The visualization tool »BisonWatch«, designed by Ludwig Lorenz (BA student of media informatics) and Sophie Grimme (MA graduate of the Human Computer Interaction course), uses a web crawler to collect course data from the »Bison service portal for studies and teaching«. A WebCrawler is a program that automatically surfs through a website and saves the information it encounters in its own database. The programming of »BisonWatch« enables users to search the stored data according to certain criteria and to process and visualize them graphically.
With the help of "BisonWatch", users can, for example, search the courses offered for the current semester by faculty, language of instruction, day of the week or number of hours per week in the semester. The search categories mentioned can also be combined with one another. For example, users can display all courses in the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Studies that are offered in English or bilingually on a specific day of the week (see Figure 1).
The online tool visualizes the searched courses in two ways: On the one hand, the courses that meet the selected criteria are displayed as a colored line — the thicker the line, the more courses there are that match the search query. On the other hand, the tool provides an overview of the corresponding courses with the title of the event and the names of the respective teachers below the graphic. A mouse click on the event title takes users to the course description in the »Bison« service portal. By clicking on the names of the respective teachers, the teaching cooperation networks of these people at the Bauhaus University can be displayed.
Many of the lecturers at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar cooperate with colleagues when teaching courses. With the help of »BisonWatch«, these cooperation networks among lecturers can be displayed in the form of a graphic (see Figure 2): The individual lecturers are shown as circles. Cooperation between lecturers, in turn, is indicated by lines connecting the individual circles. The larger the circle, the more direct or indirect connections the lecturer represented by the circle has to other teachers. The color of the circle shows at a glance which faculty the respective lecturer belongs to. The search function of »BisonWatch« also allows users to search for teachers by name and to display their networks and courses.
Ludwig Lorenz and Sophie Grimme, the creative minds behind »BisonWatch«, have decided to make the program they developed available as open source software. This allows other students (or other interested parties) to further develop the software or transfer it to other contexts. For example, it would be conceivable to add a function to »BisonWatch« that allows users to search the course directory for keywords relevant to aspects of diversity (e.g. gender, racism, etc.).
One future-oriented function is already built into the program: As long as the »Bison« interface remains in place, »BisonWatch« can automatically update the course data made available by the service portal every semester. The constant automatic collection of course data allows for a historical comparison of the collected data over time. Thus, developments in the range of courses (e.g. regarding the number of English-language courses at the BUW) can be traced over the years.
Here you can try out »BisonWatch« for yourself.
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