Lab for Social Machines Jekyll Web Site

View the live site: https://social-machines.github.io/

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Getting Started

This website is created using Jekyll, a static site generator. The general flow of editing the site is:

1. Clone the repository locally:

git clone git@github.com:social-machines/social-machines.github.io.git

2. Start a Jekyll server in the cloned directory:

bundle exec jekyll serve

This will allow you to see your local changes at http://localhost:4000 before you push them live. Every time you save a file, just refresh the page and Jekyll will have regenerated the site with the new changes.

3. Edit files locally as per the instructions below, save, and verify your changes are correct on your locally hosted version of the site.
4. Commit the changes you've made to the repository.
5. Push the changes you've made to GitHub. After a minute or two, refresh the live site to see your changes. If you do not see the changes after a few minutes, check GitHub System Status to see if they are experiencing delays with builds.

NOTE Do not edit any files in the _site directory. These are auto-generated by Jekyll and will be overwritten. Pretend that folder does not exist.

Editing Instructions

Here are instructions for doing various types of edits to the site.

NOTE Do not edit any files in the _site directory. These are auto-generated by Jekyll and will be overwritten. Pretend that folder does not exist.

Add a publication

Watch video explanation

All publication data is stored in _data/publications.yml and _data/theses.yml if it is a thesis. The contents of that file are used to populate the publications throughout the site, applying different filters based on attributes defined for each publication. For instance, the publications that show up on the Media Analytics Publications page are filtered to those with group: media analytics.

1. Open the file _data/publications.yml
2. Add an entry for the new publication at the top of the file (or ideally in sorted reverse chronological order).

An entry for a publication looks like the following:

- citation: |
    Soroush Vosoughi\*, Prashanth Vijayaraghavan\*, Ann Yuan, and Deb Roy. (2017). **Mapping Twitter Conversation Landscapes**. In Proceedings of the 11th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2017). Montreal, Canada. \*Equal Contribution.
  publication_year: 2017
  pdf_file: http://lsm.media.mit.edu/papers/ICWSM-2017.pdf
  group: media analytics
  academic: true
  tags:
    - Machine Learning
    - Social Networks
    - Natural Language Processing

A few things to note:

• The citation field is written in Markdown, so asterisks will be interpretted accordingly. For equal contribution, make sure you escape the asterisk with a backslash: \*. Titles should be marked in bold by surrounding them with two asterisks (e.g. **My Paper Title**).

• The pdf_file field is a URL and should point to http://lsm.media.mit.edu/papers/YOUR_PAPER_PDF.pdf. You'll need to upload your file to the paper hosting server for this URL to work, as described below in the "Uploading a paper" section.

• The group field indicates whether it will show up on the Media Analytics publications page (with value media analytics) or the Learning page (with value learning)

• The academic field indicates whether the paper is academic (e.g. a conference or journal paper) or not (e.g. a blog post, or a news article)

• The tags field contains a list of tags that can be used to filter the paper. Currently the list of tags to choose from is:

  • Machine Learning
  • Robotics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Learning
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Social Networks
  • Visualization

  If you think there should be a new tag added, discuss with others first.

Uploading a paper

We have a separate place where we are storing all our papers since they can be quite large especially when videos are embedded in them. The box was setup for us by NECSYS and is available at lsm.media.mit.edu. To upload a paper, you'll need to connect to the server over SMB. If you're not on campus, you'll need to be on the Media Lab VPN (instructions to connect to VPN).

The following instructions explain how to upload a paper to the SMB server on a Mac.

Open Finder and select Go -> Connect to Server... from the menu bar (or press Cmd+K)

Enter smb://lsm.media.mit.edu as the Server Address. Optionally click the + to save it as a favorite. Click Connect.

Click Connect when prompted about connecting.

Enter your Kerberos login information. You do not need to add an email address, just use your username. Then click Connect to continue.

Scroll to select lsm.media.mit.edu as the volume you'd like to mount (or type "lsm" to quickly get to it).

This opens up a finder window to the mounted SMB server. The papers directory is where you should put your PDF file.

That paper is now available to be read at http://lsm.media.mit.edu/papers/a_paper.pdf. Use that URL as the value for pdf_file in your citation entry.

Add a project

Projects are currently very limited in their presentation on the site. They are comprised solely of a title, an image, the group they are under, and a link to the project page on the Media Lab site. The project data is stored in _data/projects.yml.

1. Open the file _data/projects.yml
2. Add the entry for the new project to the top of the file.

An entry for a project looks like the following:

- title: "FlipFeed"
  image: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2017/01/18/1_Mk6xr17.jpg.800x800.jpg
  url: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/flipfeed/overview/
  group: media analytics

The idea is to save students work from reproducing content for projects everywhere, we can just re-use the title and images required for the Media Lab's site.

Things to note

• The group field should be one of media analytics or learning.

Add a person

The people data is all stored in _data/people.yml.

1. Open the file _data/people.yml
2. Add the entry for the new person to the top of the file.

An entry for a person looks like the following:

- name: Lisa Conn
  title: Graduate Researcher
  type: student
  image: http://excedrin.media.mit.edu/socialmachines/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2014/07/IMG_4998-e1454462435442.jpg
  groups:
    - media analytics
    - cortico
  alumni: true

Things to note

• The groups field should contain any of media analytics, learning, or cortico.
• Set alumni: true when a person leaves the lab. It's okay if this field is not there at all (this implies it is false).
• The type field should be one of: leadership, faculty, staff, visitor, postdoc, student, cortico
• The order in which people show up on the team pages is determined by a variable called people_order on the pages themselves. See learning/people.md for an example.

Add an image to the Life at the Lab image gallery

Say we want to add the image tim-cook-deb.jpg to the image gallery.

1. Add the image file to the img/ directory.
2. Edit life-at-the-lab.md and add to the images: list - ../img/tim-cook-deb.jpg:

layout: image-gallery
title: Life at the Lab
description: This page will be pretty soon.
images:
 - ../img/CASM-offsite.jpg
 - ../img/group-walk-mit.jpg
 - ../img/tim-cook.jpg
 - ../img/tim-cook-deb.jpg

Note that the order of the images in the images: list is how they will display on the site.

Edit the front page

The content of the front page is stored in index.html. This is one of the few files that is written in HTML instead of Markdown.

Edit copy on the Media Analytics page

The Media Analytics landing page can be edited via the Markdown file at media-analytics/index.md.

Edit copy on the Learning page

The Learning landing page can be edited via the Markdown file at learning/index.md.

Edit copy on the Cortico page

The Cortico page can be edited via the Markdown file at cortico.md.

Edit copy on the Admissions page

The Admissions page can be edited via the Markdown file at admissions.md.

Edit page layouts

All of the different types of pages specify which layouts they use in their front matter. To edit how those layouts are rendered, explore the files in _layouts/ and the modular components in _includes/.

Modify the main navigation items

Edit the entries in _data/nav.yml. The order in the file matches the order seen on the site.

Modifying the Filterable List logic used for Publications

The code for the filterable lists seen on the publications pages is stored in js/filterable-list.js. The live version uses a transpiled version of it in js/filterable-list.min.js. After making any desired changes, you can recompile the js by running the build script in the root directory called build.sh.