Deith: From ‘hmmm’ to useable technology

Most workers are happy to follow the letter of their job descriptions, but some so enjoy their work that they find it natural to interpret that description as broadly as possible.

As senior information processing consultant for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Brian Deith is in that latter category. The straightforward interpretation of his job would be plenty to fill a standard work week, as Deith is the only IT support person in a department with around 200 computers, three servers with 2.5 terabytes of combined storage, and dozens of faculty and students requiring technical support. But Deith handles those responsibilities and much more.

“I view my job as to make people more able to use computers. I owe people whatever IT support service I can give them, as time allows,” Deith says.

For Deith, that includes making sure people have machines to use in the first place. As with most of the university, tight budgets are a way of life for the department, and Deith has done his part during the years by applying for and receiving nearly $1 million in grants to buy lab machines.

Deith often uses his programming skills to make life easier for others. A few years ago, the department revamped its undergraduate curriculum to reflect the rapid infusion of new technologies into mass communication, and Katy Culver was brought into the department to develop and teach a new six-credit mega-course, giving new students exposure to all facets of the modern media environment.

“One of my greatest challenges early on was incorporating quantitative work in my classes in tangible ways that students would value,” Culver says. “Brian helped me immensely by developing a Web-based survey program that allows students to develop and execute surveys in their own areas of interest and analyze the results. And while he worked on it primarily for my elementary course, we’re now using it all over the school, in advanced classes, TA evaluations, grad student work and faculty research. It’s a remarkable tool that would have been impossible without him.”

When Deith’s contributions do not spill over into original research applications, they are tailored to helping graduate students and faculty conduct groundbreaking work in mass communication studies. Professor Doug McLeod echoes the experiences of others in the department: “There have been so many occasions on which I have asked Brian a question requiring some kind of technical innovation that would be useful for research or teaching. His first response is, ‘I don’t think that can be done.’ Then the next day he will come up to me and say, ‘Look, I did it.’ Then there are other times when Brian just comes up to me with innovations he has done on his own that have applications for the way we teach and do research. He’s just flat-out amazing.”

Some of Deith’s most high-level contributions benefit not just the School of Journalism and Mass Communication but the larger university community. Lately Deith has been working on for the university’s Digital Academic Television Network (DATN), an effort by the Division of Information Technology to replace the old Academic Television Network, which distributed TV channels across campus using standard coaxial cables. For now, the new system carries the same set of channels, but it uses cutting-edge technology to make this same delivery, sending the channels over digital cables so users can access DATN on their computers.

Working with Dave Schroeder and Dave Devereaux-Weber of the Division of Information Technology, Deith helped create a Web-based search interface for DATN. He also created an open-source, standalone player specifically for DATN that users install on their computers to access the service.

The system sounds deceptively simple, but Deith and others see it as the beginning of something of great potential significance. “With DATN, I think, we’re beginning to talk about a new form of mass communication, and what’s kind of neat about this is we’re really close to the forefront of making that happen,” says Deith. “Not only can we watch cable TV, but everyone at the university could produce their own show.”

But is that limited by bandwidth? No, says Deith. “In fact, the number of channels we can support on the system is over 100,000. So if you want to do an all-me-all-the-time channel, no problem. It’s also open-source so anyone can download it and compile the program themselves.”

As if that were not enough,Deith has already begun to extend the DATN project into a potentially powerful research and teaching tool. Deith’s idea stemmed from a conversation he had with Professor Greg Downey, who told Deith about a computer part he had acquired for a project that could process closed captioning from television signals, transforming it into text files. Downey says, “He extended this idea to his work with DATN and came up with an elegant technological solution for J-school researchers to be able to tap into and search this closed captioning for a wide variety of television feeds.”

The next step Deith and the DATN team are taking is to create a searchable 30-day backlog of video using the closed-caption text, which would be a groundbreaking tool for both research and teaching. Until now, comprehensive content analysis of large amounts of television content has often been an insurmountable task — an impossible one if researchers want to systematically analyze visual information.

The teaching applications could be no less significant. Picture a mass communication professor who sees something on television that would be valuable to use in class the next day. Unless the professor happened to be recording the television at the time, the best that could be done would be to describe the clip in the next day’s lecture.

Not so with the new system, explains Deith. “Bill Clinton went on Fox News Sunday, and the interview became quite a scene. You didn’t know that he was going to act that way, but it has a great deal of relevance for your class, and with this system you can recover it and show it the next day.”

Deith’s contributions to research on campus are more understandable when one realizes that he used to be one of its graduate students and earned a master’s degree in journalism and mass communication. While he was working on his doctorate in the mid-1980s, fellow grad student Nancy Reynolds asked him, “What do you spend all your time doing, working on your dissertation or working on software?” Deith said software, and she replied, “Maybe that should tell you something.”

Deith quickly transitioned to his current position, and the match with the department has been good. The journalism and mass communication school has long been a center of cutting-edge research in the field, and Deith is grateful to work in such a vibrant setting, saying, “That’s the thing I enjoy so much is that it’s a place where I can help make things happen.”

Two decades later, Deith and the department and university he works for have never looked back. Culver says, “At his core, Brian is jazzed about solving problems. He relishes a good challenge. When you come to him saying, ‘I can’t think of any way we could …’ he gets this little twinkle, cocks his head and says, ‘Hmm.’ That’s usually followed by some manner of technological-speak I cannot follow but ultimately leads to a solution that makes my life better. I always enjoy that ‘hmm.’”