to properly welcome you to what is really the first research seminar of summer 2023, which is co-organized with Rick Woodstra, who you will hear from and hear about shortly. So you see that the series that we've organized for the summer is on architecture, which in some sense is a way to step out of our comfort zone a little bit and to think together about the porous boundaries between the arts and the landscapes and spaces that we inhabit. As you know, it's a series of talks and discussions which showcases new research and approaches to architecture and its histories. Really the hope is to create conversations that allow us to think expansively both about art and architecture. And we'll cover a range of different topics over the next five sessions and I encourage you to look at the program and come back to things and I think we'll build conversations from there as well. So the format for today is a little bit different from some of the formats that we followed in the past. We'll have 25 to 30 minutes from the speaker and then 10 minutes from a respondent. In this particular case, Rick Woodstra, who is also the co-organizer of the series, is a respondent but usually we'll have also an external respondent coming in, depending on the topic of the talk. I'll introduce Rick now and then I think just hand over to Rick to sort of take the evening on as well. Just one thing before I introduce Rick. Everyone is really welcome to join us for a drinks reception here after we finish and there will be time for questions from the audience physically present but also online audiences, so feel free to type your questions into the Q&A section of the chat and we'll sort of bring you in and on board. So Rick Woodstra is an assistant professor in architectural history at the University of Amsterdam where she co-directs the Amsterdam Centre for Urban History. She's a historian of modern architecture with a specific interest in architectural design and planning in the British Empire and the global circulation of architectural knowledge and building materials. Before she moved to Amsterdam, she was very close by, at Northeastern University in London and worked as a lever-hume-funded post-doctoral research associate at the University of Liverpool and she got her PhD from MIT in the US. Rick has a lot of publications, I'm not going to go through all of them quite yet, but just mention a co-authored monograph, the United Africa Company, Mercantile Architecture and the West African City, which is to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024 and I know that the topic also relates in some sense to some of the topics we're talking about over the series and today's talk. So over to Rick. Thank you. So thank you, Sria, for that introduction and also thank you for the invitation to co-organize this series here at the Paul Mellon Centre. Tonight, it is my pleasure to introduce Adidoy and Teriba. But first of all, it's a pleasure to see you here tonight, despite the fact that part of the architecture world has, of course, relocated to Venice this week, where the architecture biennial is opening, curated by Leslie Locco, the first curator of African descent and with very excitingly and long overdue an emphasis on architecture in Africa and its diaspora. And in that sense, our subject today on African architecture and performance, particularly in southwest Nigeria, is quite fitting. So I would like to introduce Adidoy and Teriba, an assistant professor of architectural history at Dartmouth University in the United States. Dr. Teriba specializes in the history of architecture and urbanism with a specific focus on West Africa and its diasporas. His teaching and scholarship explore a multitude of subjects, including architecture and placemaking and the ways in which folklore, orality, language, art, dance and music are used as tools, both in an historical sense and in the present to generate an architecture that creates a sense of place. Another subject of research is performance-based ways of designing in Africa and its diaspora, a very exciting and novel subject in architectural history that he will discuss with us tonight and one that fits perfectly in our architecture summer series, in which we aim to highlight new and innovative scholarship within the history of architecture. Our speaker tonight received his PhD in architectural history from Princeton University with a dissertation Afro-Brazilian architecture in southwest Nigeria in the late 19th and early 20th century. He's the author of various fascinating articles including an article on orality and permanence, restoring a bongum palace through spoken architectural history in the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and also quite recently, a wonderful essay on a 19th century mosque in Lagos Colony in the book Race and Modern Architecture, a critical history from the Enlightenment to the present. Please join me in welcoming Adedoyin Tariqa. Well, good evening everybody. Riks, thank you for that very generous introduction. Shria, thank you and Riks as well for organizing this. And I see some familiar faces myself and so I'm gladdened and with that I will begin by saying that this is an excerpt of a book I'm working on, my second book project about performance. It was alluded to in my biography about performance and architecture as those two things have been very important in the continent of Africa for generations and also how they linger in its diaspora in the hands of some architects and builders. The book is also going to argue that despite that storied tradition, there's a way that it is marginal when thinking about how architecture is created and designed particularly today. And so this talk is a distillation just testing out some ideas to welcome your questions, criticisms and comments and so with that I will begin. I'm going to invite you to peer beneath a veil into a conversation occurring amongst African architects and professors of architecture that is equally pertinent to the larger discipline of architectural design and the historiography of architecture. Ideas such as identity and performance have been part of this discourse manifesting itself in print speech and in the design practice of some architects. In this talk I hope to show the ways in which design was and is part of a larger holistic enterprise integrating it with other fields such as dance and music. Thus it is my goal to provoke us to think of how architectural history can be harnessed as a living tradition that engages with old forms of interdisciplinary making of places and monuments even as it rethinks what contemporary architectural and urban design could be. I will begin with a survey of recent trends on the continent that explore the interplay between culture, design and architecture. In 2014 the Ghanaian architect Joseph Ose Ado tried to organize a conference that would deal with the challenges and opportunities of creating architecture and other design-related disciplines in Africa in the 21st century. Ado, president of Arche Africa, you see the logo on the upper right hand side and not-for-profit organization was committed to addressing that very issue. Several panels in the conference were to focus on the state of the various design disciplines in the continent. The main event was to be a discussion between Francis Kerry, the Bokinabi architect Sir David Ajay and Kule Adiemi, the Nigerian architect. The conference was to be called African Perspectives, the Lagos Dialogues because its venue was supposed to be in Lagos, Nigeria. In some ways it was a resuscitation of conversations about regionalism and architectural have gone on for a lot of the 20th century. The American architectural critic Lewis Monford is just one example in his description of a Bay region style in San Francisco, California to more recent decades where the contributions of Alexander Sones, Leon Lefevre and Kenneth Frampton were prominent. Unfortunately, the Lagos Dialogues Conference, a kindred spirit to these conversations of regionalism, did not take place for reasons that remain unknown. Nonetheless, the discourse about the relationship between contemporary African cultures and design on the continent continued apace, manifesting itself in different places and times. Ado himself was involved in some of these convening a multidisciplinary social event featuring architects, musicians and other designers within Ghana itself in 2014. The event was called Why Design Matters? In 2021, Arche Africa had a pavilion at the European Cultural Center's Time, Space, Existence exhibition in Venice that ran with the 17th Venice Biennale. In 2020, the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Lagos in Nigeria organized multiple Zoom seminars focusing on the relevance of ornaments in the creation of contemporary architecture. One speaker asked whether re-enacting rituals were necessary to create new expressions of architectural ornaments in pluralistic societies where in past errors, artisans had to participate in rituals to be prepared to create architectural forms. Some citizens are atheists, agnostics, while others are devotees of monotheistic and even polytheistic religions. How the speaker queried would ornament on columns and other building elements if people wanted to see ornaments on buildings, be created in a region saturated with the religious and the irreligious alike. At the conference, I urged my colleagues to revisit how older traditions of building in the region were performative to initiate new discussions about the relevance of performance in contemporary architectural design. This paper today then is an elaboration on that point made in the University of Lagos conference focusing on how a type of architectural history not only performative but was used by one monarch to rebuild his palace and how in the hands of some contemporary architects memory, performance, and design intertwined in their design practices. The purpose of illuminating this episode, or these episodes rather, is to make the argument for placing the historiography of architecture and the design disciplines for a plethora of architectural history types including those that are performance-based. Put differently, this presentation will show how one monarch used architectural history as a design tool and how such performative approaches to design come to the fore in contemporary architectural practice. In the mid-1980s, an ailing monarch, Sulu Mon, Baba Yemi, who you see on your left-hand side of the Kingdom of Bongong in southwest Nigeria thought it best to present a paper at a conference in absentia instructing a British scholar, Karin Barber, to deliver the paper on his behalf. Professor Dame Karin Barber is an emeritus professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Birmingham. The paper in question that Karin Barber presented was about the occurrence of oral poems of palaces in southwest Nigerian kingdoms that were at the very least 300 years old and in the case of Baba Yemi's kingdom were used as a tool to reconstruct his own palace. In addition to being the ruler of his kingdom, Baba Yemi was a distinguished scholar. He took his PhD in Yoruba literature, Yoruba, the language in southwest Nigeria from the University of Birmingham in 1962, writing a dissertation on the fall and rise of the Oyo Empire in southwest Nigeria. He had also written about ruins of many kingdoms in the region and collected poems of particular palaces as well. He was part of his area of study. Those poems are known in Yoruba as oriki orile. I will devote the next few minutes to describe what such poems were in part because the word poem does not do justice to the multidisciplinary and multi-sensory nature. The first thing to note is that each southwest Nigerian kingdom and there are several to this day had an oriki orile that was uttered orally by a royal griot. The poem contained the origins of the kingdom, traced the succession of rulers, signified prominent historical episodes in the kingdom's history and without warning praised the builders of the palace. Some of them even described the building elements that the artisan was known for. Additionally, oriki orile were performed in a way that incorporated music and dance. Instruments such as the dundum drum, also known as the talking drum among the Yoruba, accompanied the utterance of the oriki orile. And so what I'm going to do for the next few minutes is actually play, try and reconstruct. As I said, they were performed, the accompaniment of music, different instruments and dance. And I am just starting this research about this living tradition that persists and I'm going to play just some instruments and actually recite some of the, an excerpt of a poem that speaks to a builder, what a builder did on a particular palace that is his palace. And so this will start, the first instrument I want to introduce, it will take a few moments, is the shekare, a rattling sort of instrument. And then I will introduce the dundum drum, just beginning this research, but at times this syncopation was overlaid with an orator who would utter the poetry and that I would do right now with an accompanying English translation. Ido'u agge girebe te foba, which when translated into English means Ido'u, one who creates beautiful carvings for the king, or by the Yoruba title for king. Ido'u refers to the builder, Ido'u is the name of the builder. But ingbe odo, which when translated means he was not only an expert in carving mortars, that is, basis for shungo ritual containers, shungobi, the deity of thunder in southwest Nigeria. Ningbe akbuti, which when translated means he also excelled on carving decorative containers. Ningbe uko, which means in sculpting monumental veranda posts, some of which you see in the middle of the screen. Ningbe ashe, fun uluayye, translated as and in bar reliefs on wooden doors for important persons in the community. I'll allow the music to just play out, but this is just to summarize the point that this is an excerpt from the poem of King Baba Yemi's own palace. And he actually used this in reconstructing his own palace that was destroyed several generations before as different ethnic groups were warring in southwest Nigeria. I'll just allow you to play out. So back to the script, each southwest Nigerian king learned the drumming and dancing that accompanied the utterance of the oriki orille. Rulers in other words participated in this performative history. Suleiman Baba Yemi knew that and took perhaps the unprecedented move of using the oriki orille of his kingdom to rebuild the palace in the 1980s in his own words, immersing himself in the performance-based activities that encompassed the evocation of the poem. Out of that activity came a new palace that you see on your right-hand side that differed from the old one in terms of the use of materials, ornaments and the layout of its plan. The older one was done in Adobe, Adobe building materials. This one relied on concrete blocks. Columns were different. And just to give you a sense in terms of the plan, an older palace was known for its open courtyards. It's a way, in a way, the number, the greater the number of open courtyards, it added to the prestige of the palace, added to the complexity. So it was this spatial way of adding grandeur to these palaces. But also, in addition to that, I'm going to just sort of circle in on a particular detail. You see that circle, that small circle there. That is a detail of a sculpted column, which was very, very popular. More about sculpted columns in the course of this presentation. But I wanted to just indicate where the location of this sculpted column within this older palace scheme. And just to buttress the point of how Baba Yamey's palace, this construction, of a palace with poetry differed. In terms of the picture on your right hand side, gone are the sculpted columns that you see, that you see an example of in the middle. And so there's a way in which his was an interpretation of what you see right here. In many ways, relying upon tradition, this performative history, but being quite liberal in how he created a new palace out of the old palace. And we can return to that that liberality later on. But one of the things I want to highlight is an artisan who I'll introduce next, who was somebody who sculpted the column in the middle that you see. And his name was Arie Ogun. A renowned woodcarver in the region, creating sculpted columns, one of which you see on your left-hand side, far left. The British Museum actually has a number of his works. He also created royal palace doors that you see right here, while belonging, and I'll show you another image of him right here, while belonging to three secret cults that performed rituals. One of my hypotheses is that his participation in rituals inspired the way he even carved a wooden sculpted column. And so one of the points of departure for me that I want to explore is whether the analogies between he had to participate in drumming himself and whether that tempo, whether tempo is generated in drumming, one can bring that into conversation with his tempo of carving the sculpted columns that you see on your right-hand side. And so a question I have for myself is just could the very non-literal and performance of the architectural poetry that Arie Ogun also immersed himself in in service to these palaces that had poems could that have influenced architectural design? I want to show just an isometric view of one of the palaces, and we owe this to the very important work of the Polish architect and historian Domołowski, who wrote an incredible three-volume set on Nigerian traditional architecture. But my purpose for showing this is to also show you a detail that just a detail, just the way that these sculpted columns just really loomed just in these architectural schemes of older palaces. And these were done by Arie Ogun himself. This is another image of a sculpted column that he worked on. Now, such performative art accompanied other palatial architectural forms in the region, whereas Adobe and Wood were the primary building materials in past eras. Afro-Brazilian immigrant artisans created a palatial room in the Palace of the King of Lagos made from brick and stucco. The details shown here show how the Afro-Brazilians appropriated architectural elements they saw in Portuguese-owned buildings in Brazil and inserted them into the Lagos Palace. And just this is, just show you a different, just a blow-up detail just another, just some other stylistic elements that also were part of a larger performative enterprise where song, poetry and all of that were also part of this. And so there's a way, even with the stylistic differences, that performative tradition lingered. And in some ways, just a little bit more about the Afro-Brazilians, these were ex-slaves who, over a 70-year period, migrated from north-eastern Brazil to southwestern Nigeria. This is one of the only pictures we have of an ex-slave master Mason, Lazaro Borges da Silva. This is the subject of my first book project. They created Islamic architecture. You see to your far left, lower left, Tombstone architecture, you see in the middle, but also civic architecture that you see on your right-hand side. Why this is also pertinent to a place like this, the Paul Mellon Centre, is that some of these ex-slaves, on starting to create architecture in southwest Nigeria, were then sent by the Lagos Colony to the Public Works Department to get training in architectural drafting and what have you. Almost an augmentation of the performance-based approaches to design that they were doing. But in addition to creating architecture, the built form in the atmosphere of ritual and performance, that didn't stop with the completion of the building. There's a way in which masquerades, like the Gelede masquerade that you see here, a picture from the 1970s, danced through around and around these buildings as well. So there was a performance-based activity even on the completion of the building. And the Gelede spectacle itself does merge history. It does merge all sorts of things into its performers. Just further, just showing the ways that the built form, so to say, and these performative activities were just augmented together. And so this is to say that hence King Baba Yamit, who'd go back to the monarch, was only the latest in a line, at least in southwest Nigeria, of monarchs who appropriated other construction technologies and architectural styles even while re-enacting the palace's oral architectural histories in performance. More recently, Sir David Ajaye used the top part of one of Ariao Goons' columns as the basis for the American Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. Additionally, for more than two decades, David and his brother, Peter, have created a non-linear architectural design process where David gives Peter conceptual sketches of designs and Peter, in turn, composes a soundtrack. Peter then gives the composition to David who completes his design. This is all to say that the tradition of using performance to inspire design continues in the brother's collaboration. In the year 2016, Peter released a vinyl record called Dialogues, Music for Architecture, that featured ten tracks, ten soundtracks that Peter composed for David's buildings and pavilions. I'm going to play one of those soundtracks and this being the 30th year anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in London. Stephen Lawrence Day was April the 22nd. He was a young man who was an aspiring architect and David Peter and Chris O'Feeley collaborated on the building that you see on your right-hand side. What I'm going to play right now is the soundtrack called Reflections on a Golden Dream that Peter composed for the building and in the memory of Stephen Lawrence. It is not lost on me that these case studies were created either in Britain or in what used to be a former British colony where designing architecture through joints has a rich history. The performative ways of designing I have shown today at times complemented drawings in some cases. There is no doubt however that architectural design through joints has become the de facto way of architectural practice and there is a case to be made that the British Empire influenced the way that architectural drawings have become the, became the dominant way in its colonies even in its former colonies. The instance of the efforts of King Baba Yamut to preserve and embodied architectural history that relies on a plethora of artistic genres and to use that to create a new palace is an instance of history designing architecture in my estimation. The Ajayi brothers use of the traumatic event of Stephen Lawrence's murder is another instance. These episodes indicate the continued practices of performatively creating spaces in Africa and it's diaspora and urges to expand a notion of what architectural history is and to rethink how the history of architecture and the design disciplines can be taught. Perhaps such instances will allow us to cast a fresh set of eyes on the way that the built environment and space is an inherently performative symphony of different art forms and media moving to different rhythms and in the way that the British sociologist Patrick Gettys for instance saw as a particular drama. Thank you very much for your attention. First of all, thank you so much for this wonderfully rich and engaging talk. It's not an easy task as a respondent to or to act as a respondent to a talk that has so many ideas packed into it but I'll give it a try and what I would like to do tonight is to pick up on three particularly interesting threads within the talk connected to three separate questions although of course I have some more and I'm sure all of you do. Nearly 50 years ago in 1974 architectural historian Labelle Proussin author of several wonderful books on architecture in northern Ghana and a former staff member of KNUST in Kumasi, Ghana stated that and here I quote her until recently, until quite recently the Western world accorded no place in its architectural schema to Africa with the exception of Egypt. The subject of African architecture was and indeed still is among many not considered worthy of recognition and quote. Fortunately much has changed in 50 years. If this year's Venice Biennials shows as exciting examples of present-day architectural practice across the continent in glimpses of an African future then our talk tonight has demonstrated that the field of architectural history is indeed thriving. Perhaps one of the most fascinating ideas we've heard about tonight is the way in which architectural construction in southwest Nigeria was and indeed still is deeply embedded in a multi-sensory experience of sound, music and ritual. You've taken us along to Nigeria to show us the example of King Babayemi in the 1980s to Palace that was redesigned based on oral poems. And in doing so I couldn't help thinking about what your talk has also made abundantly clear is the way in which most scholarship on modern architecture has been devoid of the senses or rather I would argue has strongly stressed one of those senses our sight, our vision. Meanwhile, other senses sound, music, smell or even touch are mostly absent in our consideration of architectural form. Perhaps with some exceptions of course one could think of for example the appearance of phenomenology in the 1970s and the work of someone like Christian Norbeck-Schultz comes to mind here. But in other words, what you've sketched out for us tonight is not only the lack of consideration for multi-sensory experiences in architectural history, but also the ways in which our methods, our toolkits still primarily focused on visual and textual analysis isn't quite equipped to deal with issues such as sound and music. And the issue of methodology leads me to the first point I wanted to pick up on and that is the matter of evidence. One of the difficulties of doing this kind of work, I imagine, is the notion of evidence both in terms of locating evidence but also what serves as evidence. And here I would like to invoke a recent essay by Ita Hana Saeem Wase professor of architectural history at Brown University, also with a focus on Africa and its diaspora. She reiterated that in a field that still heavily relies on textual sources, and here I quote her again, evidence is long been considered one of the greatest challenges for historians of Sub-Saharan Africa. Though it is becoming increasingly clear that Africa had many long, rich and diverse traditions of writing from ancient times to the present that have been largely unacknowledged, most people in Sub-Saharan Africa did not adopt phonetic writing systems until the late 19th century, end quote. The presence of oral traditions, however, poses distinct challenges to a field that they still focused on textual evidence. This problem, she adds, is further exacerbated when studying the built environment. Many structures in Sub-Saharan Africa, as we know, have not survived because of the choice of materials like Adobe, which you mentioned, or if they have, have been altered in the process of maintenance. While tonight's talk has showed a convincing way to overcome some of these issues, using oral recordings to do research on the built environment, some of the same difficulties still remain. What then, I wonder, counts as evidence here, perhaps in this specific project, but also more broadly, thinking about your book project. How have you dealt with some of these problems related to evidence? The second point I would like to pick up on is what you compellingly described as history designing architecture, or the idea that history, in this instance, in the shape of an architectural poem, could shape architectural design. In a broader sense, this ties into an ongoing discussion in many architecture and design schools about the relevance of history and design education. Many of us who teach or have taught in architecture schools know that it's often difficult to anchor design education history, or to prove the relevance of history for the education of architects. And here, I'd like to turn briefly to a recent interview with Leslie Locco, architect, former head of the Johannesburg Graduate School of Architecture, and of course curator of this year's Venice Biennial. It's again present. In an interview with Locco, published in a recent and very evocative issue of Journal of Architectural Education on Critical Architectural Pedagogy, she discussed the importance, but also the difficulties associated with the importance of the oral tradition in Africa, and African architectural education. One example of this interview is that in architecture schools in Africa, on the continent, still to heavily rely on the written word, while not sufficiently incorporating oral traditions. One interesting solution she proposed at the Graduate School of Architecture in Johannesburg, which she also led for several years, was to give students the option of doing a performance instead of a written dissertation. My question then to you is how do you envision performance, or participatory and embodied ways of learning to play a role in design education in a more practical sense? Do you see this as a critical or perhaps even decolonial pedagogy? And I somewhat hesitate to use the word here because it's so frequently used these days. Yet thinking about performance, also the ephemeral nature of performance comes to mind, which perhaps also makes it challenging as a tool for education and learning. Thirdly, and finally, I would like us to briefly move from methodology to the architectural form itself, to the palace of Baba Emi. We heard about a process of interpretation and in a way also of translation from sound into architectural form and space. And what struck me was your description of Baba Emi's translation as a liberal interpretation of the architectural poem. And I think this prompts the question of the broader cultural significance of the redesign of the palace, in appropriating the poem and conflating the past with the present, what is perhaps the political dimension of his interpretation and the political dimension of these incredible ornaments you've showed us. And with these three points, first the notion of evidence in West African architectural history, the role of performance in architectural design education and finally the political dimensions of using performance for redesign. I would like to hand it back to you, Adid Oyan, and ask you to join me now in the front and perhaps give a response to maybe one or more of these points if you'd like before we turn it over to the audience, of course. Rick, thank you for your very generous and probing just summary but also just the questions you have asked. I'll attempt to do justice to some of these questions. I think if I were to talk about evidence, what counts as evidence and how I have dealt with that, it's a great question and because this project is ongoing, I'm just really at the beginning but there's a way in which your question about performance and the place of performance in architectural education is related to this question about evidence. Let me try and attempt to respond to the latter, how I have dealt with the notion of evidence. So part of what there's a way in which these... So the first, let me say this, the first time I heard of such a tradition was acquiring the report that King Baba Yami himself wrote, a list in different palaces, poems of palaces, poetry. And that point is significant because it was transcribed. I didn't hear these poems in their original contexts and part of what I propose, part of the way I propose to deal with this and this is where your discussion of ephemerality is also important. I am afraid that going to southwest Nigeria and going to some of these kingdoms, there may not be a lot of people who are still performing this poetry in its multi-disciplinary context. So the short answer is that because I first encountered this through a textual transcription, it remains to be seen what challenges I'm going to see. So it's a legitimate question that I can't answer. I realize the risk of that. But I think there's something there. I think what I would say, though, is how important the performative part of this tradition is that this tradition of oral poetry or just poetry of palaces was performed. I want to emphasize that and to really begin to try and engage with that tradition. One has to go there. So there's a sense that one has to go there. And so that is how I would respond to the question of how I have dealt with it in terms of evidence. It's also a very good question. Part of why I find Baba Yemmi very interesting is, again, to go back to a point about the liberal. It was almost as if part of the purpose of his performance of the poetry was to create a sonic and performative atmosphere where the new building could be built. And it was almost not as important what type of building was built. What was probably more important was just creating the atmosphere. So merely performing, not merely, but performing, you know, evoking the poetry within a ritualistic context created, and I don't want to use the word adequate, but created an ideal atmosphere where this was created. So the factual, where I'm going with this, is that the factual, you know, whether the poetry, in other words... So just give me a perfect example. The excerpt of that poetry that I read referred to an Edo who was the builder. And when he rebuilt the palace again, Edo was not involved. And so it's almost as if Edo became a model, an idea, right, that needed to be performed in order for his liberal interpretation of what that palace would be. So there's a way in which the question of what constitutes evidence, it's the sonic atmosphere. It's that as opposed to some faithful, right, you know, faithful interpretation of the poetry, you know, the use of the people, you know, the original people. So there's a lot of liberality here. And so that would be my response to a question of what is evidence. I think the most important thing is the ephemerality. The most important thing is the fact that it's performed. So that would be my response. I'm grappling with these, but this is what comes to mind. It's related to what you said about performance, the place of performance in architectural education. I would say that as wonderful as studios are, I think there can be alternative spaces where architecture can be generated in a way that allows for performance, allows for, you know, just a sense of community. You know, a lot of these activities are communal. And I'm also thinking about just radical things like the American Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio. And the way that, you know, students of that Rural Studio go into communities. They linger, they play on sports teams. They get to know the clients and they build these, they build buildings together. Why not adapt part of that, you know, a long-term strategy in thinking of a studio that has, you know, just, it's longer than the normal studio and creating avenues where, for instance, just taking a place like Southwest Nigeria, having students embed themselves in these communities where these are still performed and then just creating a studio around that, right, where they have proximity to these performances. That would be my response as I'm dealing with these questions and I realize I have to give these questions much more thought. But the political, if I may, the political question, it's an interesting one because I think one response to that would be that it brings up a question of style and fidelity to a particular style. And so with the column that I showed by Arie Ogun, there's a way in which the history, especially the 20th century, the history of architecture in Southwest Nigeria as opposed to, well, maybe not as opposed to others, but there's a way in which there is a liberal take on style. There isn't a sense of canonization as such, right, or fidelity to a particular style. So there is a liberality to how certain things are, certain styles are used and deployed and what have you, and that includes architectural form. And so there is a political dimension to that. That I have to think about, but I think you can't divorce that from this liberality to the question of style and how that is deployed. So I would just say that just right now, but I really thank you for these. I would grapple with them some more, but that would be my response to these three things right now. So thank you. Well, thank you for answering all three of them. That's really good. I think especially your first, I don't know if this is working, but I think especially what you said about the ephemerality of this tradition and the ways in which it changes as well is very interesting, but also challenging in scholarship that is, in a world of scholarship, that's so much focused on replicability and permanence. Right, yeah. But let's open it up to questions from the audience. Hi, thanks a lot for that. That was great. I had a question about the poem and the way in which the poem seems on the face of it to make carving into a performance. The poem isn't about carving. Carving, as such. It's about carving. And so I wonder if that can lead into speculative thoughts. And I think speculation here is actually more important in a sense than a kind of evidence-based way of interpreting. I think speculation really is what this makes us do. I actually think speculation is more important, actually. But speculating about the idea that the making is the performance, what happens then to the idea of performance around the finished column, a finished column, such as the one you showed, and the fact that that column is in a particular place beside an open courtyard, what happens then in moving from carving as an act to a carving? It's a good question. And this is something I have to give much thought to. I mean, the few times granted through documentaries, the few times I have witnessed carvers, chip away, so to say, and carve and engage with different types of work. There is definitely a rhythm. There's a performative dimension. And I have to think about this a little bit more. So there's the performance of that making, that carving as you stressed that. So there is that. To the latter part, what happens, to the latter part of your question of what happens, depending on the subject matter of the sculpted column itself, sometimes what is depicted is a king's horseman that has a storied history in southwest Nigeria. The playwright Waleishu Inka wrote, and the king's horseman really highlighting the importance of the king's horseman. The king's horseman occupies a very important place in southwest Nigeria. And so there's a way in which that is communicated, right, in that courtyard, just the ideal and the importance of that. And so it continues a function as a finished product. It's not even really finished in a sense, it's venerated and what have you.  They are very powerful in South, historically have been very powerful in southwest Nigeria. They support the kings in a sense. And there are a lot of these sculpted columns that are depictions of those women as well. So these columns, even after the performative part of the carving has taken place, they are intentionally put around the courtyard precisely because of their status. So there's that dimension to... And in some cases, I mean, with wood sculptures in general, the sculptures of twins, twins loom very large in southwest Nigeria as well, those are fed, you know, twin Ibeji. They are known as Ibeji. They are closed, they are fed, right? So there's a way, in terms of performance, it's a great question. There's a way in which with some of these sculpted columns, the carving is just the end of one performance and there's another type of performance as well. Hi, thank you for your really interesting presentation. I mean, I'm just sort of thinking about the actual word, the word performance. I mean, within the English language, it has the word form in it. And, you know, the prefix per is for forming. So that might be something useful for you to sort of help frame your thinking as well. Obviously, you know, it's in the English language and other languages have different kind of words.  It has a front.   And perhaps the humans is a kind of an architectural thing as well within the performance. Yeah. I don't know. That's just my idea. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Hello. Okay, thank you. Thank you for the wonderful lecture. So whilst listening to you, I was thinking about, so I trained originally as an architect in Ghana and I remember back in architecture school being very interested in poetry and architecture grappling with poems like Kofi Aouna's Rediscovery.  And so I guess the question is, how do you see this work in a sense going back to a place like Nigeria or to West Africa or to Ghana and sort of expanding the canon? Because again, back then there was a lot of reliance on the Western canon and if you were interested in some of these topics, you sort of had to come back to that. And yet I see there's a lot of rich history here that could enrich the canon, expand it. And the second question would be based on your research. What is your reading of, let's say, the contemporary West African architectural scene, especially as it relates to its own history and how that history is appropriated or ignored or, you know, used if at all? Okay, thank you very much. Two great questions. So the first question about just the curriculum and expanding the curriculum, so I will try to answer that by just citing an example, just a few examples in Nigeria.  So to say, that has been less successful. There was, you know, there was a moment, and Lukach here has talked about that a little bit.  It hasn't had, you know, just, even just decades after that, it didn't go anywhere. I studied architecture in Nigeria in the 90s, and there were no offerings whatsoever, and I can count the number of schools of architecture in Nigeria, where there were no offerings on Nigerian architecture at all. And so I don't think much has changed in that regard. So the things that were instilled into art history curricula in Nigeria, that didn't follow in architecture schools to what I know. It may very well be the case now. I doubt it, but it may very well be the case now. So that, so, and that is interesting. Why that has been the case is quite interesting. I would allude that to, at least it was the case when I was an undergraduate student, just this desire to quote unquote catch up with the West and just to be very fluent in modernist architectural forms in the West. That was what, you know, that was the goal of many, many students. So there's something there that's worth talking about. Your question about just contemporary, you know, West African architectural practice. In the conference, the University of Lagos conference that I cited, there was more a desire to appropriate semiotics and forms, you know, architectural forms of historical architectural Nigeria as opposed to the question of ritual and the place of ritual in all of that in generating and being a sort of atmosphere, performative atmosphere. My sense is that with, at least, I can only speak to Nigeria, I can't speak to Ghana as much, but there is this move, right? There is a growing critical mass of people who are interested in the question of, you know, semiotics and what have you. The performative part less so and it was what I was trying to provoke in the conference at the University of Lagos. In fact, there was somebody who taught theater and one of the people, the three pictures I showed including myself, the person in the middle was a professor of drama, so it was heartening to see him there, but I would say he was in the margins, so to say, and so there is this desire to use ornament, whatever one defines that, as a rallying point to create, you know, contemporary West African architecture, but it's at face value in my humble opinion and it does not involve just the context, the ritualistic, the performative context, so that's what I would say, and I don't know how it is in Ghana. Sorry, thanks so much for the talk. I wanted to ask you about, in your presentation, you present two main performative spaces, one of the David and Jay, one of the Palace, and I wanted to ask you about the different approximations that you take to one or the other, your own performative self in that, which is quite distinct. I had some speculations why that was, but I'd rather ask you before. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there is the... That's interesting. There is one of the ways, maybe I will attempt to do justice to this question this way. One of the ways that I connected these two case studies together was the Ajayi's use of Areogun, the artisan, you know, his knowledge, of the artisan's work, and as I said, it's generated, it became the impetus for the Smithsonian design, and so there's that direct, right, connection. Now, you are right to allude to the ways that they are, they are different ways of performing, but David's knowledge of, he's done a documentary on the urban built environment in Africa. His knowledge of different architectural traditions in Africa is vast, he's written books, he's written at least one book on that, and the idea of performance has been very, very important to him. In talking with his brother, they lived in Saudi Arabia and would wake up to the, just the wisdoms, you know, call to prayer, Islam and what have you, so there's a way in which, in the biography of somebody like, well, the two Ajayi brothers, you know, just performance and sound has been a huge part of just their, you know, their lives just growing up, and so I would say that the palace itself and that oral history of the palace and the performance, nature of that palace, as I tried to demonstrate, was a multidisciplinary atmosphere that I think is a little bit akin to the kind of atmosphere that the Ajayi brothers were creating, where in both these case studies, the built form was not the only thing, it was part of a larger complex, right, of different artistic genres, and so I guess my, my positionality, for lack of a better phrase, my position vis-a-vis these things is just appreciated how in these two cases, they are these examples of placemaking that are multi-disciplinary, a multi-sensory, you know, and with the Ajayi brothers and Chris Ophelia as well, who I also have to mention, the Stephen Lawrence Center is this amalgam, right, of music, you know, I didn't mention this, but Ophelia did the stained glass windows at the Lawrence Center. It's, in both cases, there are these, there are these holistic enterprises, holistic attempts at making a sense of place, right, and so that as, as a scholar looking at these, that's how I was able to just connect these two together, that's the common thread for me, you know, just running through these two. I think we have time for one last quick question. Thank you. That was great. I was really intrigued by this statement, which I believe came from the conference of the University of Lagos about this close relationship with an ornament and rituals, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that, because what is striking to me the most specific statement than the statement about the relationship between architecture and rituals, right, and my kind of follow-up question, or perhaps a counter-question, is to what extent the category of an ornament as opposed to something else, to what extent the category of an ornament is useful for the material that you are discussing? Let me attempt to the question of ornament and ritual. At least historically, as it was understood, there was a way in which, whether it's in building elements, it's actually more so with columns and what have you. There's a way in which those building elements were the culmination, but also a very concrete part of what was otherwise, in some cases, much more ephemeral, if that makes sense. That in other words, whether it's with evoking poetry, plain drums that had a temporal, that had just a sense of time. There was a way in which ornaments considered a certain way, and by that I'm referring to the wooden columns in particular. Of course, you know, ornaments abound in a variety of ways. That was something that manifested itself in a way that had a different kind of duration than say, you know, the authoring of poetry, the dancing, and the drumming. And so ritual, the way that ritual and the ornament, the Christian ornament was part of the ritual. So the way I would respond to that is that the ornament of wooden columns was almost a different physical manifestation of what was also a holistic process. But if one were to think of ritual in terms of the music and the poetry alone, there's a way in which the sculpted columns were part, they were, again, sounding like a broken record, but they were this, I don't want to say more concrete, but they were just a different kind of manifestation. That would be how I would respond to that. But what was the, forgive me, what was the second part of what you were saying? To what extent the category of ornament is a useful category of distinction? It's a good question, and I'm thinking through this, and I'm not sure that I can actually distinguish. Yeah, I mean, the question is making me think of how people have defined ornaments, and how people have defined ritual, how people have defined architecture. I mean, I think this question is forcing me to actually really interrogate these, because I think as you, I know it's a leading question, but I think as you are pushing me to think about these, there are ways that these, the boundaries, the false boundaries or whatever, could be, you know, just problematized and blurred even more. So I'll have to think about this more. I hadn't really thought about that. And the reality too is that there isn't a Yoruba equivalent of ornament as such, right? And I think I am projecting these terms right onto this, right? There isn't a Yoruba word for ritual as such, right? And even architecture as such, there isn't a term for that. You know, the closest, there are terms, there's a term for a palace, right? There's a term for that. There's a term for home, right? And usually, it encompasses the poetry, it encompasses, you know, just the features. So no, you are right to push me and to really make me again just look at these terms. How am I deploying these terms? Are there maybe something there that I need to just think through a little bit more? So thank you very much. Thank you. I actually think we have time for one more question. Yeah, we have a question from our online audiences. We have a couple of comments. So just to kind of, for those online, we'll pass these on to Ada Doyne to look at, maybe respond by email, just for him to know. There's a question that I think you've already answered in many ways, but I'll sort of ask it anyway. This is from Dayemi Akande, who asks in the Babayemi example, once he's a significant departure from the early style, how much of the old was he able to represent in the new palace, considering that he relied on history, archaeology and folklore as primary sources for his reproduction? I know you've talked about it in your response, Derrickst. And I was wondering also if you could tell us when the new palace was sort of inaugurated and built? Yes, it was in the 1980s. Okay. It was built in the 1980s. And my sense is that the Babayemi was very much a product of the 20th century, the latter half of the 20th century, and had no qualms about just employing, in a very liberal fashion, different elements of, you know, different stylistic elements of architecture. And it speaks to very much his place in history. So that's what I would say, that he had no qualms about that. And that the atmosphere of the performance was more important to him than a literal translation, a literal depiction of stylistic elements from the early part of the 20th century or the 19th century. Yeah. Thank you. I really just also want to say a big thank you to both you and Derrickst for the talk and the conversation tonight. And I know I have quite a few questions that I'm holding back on, and I know quite a few of you in the audience will as well, but this isn't really finished. We can sort of move to the next room and continue our conversations. And thanks to all those online as well for joining us. So, thank you.


This week's topic is software engineering, and in our class, we'll focus on two main ideas. One, what are some of the tools and techniques that professional software developers use to create real projects? And two, what are the theoretical principles behind software engineering to manage the complexity and understand large software systems with lots of developers? In this video, I'm going to show you an example of one of many tools that developers use. It's called MELD, and it allows you to compare the differences between files and directories. Now the reason I'm showing you this utility is so that you understand how it works so that we can look at the source code and what a program looks like that's written across many different files and directories. Then I'm going to show you some of the tools in the book, the different types of diagrams in UML that the book talks about, and take a look at some of that in the context of the MELD utility. I have some examples here on my desktop, bottles1.py and bottles2.py. These are sample solutions to the lab we did a couple weeks ago with the bottles that pop on the wall. So this first solution is the one I've already given you on Canvas, which has a while loop and an if statement. This other one I just made up quickly, it has a while loop and two if statements, but essentially it should print the same results. Something you end up doing a lot as a software developer is comparing different versions of files that you've written. Perhaps you've been working on a project for a little while, and you want to know what all changes have I made to this file and do I want to keep those changes permanently. A nice utility in Linux and also available in other operating systems, it's called visual diff. To run this diff utility, you just select the files you'd like to compare, right-click, and choose the compare option. By the way, diff means difference, it's just an abbreviation of that term. So this is a program called meld that runs on Linux, and it basically puts two files, one on the left, one on the right, and it highlights the visual differences between the files. You can see, for example, in this file I have verse greater than two, whereas in the other file I have verse greater than one. And it highlights the background that that character was changed on that line. And then also it shows, okay, these lines are the same here and here, but this chunk is different between those two files. So that's kind of a handy utility. And if you explore this in the lab you can see what all the other menu options do. Meld also works on a pair of directories. So here I have some pretend directories of files left over from another tech talk in the past. I can select those two and compare. And basically what it does is shows you a list of the directory contents on the left versus the other directory. Here's a new file, for example, that comes up in green and it's striked through on the left, whereas this file here, bash quickref.pdf, I've deleted out of the directory on the right. Finally, there's a copy of Grim's fairy tales. It's a text file. And that one shows up in red because that file has been changed. And if I double click on that file it will show me any differences between the two. So on the left it says the brother's Grim. On the right the brother's Mayfield. I'm not trying to plagiarize that work, I just want to show you that if you make a difference to a file you can detect that difference using a utility like meld. This utility also come in handy when computer science professors want to compare your code submissions to see if you copied from other students in the class. So please don't cheat in your programming classes. It's not very difficult for a computer scientist to detect that kind of thing. Well the reason why I showed you meld is I want you to be familiar with what features this software has because now we're going to take a look at the source code for the meld utility. So I've cleared off my desktop, let me bring up my web browser again and search for meld on Google. So it should be the first link, hopefully it's the same on yours. So here's the website for meld. Again it just shows you what the features are and blah blah blah. So I'm going to go ahead and download the latest version of meld. It downloads in a tar.exe file which is extractable by a Linux computer so I'll just go ahead and right click that download file and say extract here. And now what I have is a copy of the source code of the meld program. Now I'm not going to go into all the details to how this code is implemented. Our goal today is to look at modularity and understand what the concepts in Chapter 7 of the textbook are talking about. So what you see here if I go into the meld directory is here are all the source files for the meld program. Now I've also got other files like the binary and some data, maybe the help documentation. If you ever see the term PO those files are used to translate an application into other languages. So here's all the PO files or they're called translation files. And then some tools that go with that as well. But you'll notice that the meld application consists of a number of Python programs or not Python programs, Python modules. So here we've got matchers.py, merge.py, mist.py. And there's some subdirectories as well like UI which must stand for user interface. So maybe these are all the programs that make all the different text boxes and buttons work. Utility functions and VC which in terms of meld stands for version control. There's a number of version control systems that meld automatically integrates with. So there's all of those. So one thing you'll notice in a medium sized software project like meld, all of the source code is in different directories. You've got a number of different files and they each have their own role in the application. So let's take a look at some of these files in more detail. The first file you may notice that looks strange is this double underscore init double underscore dot py file. In fact, if I open that file it's just a blank file. To understand what this means, let's go to the Python tutorial. I'll search for Python modules on Google. That will take me directly to chapter six of the tutorial. Now I don't expect you to read this entire tutorial, but I do want you to know that it exists. This might be a useful page just to skim through for your own enrichment. And you'll notice that what it says about Python modules is it's basically a way to organize an application into multiple directories. This is really useful if you have multiple people working on the project and they each have their own space or their own set of files that they make changes to. A requirement of the Python language is that each directory needs to contain an initialization module. So this double underscore init dot py file says if I go to import code out of this directory, you need to run this initialization first. Now, although that's a requirement of a language, you don't necessarily have to include things there. So for example, if I go back to the meld source directory and look at that init dot py file, for the most part they're blank. There's another blank file. There's another blank file. However, in the version control directory, the init dot py file has a bunch of extra stuff in there for initializing that version control system. Anyway, you might notice if we look at, let's say, dir diff dot py, this must be the file that does directory diffs or directory comparisons. And again, the goal here is not to understand all this code, but to get a feel for what a real software application might look like at a small scale. Here's another one, file diff. So here's the code for comparing the differences between two files. And of course, at the top of this file, we have a whole bunch of import statements because there's all these other modules that need to be included in the code. Finally, let's take a look at misc dot py. So here's some miscellaneous things. You can see I've got some statements, some definitions like shell join, run dialogue, open uri, position menu under widget. I kind of like these names here. However, if I go back to file diff or dir diff dot py, here we have classes like a stat item. Or let's see, there's some other definitions. Here's a dir drift tree store or a canonical listing. Those are all class blueprints for different objects in this application, a cached sequence matcher, for example, or cursor details or task entry. There's a lot of details that go into this type of application where even if I just have a simple task like compare the contents of two directories or compare the contents of two files. So now that we've seen a little bit about what the code looks like without again understanding the individual details of the code, let's define what these different concepts in Chapter 7 of the textbook mean. So in this segment, I'm going to refer to three of the figures in the textbook. These are all in Chapter 7 starting on page 309. So the first figure is Figure 7.3 where we have a structure chart. Now a structure chart is used to understand how the code is organized in terms to what function calls which function or how does the control go from one place to the other. So for example, you might see here, I'm back in my dir diff file. And as I go along, you'll see at some point it will call other functions like tree view dot connect or focus out events dot append or so forth. Now this would make a very large structure chart. And of course, again, I don't want you to go through and fully understand some big projects in five minutes. But on a small scale, you might have a game that has these four different functions and you call each one. And the point is, can you go through a large software project and come up with a diagram that helps you understand how do I get from one place to the other. This is like a map for the execution through that code. Let's take a look at Figure 7.4 now. And this is a different type of diagram. This is called a class diagram or a structure of, let's say, a class in all of its instances. So for example, going back to the mild application, I have a class for file diffs and a class for directory diffs. Where did that class go? Here we go. So there's this nice big comment right here that helps you find it. So the directory diff class has all of these things and it just got some kind of a map and a state actions and it has all these other different buttons and it has all of these UI tools. You can imagine having in the diagram over here a list of all of the properties of that class. So if I were to have multiple diffs going at the same time, which I can, I can compare multiple sets of files at the same time, those are all going to be instances of the same application. And so a diagram like this helps you understand what are the objects in the application and what are they all doing. Finally, if you want to look at how the application is running itself, you need something like an interaction diagram. So in the textbook example, going through with this tennis game, we have different players and a judge and then some kind of a class that keeps track of the score. And player A will let the judge know that it served and then the judge will let player B know that that ball was hit to them. And then B will say, well, did I hit it back or not? And the judge will let player A know and at some point the match ends and the judge updates the score. So this allows you to see both the flow of execution and the different actors or objects that are involved. And the way you read this diagram is from the top to the bottom. As time goes on, we move further down the chart. So when you have a project this complex, right, if there's this many files involved, and I think the meld project is developed by, I don't know, about half a dozen or so people as an open source project, it's kind of nice to keep everything independent, right? So if I need to fix something in this file or in this file, I don't want to break something in this file or this file on accident. So the way we do that is with a number of techniques described in the book. Let me pull up a document to type some of these. So one of them is the idea of coupling, or in other words, we want to minimize coupling. Now, coupling is when one module affects another. So for example, in the beginning of this presentation, when I was showing you how meld worked, one of the things you can do during a directory diff is double click on files that have changed, and that will bring up a file diff, right? So there's some kind of coupling between these two files, and if I change one, it may have a side effect on the other one. This is called, now there's actually two ways that you can actually do coupling. One is control coupling, and one is data coupling. So in control coupling, it's basically when you have a procedure or a function calls between the two of them. Let me go ahead and bold this term. Now, of course, this could be between two or three or how many of our modules, but a couple means two, right? So if I have two modules and one module calls a procedure or function of another module, then those in terms of the flow of control of the program are coupled. That's what control coupling refers to. Now data coupling, as you may guess from the name, talks about sharing information or data between modules. So if I go back here and look at the source code, I think it wouldn't take long until I see that there's some kind of data structure that may be shared between the two modules. And if I just take a look at the list of all these files, the meld window may have nothing to do with, say, the undo button. Actually, that's a bad example. Undo is probably part of the window features. But there's other things like debus service that might not have anything to do with the miscellaneous features. And so as we design the software project, we want to minimize coupling. We want to keep control between several modules that need each other, but there shouldn't be a dependency between every file to every other file. And same thing with data. We want to keep the data organized in different places so that if there needs to be a change, I have to go to the minimal number of places to make that change. Now the other task, or sorry, the other concept that's introduced in Chapter 7 is that of cohesion. Now this is the other side of the problem. I actually want good cohesion. I want to avoid coupling, but we want to maximize cohesion. So I'll tell you what, I'm going to make this green because that's a good thing. Dark green is probably good enough. And I'll make this red or crimson because that's a bad thing. Okay, so what is cohesion? Well, the book refers to cohesion as glue. The glue that holds a module together. In other words, as I'm designing a module, I want everything in that module to be related. So for example, the file diff module should only have code that is necessary for doing the difference comparison between two files. I don't need any code here that deals with directories. I don't need code in here that deals with, well, I don't know what other files are in this program. Maps of links or buffer management or different paths of things or the undo button. That's not necessarily what it means to compare two files. So as I'm trying to build this module, I only want everything that's related. So glue in this sense is what's the underlying abstract concept that makes all of these things the same. I think most of you as you organize large projects do this anyway, right? You organize things if they're related. So save to file name, save file, make patch. These are all part of doing the differences between files. Now one technique that we can use to protect our cohesion, and this is the last section now in 7.4 that I'd like you to study before Wednesday is called information hiding. Let me unitalicize the word and. So information hiding. Now some of you have seen this in the Java intro courses if you've learned about public and private. So the basic idea of information hiding is that the details of how a module works should not matter. So in other words, if I'm going to do a file diff and some other module like the directory diff needs to do a file diff, the directory diff doesn't need to know, well, what all variables did I have to write to make that happen? So looking at the example in the textbook when it talks about that tennis game, the judge doesn't need to know what are all the data types of the players like their name and their current speed and the trajectory. The judge only needs to know did the ball cross over the net or not, right? And by making something private or hidden in the details of how you write code, it's not like you don't want anyone else to ever see that code. What you don't want is them to accidentally access that code, right? We don't want to have data coupling. We don't want one module to try to access data of another module accidentally. So by hiding that data with mechanisms in the programming language such as making it private, we prevent the coupling of two modules accidentally. You know, people make mistakes and these things that we want to minimize, we use cohesion and information hiding to prevent that from happening. So clearly there's a lot more to this chapter than these concepts, but this is what I would like you to focus on between now and Wednesday. Be sure to read the textbook section 7.4 and 7.5 so you can get the details of what this information means. I've mainly wanted to give you a bird's eye view just picking up some source code that I've never looked at before. I know most of you probably haven't looked at this code before, but it's not that intimidating if we use tools to understand how things are coupled, where the data flows, and I hope you'll take a look at the UML tutorial because we're going to draw some diagrams on Wednesday to do just that. So until then, I'll be signing off and I'll see you on Wednesday.


Welcome to All Hands Update, I'm Petty Officer Amara Timberlake with your headlines from around the fleet. The X-47B unmanned combat air system made Navy history when it landed on board USS George H.W. Bush, July 10th. This was the first time a tail-less, unmanned autonomous aircraft made an arrested landing on a modern aircraft carrier. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel emphasized the importance of education in his closing remarks at the Military Child Coalition's 15th National Training Seminar, July 9th. Their education is a strategic investment in our future. Today I want to assure you that DOD will continue these investments even as we transition away from more than a decade of war and confront the reality of reduced resources. Hagel said family support is and will remain a key part of the all-volunteer force. You can read more about these stories at Navy.mil. From All Hands Update, thanks for watching.


So you want to become a cardiologist. You want to know what a cardiologist does, how much money they make, how long it takes to become one and what your typical day will look like. That we're going to talk about all of that in this video. Let's get to it. All right guys, welcome to another episode in the MD journey and the TM day show. My name is Laksham, internal medicine resident, helping people just like you succeed on their medical journey with less stress. Today I am super excited because we are finally starting here, how to become a doctor series on the YouTube channel through playlist and videos, basically helping you understand what options you have in medicine and what each of them do, how long it takes and how much money they make, what they do on a typical day or break those all down. So if you guys have your recommendations on what specialties and fields of medicine you want me to cover, drop them in the comments section down below. Today we are going to talk about a specialty by myself, considering, which is why I'm biased and we will start with the field of cardiology on how to become a doctor series today. Before we get to talk about all the fun things regarding cardiology, make sure if you're new to this channel and you haven't done so already, subscribe to the channel and go ahead and hit that notification bell to get two videos just like this one given to you on a weekly basis and also support the channel in this video. If you enjoy it by hitting that like button. It's the first thing we have to ask is how long does it take to become a cardiologist? What's the training like? And a lot of the videos are going to have similar answers.  So that's another four years. Now, the things that change is when you go into cardiology.  That's currently what I'm doing. And after you do internal medicine, you have several options. You can go into cardiology or you can go into GI and work as a stomach doctor and go into hematology or oncology and become a cancer doctor.  You have to do another three years of a cardiology fellowship. So that's like four plus four plus three plus three. Doing my math live 14 years from high school on to be a full-fledged physician as a cardiologist. And I know that seems like a long time because it is, you know, it's going through 14 years after high school is a long commitment to become the profession you want to. But it doesn't even stop there. If you want to do something even more invasive, maybe you want to be an invasive cardiologist. These are individuals who do common procedures like putting in stents or evaluating somebody after they have a heart attack. That requires even more training after the three years of fellowship. So you can be in training for quite some time. There are plenty of different options. If you want to see the full breakdown of all the different roads that you can get in cardiology, if we've written a blog post just for you, that will be on empty journey. I'll link that down below. So the answer to how long is very long. 14 plus 15 plus years. And if you do a gap year or if you have another career, you know, it can be some time until you become a full-fledged cardiologist. And if I chose to do this and I haven't really taken any extra time off, I graduated college a year early and then I took a gap year. So I'm on the typical route. Otherwise, I'll probably will become a cardiologist if everything goes correctly at the age of like 32, 33. And that will be my first full doctor job. So it takes some time for sure.  How much money do you make? And I'm not going to shy away from sharing numbers just because we're in medicine. I feel like if you want to know how to become a certain specialty, you should know what their salaries are because that is something you should consider. And so for cardiology, it really depends if you're non-invasive versus invasive. And regarding invasive, we've already given the example of people who play Stenson for somebody with coronary heart disease or somebody who has had a heart attack. There's also individuals known as electrophysiology cardiologists who I know it's a mouthful, but they basically work with the rhythm of the heart. And if anything goes A wire, you know, then you can go ahead and fix it through many different cool procedures, things like ablations and so on. And so those also again require more training but are rewarded with a higher salary. So let's break down the difference between non-invasive and invasive. So if you're a non-invasive cardiologist, the numbers can really depend on what part of the country you're in. So this is going to seem like a huge range, but I would say the average is going to be in the $300,000 range. There's going to be still people who make something in the high 200s. There's going to be people who make as high as four or even 500,000. And again, the people who make higher are usually in less desirable areas where they're able to, you know, just make more because there are more desired, the demand is higher. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, there are people who live in major cities where there's a lot of cardiologists around. So maybe they just aren't able to make as much depending on the demand that's there. When we talk about invasive cardiologists, the numbers starts to go up into the $400,000 range. And again, that's just because these individuals are one more specialized, more trained and higher in demand because of the procedures that they do.  But you have other obligations as well as higher malpractice insurance for doing an invasive procedure. So just keep those kind of things in mind. Your salary will go up, but so does your liability. And last few things I want to leave you guys with, especially because I'm interested in the field myself, are things like why you should become a cardiologist, what your typical day looks like, as well as how you can learn more and who you can follow to get more of an insight into the field of cardiology. So in terms of why, I'll at least give you my why. That's because one, the heart is such a crucial organ. They all are, obviously. But the field of cardiology is so well researched. And if you look at the amount of data there it is, I can look at two different patients and understand, you know, that there's probably a research article or study that's evaluated what medications I should give this individual versus this individual. I feel like comparatively to other specialties, cardiology is known to be more data driven. There's more guidelines and it gives me more of a direction on what should probably be best for my patients. Personally, I enjoy the ability to use guidelines and directions, but also have some flexibility and creativity where research hasn't been done. So with that data, I know what medications are great for my patients and doing the best to make sure that they are on the right ones for their specific condition. And if you're somebody who enjoys medicine, the elements and aspects of physiology, cardiology is one of the coolest fields for that because the heart can both impact how the body works as well as be impacted by the body's other comorbidity.  Those are just some of the small things that all make sense when you understand what's going on in the heart and the muscles and the cells. It's just, I love it so much.  Through heart attacks, through arrhythmias, through strokes, through heart failure, and you are able to take care of those patients, truly make an impact and ideally, you know, change the course of their prognosis. So all of those are reasons that I want to become a cardiologist or at least I want to explore the field a little bit more in my remaining time in residency. Hopefully that's helped, I'll fuel you to look into the field a little bit more. If you want to understand other questions like what typical day of the cardiologist looks like or who you should follow, maybe on Instagram or social media to get a little bit more insight. And we have a full blog post that we've gone ahead and also created with this video that you guys can check out down below in the link in the description. If you do enjoy it, you know, it would really help us and help me on the channel if you can go ahead and share it with other people who you think that it may also help. And in that blog post, I also gave you a list of some of my favorite people on Instagram physicians who are truly sharing their experiences with a cardiologist that you may be able to enjoy from, seek some cool videos and cool diagrams as well as some cool teaching. That's basically it for today's video. Thank you guys so much for allowing me to nerd out and geek out. And hopefully you found the video still helpful. If you did, make sure you support the video and the community by hitting that like button as well as that subscribe button and that notification bell. And new videos are coming at you every week on Wednesdays and Sundays with topics just like this one. So if you want more videos on how to become a doctor series, make sure you comment down below on what professions you want me to cover in the future. And ideally the goal is eventually we start doing more interviews with professionals in the respective fields. But at least for now, you're just gonna have to deal with me. Hopefully that's okay. If you're listening to this on the podcast, make sure to go ahead and subscribe as well as leave it on as soon as the high tunes that truly helps us get in front of you.  So hopefully you guys enjoy that. But with that being said, thank you guys so much for joining me on this video, joining me on my journey. Hopefully it will help to you on the worst. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.


So up next we have Peter Boy. He's going to talk about Fedora docs plans for the future or how you can contribute We're just doing a little bit of text that up here for his laptop Okay, that's someone has a Fedora sticker at hand so I can hide No, oh it's already online. I need my manuscript. Sorry. Yeah, well, I'm Peter Boy. You can read And it's the first It's the first time I'm in an in-person Fedora meeting so probably some some words about me I'm Working as a scientist at the University of Bremen. No redhead. No Whatever I graduated in sociology as a first and as a minor in applied mathematics That was the home of computer science those days and statistics and Right because of that my colleagues thought it was a perfect person to care about our department's computer equipment And it grew and grew because we were funded as an excellence Research collective so we had our own equipment. We had freedom from the university IT and The side job grew and grew too but at the end I ended with a 24 or so servers and hardware At the end all of them in Fedora server and Well And I began to contribute to Fedora to things to Matthew's reboot of the server of a game. I wanted to Spend some of our internal Fedora documentation to Fedora That's what the starting point Nowadays I do a lot of more Then come to putting docks and when Ben a year ago started to the reboot the docks team Which was dormant for many years at that time. I Came to the crazy idea to join the docks team as well and Well, now I'm the member of the board and the only one who is regularly available Okay, so it could be better, but Let's start what's in its Some pages didn't work with the equipment here and other pages. Okay, so Wonderful the IT technology and Well, let's start with a Short analyzes where we are where we stand the way we are standing It's not a secret the state of the docks in Fedora There's a lot to wish for let's say is that way We are suffering in with the docks team for many years Until recently we had on nine our docks From Fedora 18 onwards or so and if you skip through the docks release by release you could see from release to release a number of documents which compose the docks but less and Sometimes any times ended with just to it was a installation guide and it was the Administration guide Well, but as a scientist I tried to make analyzes the idea was the issue is another Coincidence that we have such a How to put it not a bad state but a state which has many open wishes It must be a structural Issue and the here's is we have a weak integration of docks into the Fedora project and into the Fedora development There are several signs of it Is it here? Okay. Oh You may see and compare some starting points of several distributions It is Fedora. It is rocky Linux and arc Linux or how they are pronounced And maybe You notice a difference between them, but we don't want to make a guessing display here if you compare them you see these quite successful Distributions have all a document link in the main part of the website Besides you don't it does we have no document link and all website It's a weak indicator what indicator If docks is not in the main objective of Fedora of the Fedorians and if you have a look at our procedures eGV have a lot of Regularities a lot of decision chains to make a Package all these decision change handle about technical technical issues There is no requirement to have a dock At least at me it for instance and the description field for the package that there's a link to any kind of description and Or even worse we have additions We have a lot of regular of a lot of procedures to have it to make it with this edition It's a product document requirement You have to specify the marketing chances that you have to specify the user base a problem But you don't have to have a documentation We have no issues to distribute our flagship our lighthouse Distributables without documentation available fortunately Most of our additions have a documentation But that I think it's more by coincidence than by system system medical Issues But the problem is This this week integration. I think you can It's a long-standing water indicate we can change that and foresee the future and as far as I know Matthew can Talk about it documentation was no topic in the current next to do a discussion I suppose Yeah, yeah, so Next-chance is 20 30 or so flash probably I think we had documentation as one of the Points somewhere and then it ended up falling out in one of the reorganizations But there's kind of a bucket of here are the things we didn't know what to do with where should they go That's gonna be part of the need that conversation, but yeah, you're right. It's not been a focus except there is one section like the accessibility documentation has a Call out where that's kind of about The documentation we have already rather than making it a specific focus All right, oh I have to hurry This State of our documentation has some I suppose not fortunate for effects of our distribution as a whole For instance, we are hiding all our excellent technical capabilities because without documentation nobody sees it and many Fidorian want to For instance set up a web server. They don't find and documentation and start with documentation From Debian or whatever they are finding and wondering because why it doesn't work And the thing is okay Fedora doesn't work or Fedora is Rated as difficult to use and some decide them to switch to another Distribution that's a negative effect In the wrong run among others We could I think we could fix it without too much work The minimum could be to change our Package package guides to include some kind of documentation. It's new for packages. Oh, no, it isn't you We are used to do that with change proposals It's I had to read double time or three. But yes, we have in our change proposal the section about documentation and to Explain our users what to do. So our packages are not So unused to documentation. Maybe in the long run we have a chance to To improve the situation Well, that's a general consequences we have Well, that's the thing The the gist of it. We hide all our excellent engineering results because we have no documentation no one find found finds it Well, and we have An effect of our documentation tools themselves we switched sometimes they go from Doc book and Be the poor publican was it to eski doc and and Torra And a good workflow and the problem is that is a workflow that is fine for developers But not fine for those here who are dedicated writers You I don't know from any public publisher who asked for a good repository or ask for us guitar. That's the different workflows and The workflow has a lot to desire because for instance at the moment We have no with Preview tool so you are writing docs without having as see your the presentation of the content and Unfortunately, if you are writing docs There's interdependence between the content and the presentation of the content and so our tools are missing very important Element of writing Well, and we have a kind of quandary at the moment We have a workflow which is perfect for developers and we are Urgent need of developers who write documentation Or we have the right people who want to write documentation and Have a huge barrier in form of the bit and workflow with The public best workflow, which is quite only well unknown to them and this is a really a problem after Ben started the reboot of the Of the Docs group We managed to get eight new contributors over the one year Well currently the age the eight one is a zero again So yeah, after one year nearly at the same point as he started a year ago with events initiative. I Don't know the exact reasons but involved in all cases more issues with the workflow and with the drip User interface Which isn't nice and powerful but 80% of this unneeded for documentation and we have no Options at the moment as I got to know to do simplify for docs So we have a new we have one barrier Dropped and haven't built a new one No, nevertheless We can not rate until we have a better integration. We might have to do some things in the time we have So We started or I started to evaluate how we can improve documentation with the circumstances as they are and where we Took three Yes, the two ways the one way is to fix document structure The most most problem is in the door our document structure was it was perfect for Fedora 10 but all The changes we made with the last Fedora next to to create the additions didn't Well, didn't went to the documentation We had in so we had the unified installation guy which Should be valid for all our for all our distributables, but it wasn't So Sorry, this is Well, we change the doc's home page and I wrote a block post About the change we made and we adopted the structure of our documentation the structure of our Distribution and Well, we had to be resolved some documentation problem with that the responsibilities for the edit for the additions is now the addition workgroup and The addition workgroup should be familiar with the workflow and pull request workflow. So it seems it's not a problem for them I hope so to make the proper Right to create the proper documentation Um, if I better Okay, that's this foot Coming with Fedora release 27. We changed the home page We're in the Moment you can see a bit more we have we have a Just an introductionary power first part at the top and in the center of the page are our additions or additions to be in case of In a keynote and silver blue it is and We have we have an opportunity to add some of our goodies G's quick talk is for example or a specific Box for the arm for the arm computers for aspects for a single board computers, which is currently Discussed topic. Well, there are both some I skip that. Sorry This is the other way was to improve to make contribution easier for our users and And the way that was first step was as documentation team were documented the procedure So we created documentation about how to contribute to Fedora and Concentrated on quick docs Because this type of content Which is not so complex and not so huge as Contribution F installation guide for addition and so it's easier for users to start to contribute to and Where we developed it is this documentation how to do it we Developed some templates for creating a quick doc document and Various others Under others Helpful material, so we hope it is easier to do that. I Skip all the the details at the moment We are trying to Demonstrate these things in our workshop sessions on Friday, I suppose somewhere so we can demonstrate the things in detail and we can Hopefully get feedback if we didn't have good documentation or a bad one for instance But another step is we have to improve our doc tools Specifically we need a text processing option for Asking doc documentation with a preview or a viscic interface The only one I found at the moment is ask you ask you don't FX. Yes, and Well, we need to develop us to develop our Documentation tools and that's a long-term goal. It's not for the next to Fedora additions or so but what we already have in the Work is to automate our the generation of our release nodes so these notes suffer from the same issue as our user documentation from release to release the percentage of changes which were included in the release notes are going down and to Help therefore we are going to automate that Probably not with the next but with over next. Okay. That's a short overview with some technical issues and Yeah But we have time for questions. I think it's not me at G Hi So you mentioned there are some I suppose Issues with people onboarding in terms of like learning to get workflow and that kind of thing Do you think there's an issue with the documentation format? So ask you doc over something like markdown, which is a bit more ubiquitous. No, not us not ask doc It's it's a tool issue a tool on the workflow issue workflow issue All of these where it is a it was you aware users without a relevant development experience But some of them were dedicated writers. That's problem was not to make a text the problem was to get the text in the in our documentation and it was additional work for them. That's a problem and It was not attractive enough. I'm not I'm too for city was the German wording. I think we can fix that but it's additional work on our side or my side Well, just a little comment on the workflow So I've been involved in publishing lately and the process that people use like the professional writers in air quotes Without good. It's a living hell to be fair And I believe that spreading the git based workflow is actually a net good for everyone For non-developy writers as well because the process Can spread around and they can bring it to with them to other projects Maybe my problem problem is the guys are away I would like to have it and all of them struggled with the workflow And the additional work That's And well my goal of man and at the moment is to make it easier for them to provide better guidance For instance you plan we are planning Virtual shared writing sessions for us. We have someone attend during the session who can fix problems or explain them, but we have additional work to do Okay, so I have no problem with the git word for I do that myself and our projects. It's not a problem, but The non-development defined users are not they are not the problem, but they have the problem so Well, it may be a bit of a shameless plug, but in virus our distro So when we switched from media wicket to sphinx and git The community of the commutation developers actually exploded so sometimes I wonder if it may be Just an issue of marketing that workflow to people or attracting the right kind of people yeah, I Think well if I if I come read what they have written they were the right people content-wise at least and And Well, it's I'm quite Unhappy what is it they said to have lost them. It's They weren't able to write Qualitative high-level documentation Do you think it might be worthwhile to I like having you consolidated in one tool But do you think it might be worthwhile to move something like the quick docs to another system like a dedicated wiki or even to Solving all my problems with discourse using the discourse as a doc's plug-in that was marked down based if it would it Might it make sense to have a different like easy format docs that people could use Or would you it's better to? There are some people who propose to go back to wiki. I don't think it's it's a solution You should have unified system for normal docs and quick docs. You have to refer back and forth It's a matter of presentation to the public I think it's not a good idea the the counter example is the arm area they have and they are only on wiki and it's hard to find them because It doesn't fit into our documentation structure. And so my My what is the quicker in German? It's a help my helping stick Make a box for the arm on the on the on the wiki on our main page. So to have a topic which is highly discussed at the moment Well, you have to offer something about it. And so I'm more on the trip Make it easier to use a workflow and I'm hoping on the consulate council that we get a better integration and so long run so and I hope that our Repository, I don't know a pig. You are Pagoo. I don't know how to pronounce However you want okay That we keep can keep that because it's much easier with the workflow because it's much less powerful Okay, but all but we use what I give need for documentation is there. So It's a meant hopefully you can use it for some years for for what it's worth. I Jolene who is a lawyer Red Hat who is awesome, but you not a not a coder not She's not She's not non-technical, but she's like she's like she's a lawyer, right? And She found it. So I convinced her that she should you know use our docs process for the new fedora legal page she didn't want to use the wiki and She found Pagor too hard to use but I was happy with sick with get lab Once you figured it out. She thought it was much much easier. So that's my one other data point there I think also if we had a dedicated get lab We could configure some of it to turn all of that stuff off so we can have a much simpler like at least a section That's much simpler But you know that's we have to figure out how to get to something like that I'm sorry. I'm throwing stream of conscious thoughts that you hear but There's also there's a stalled thing in get lab where they are looking at having an ASCII doc preview in addition to the markdown Preview which would probably help, but that doesn't seem to be going anywhere But maybe that's something we could invest in working on as I don't Java program ASCII actually ASCII doc affixes it they have some working the editing To it and the manual like any text processing things and they have a preview and you can plug in your own CSS. So with some Effort we couldn't we can use it for our own CSS It'd be nice to have that edit like into the get Forge tool entirely. So I don't know maybe if you people do end up investing more in Pagor development We could solve both of those problems and maybe maybe make it have that preview Well, never the less before we are go I'm still on the trip to make documentation in Fedora better and to try hard to get it done. So Although I'm some time sometimes I'm a bit desperate about I have to see the night and then it's okay Thank you very much and just Yeah