn't pay attention to, to people who write like this, or type like this, or communicate like this, or from this background, or in this location. Because that's there very few of them. And it's too hard to solve. The classic example is being left handed or right handed, right? If you're left handed, there are a lot of things that are poorly designed for left handed use, even things that seem really obvious, like how cupboards open, obviously, scissors, but there are a lot of other things that come out of this, and left handed people or 10% of the population more or less. So I see that more broadly, in the sense of how can we take advantage of those exceptions? How can we listen to them and learn from them to try to go to roll back in those design processes. And even more interesting are the corner cases where you've got two sets of edges. And this becomes critical. If you're dealing with people with different language backgrounds, people of different age, such in different age situations. So if you're an elderly personnel, and you have to file your taxes, how can you do that anymore? If you have to do a hold mail with the post office? How do you do that? Everything is online or it's on a cell phone can be hard to use if you have a corner case of age, which has maybe cognitive aspects, but also maybe arthritis, it's hard to push these buttons. So that starts getting really interesting.

Kevin Stoker

It's fascinating to me that there seems to be a pattern here. And that, you know, you're talking about the corners of Nevada, you're talking about the corners of technology and technology's usage, it seems to me you, you kind of have this fascination with, you know, places that people don't usually look, or questions that people usually don't ask,

Julian Kilker

I'm interested in what's overlooked? Absolutely. And I think in our field, the larger media field, we tend to focus on content by and large, right, what let's do content analysis of this TV show, let's produce content and so on. I'm interested in the containers in which that content goes, the structures of the systems that support that content, and therefore the constraints and the opportunities that are available, if you look at it. So absolutely, I think that the less looked at items are really valuable, somebody has to look at them. I mean, if everybody did it, they wouldn't be overlooked. But I think it's very valuable to look at the mass characteristics as well. But I think it's important also to pay attention to those little elements that are unusual and underappreciated, and maybe have something to tell us that we can bring back. It's a little sort of treasure hunt to find things that you can bring back.

Kevin Stoker

And we call it movie killcare in the shadows.

Julian Kilker

It makes me sound like a vampire.

Dave Nourse

Gillian tucked to us a little bit about the courses, you teach your teaching philosophy, you've been a teacher almost your whole life. How has that changed as you've matured, as a professor, as you've matured as just a scholar? Generally, I'd love to hear about your teaching.

Julian Kilker

Yeah, it's certainly changed a lot since since I started. There are the obvious changes in the field and with technologies, and in styles of teaching. And I've certainly learned a lot along the way. So I would say if we look at the present day, the major areas that I focus on now the major techniques I focus on now are applying the design issues that I've mentioned to you, to my classes themselves, I see my classes as living things that are constantly being updated and revised, that are being iteratively designed not just by me, but by the students, by the student comments by the student work that I see. And by the discussions I have with them. So sometimes people might not be able to articulate what they see as being most at least valuable in the classroom was problematic or at least problematic or interesting. But I'm able to sort of think about that and think about how can I redesign these elements. And for those purposes, online courses are particularly interesting, because in a way, I'm going back to the technical writing background. And I'm saying, Okay, I've got a system here. I've got students who are taking part, I've got documents that I'm preparing, I've got workflows that I'm trying to try out. I've got experiments, I want to run each semester to see what works. And if it works, I'll keep it if it doesn't work, I'll do something new. So I'll never have a perfect class. But I'll always be aspiring to improve things and change things to keep keep up with what's going on. And of course, in our field, things are constantly changing anyway. So the idea when Kevin I talked a while back about online education, and I gave the impression that I wasn't a fan of it. What I wasn't a fan of was what was being taught then, which was basically video recording lectures, putting them online. And then having something that was basically frozen in time, they would be used for a long time until it was clearly out of date. And then you record a new set of lectures and put them online. And that just doesn't wash anymore, and you can't do that. So I'm looking at designing things in such a way that they can be updated, they can be really current, but also trying to adapt to changing communication styles, which are evolving really rapidly as we know, with social media and so on. So the question is, how can I get students to be professional to produce professional work, but maybe not do it in the traditional way?

Kevin Stoker

Which I you know, I can I can really come in with a point that you've been successful that just to a lot of big extent, because you are teaching a class. So Julian teaches, J math or journalism for 35 research methods. Now, at every university I've ever been at, and I've taught it before, too. It's probably where people receive the lowest evaluation, students hate the clock typically do not like the class. A lot of times you throw in your brand new faculty members into that class, because really, that's about the only skill they have is research methods at the time. But what I've marveled at that marveled at in regards to Julian is that he is taking this put it online, and the students are really getting a great experience and their your evaluations are really strong. And there must be a lot to do with this philosophy you have but but, you know, what, what has kind of been the epiphany for you, that's come along with that, that's allowed you to be successful. Teaching what typically is a very dull

Dave Nourse

don't oversell it here.

Kevin Stoker

Yeah, you know, what I'm talking about.

Julian Kilker

I think the epiphany for me was being able to break away a couple of years ago, I was getting increasingly frustrated by the textbooks that were available. There's some very good methods books out there, technically speaking, but they're not as engaging as I would wish them to be. Nor are they focused enough on, I think the specifics of our field, and our students in particular, who combined both more journalistic interests, but also more PR advertising interest. And I wanted to do something that combined the both of them together, which meant a lot more examples, a lot of specific examples from which I could draw some of the key elements out and discuss them in class. I also switched software systems, I was using some some pretty high end and frustrating stats software, which the students did reasonably well at. But I don't want to use my philosophy now is I don't want to use software that students don't have easy access to when they graduate, I want them to learn skills in class that they can use immediately. And I was getting emails from students saying, Hey, we used SPSS, I found it useful. I met a new job now, and they have no experience with this. I'm going to be doing this with data. It was something like evaluating sales of actually audio tracks, globally. And they're working for a licensing firm, and they weren't there. They said, Should I buy the software license? And I was like, maybe but then it'll, it'll be a challenge. And so what I started doing was I started saying, How can I make this class address the core methods, concepts and issues, but make it much more applicable in the real world of our students, both now to get them on board to get them to make that extra effort to really engage with the class, but also to help them understand why it's so important to focus on these topics for the real world after they graduate. We have there's a focus in journalism now in data journalism. And even that, I think it's better than the traditional research methods focus. And, you know, I, I grew up I use babby, which is one of the classic social science textbooks for years, the cost was getting out of control. It was $120, for used copy, which I didn't want the students to spend. So I essentially wrote my own textbook. And I use elements of open source textbooks for some of the specific chapters. But most of it is my own material with examples. That's what seems to have really worked is making it applicable, practical, and really listen to what the students observe what the students are doing and listen to what they're saying about what they're doing. So I've I've probably changed that course every year, certainly. And sometimes there'll be minor modifications every semester, but probably every year I've done something major to that class, to make it what it is now. And yeah, it's gone through lot of changes. So but I'm pretty happy with it now. The challenge is, you know, as in that class, I focus on survey design, and things that lead to survey design when the challenge is now is large a large issue for us in our field, which is now that everybody can do surveys easily, using online resources, were swamped with surveys, often very poorly designed surveys. So my angle these days is to say, let's talk about the overall sort of philosophy of doing these things. Why are we doing them? How can we do them? Well, and I talked about the idea of surveys as being sort of, because I worked on it for my masters in great detail. It's a discussion, it's an interview process, a good survey, it's written in a friendly, flowing manner, it's not a series of questions that demand information from you, from the people that you your respondents. And so we talk about the larger issue. And my goal is when they get out there, there might be completely different software, there might be different goals. Surveys might not be done the same way. But the overriding idea of I'm trying to get information from people, I'm trying to do it in a friendly way. I'm trying to make it worth their while, not necessarily bribe them, by giving them five bucks or a coupon or something. But I'm trying to basically say, here's why I would benefit you to give us information. And I'd be happy to share the results with you at the end, you know if that would help you participate so that you can be part of a community trying to do something useful. And argue for it. So I talked about the the intro that you write in the survey, it's a writing process, right? You have to be a good writer, to write a good survey. So it's a larger sort of almost philosophical move. And that's what I think is made the class be perceived as more useful, more authentic, and more practical. Among most of the students, yeah.

Dave Nourse

You pay attention to changes in technology changes in media. Now, the two of those intersect, if you think, in the past 10 years, or even the past 10 minutes, right? What What really excites you? Is there a new technology? Is there a new form of something that's existed for a while, what excites Julian Kelkar, today about things that are happening or things that may be on the horizon?

Julian Kilker

I think one area that has the most potential for what's going on is a better understanding of computational thinking. There's an organization called code.org, which helps school kids get good at programming, because Silicon Valley said, we need more programmers out there. So in all the middle schools, you've got kids who are doing programming, right. So they're coming in more sophisticated, that's another methods class issue, by the way is I have to ramp up the sophistication of the tools and how I approach them. I usually use spreadsheets now instead of SPSS. But I'm ramping up how, in what ways I'm using them how sophisticated the goals are for using them. So I'm starting to see students coming in, who are more comfortable working with data, who are more comfortable processing data, who are thinking maybe slightly computationally, and for me, and for our students, what I think is really critical, and what excites me are some of the innovations in what's called no code programming. So the idea that you don't have to be a nerd and right that machine language code I was talking about earlier, which is, you know, really challenging. And if you don't do it for awhile, you forget all the details, and you have to have all your comments in the right place. And it's just, it's really tough, the grammar is difficult. There has been a move to do programming that's often visual now, where you basically say I want to do these things, I'm going to throw these blocks up on the screen and draw lines between them. So conceptually, you're programming, but without the actual pain of doing it. And so that's called no code or low code programming. I think there's a lot of potential there, for people to start saying, I want to do this, I want to design a system that the records my podcast automatically or easily, and then prepares it and drops it onto my server and does this and then gathers sort of analytics related to it. That sort of stuff can now be done more realistically, with tools that exist that can be sort of stuck together with no code programming, I have a visual processing tool on my computer in front of me, that lets me bring in images and do certain operations on them as sort of like a workflow, almost like an org chart type look. And that's no code programming right there. So that that I see is where the sophistication lies in helping our students do more creative but more structured work. And that's the challenge for us, I think, is to find some really neat things to do. And then how do you repeat that process? And then of course, if you want to improve that process along the way, and if you're doing it in a really like, oh, HTML, so CSS, you're doing it in a very nerdy techie way. And then, you know, Python and so on so forth, it gets really hard to keep up with that stuff. So I see that as something really interesting, some of those innovations that are coming out are, are pretty intriguing. In terms of the hardware, there's stuff is moving so quickly, in the photography world. We're seeing a lot of things with, you know, the AI influence technologies that that are all the rage, right now dolly dolly to, and then chat GPT, which works with the text elements of describing something and then it being represented visually, I'm really interested in when cameras become conceptual. So if I take a picture, so I'm gonna take a picture of Kevin here sitting right across from me. And I'm not storing an image file of Kevin, what I'm storing is a description of a man sitting at a table. And then there might be some little modifications and characteristics, but it'll build this image off of a model of a person sitting here. But it will be described in sort of highly compressed data, because then I can take that information, I can modify it easily, I can run it through a filter, again, with this low code, no code possibility, and then produce other images based on that capture, but the capturing method and the processing pipeline, I think are going to be shifting dramatically.

Kevin Stoker

Let's start with the hair color.

Julian Kilker

Well, right now we can do that. So So dolly to is similar to what we're hearing about with the chat GPT, where you can ask it to write something, you know, write me a memo about something that produces a pretty credible Write, write overly confident, and often with a lot of problems. CNET was just caught writing articles, if you guys saw the news about this, writing articles using an AI assistant, and it was very competently written, but there were some serious technical issues with them, including some math errors, which is something I addressed in the methods class. But watching out for this things, but um, but dolly to, what you do is you give a description, and you say, draw me a picture, create a picture of a certain characteristic, and it will try and create something and it sort of comes into focus through iterations. But what you can do is you can see that picture with an actual picture of you. So if I have a picture of you, Kevin, I can say, Okay, put Kevin on the top of the Eiffel Tower, or put Kevin surfing in Maui or something like that. And it will do a really good job because it has lots of pictures of people surfing in Maui. And lots of people have put all this together. And that's what you train on. And that's what's getting really interesting. Now, I do remember a couple of years ago, in our department, we had Adobe visiting, do you remember this deal, Dave? They came in, and they were talking about some of their innovations, which were sort of precursors to this considerable, considerably far back considerably more basic, and then neglected to pay attention to as being a journalism department also. So they were talking about all the creative work you could do with visuals, but ignoring the challenge of authenticity, and validating data. And that was a really interesting sticking point for the faculty meeting, when with these guest speakers coming in. And that's a real tension, of course, that we're going to be coming into is how do you ensure the validity of data in any format in any media. And it's interesting to see to look at what endeavors are taking place there. But it's Adobe sort of approaching it from the two pronged situation of, we're going to give you some extra tools, but then we're gonna have to sell you new tools to fix the problem we just created. And that's the story of technology.

Kevin Stoker

So Julian, we've really enjoyed visiting with you. If there was a question that we should have asked you that we haven't, what would it be? And then answer it to

Julian Kilker

the second part is the difficult one. One question I really liked that I can't possibly answers is what Kurt Vonnegut talks about, he says, What's the purpose of people? And so if somebody can come up with an answer to that, I would love to hear it. So I think our purpose here is to help people gain a larger understanding of the world and appreciate it and operate within it effectively. But I think there are a lot of other possibilities.

Kevin Stoker

Right, that's great.

Dave Nourse

I've really enjoyed having this chance to get to know you a little bit more excited for the people who will be listening to this podcast at some point to have this opportunity as well to know the various parts of your background. I learned a lot today, Kevin,

Kevin Stoker

yeah, me too. Me too. I Julian, i i i Sometimes marveled at your ability to keep up with what's happening technologically wise. And and, and I think it was really interesting that you were in the Peace Corps. I you know, I always wanted to be in the Peace Corps, but to go to Kenya and have those experiences I can see that they've really very much shaped your life.

Julian Kilker

Yeah, there's there's not a certainly not a week I don't I don't think back to some elements of it. And it's I have very good friends. from that group, one thing I didn't mention briefly in graduate school, is I was walking down to the major research library on campus. And I started running to people who had been in my same Peace Corps group. So to have people from the other side of the world who and then this is not immediately afterwards, right, a couple years later, who've made essentially the same decision to learn more, to come back to school to try and sort of build on that experience, and then end up in the same place without knowing that you know, that each of us would be doing that was says something about the experience.

Kevin Stoker

What the younger Julian at that time looking at you now, what would you be surprised or what he this kind of like, wow, this is, this is exactly what I should be doing with my life.

Julian Kilker

I don't think you'd be surprised. I think it'd be really curious and say go do more.

Kevin Stoker

Go do more. I love that. That's a good way to end.

Dave Nourse

Its' a good way to end. Julian. Thank you so much, my friend.

Kevin Stoker

Thanks, Julian.

Julian Kilker

No problem. Enjoyed being here.