As a public service, here’s “Going Places,” a 1948 cartoon digitized by the Internet Archive that describes the benefits of capitalism. Others in the series: “Make Mine Freedom” and “Destination Earth” (in which “Martian dissidents learn that oil and competition are the two things that make America great”). Via BoingBoing.
If you’re wondering how I got so fancy with my instructions on how to make a DVD clip reel, I had a trick up my sleeve. ScreenSteps is an application specifically designed to create software tutorials. It has everything you need packed in: screen capture, image notation, links, and text. Because it’s designed specifically for the purpose of creating tutorials, it’s super easy to use.
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"Archivists are Hot," by katherine of chicago. And they are!
Web-based research is great and all, but sometimes nothing beats talking to a real person. One of my favorite tricks when researching an obscure topic (like a certain kind of microphone) is to pick up the phone and call someone. In my experience, if you get in touch with the right person, he or she will be really excited to talk with someone who’s genuinely interested in the topic. And even though I’m shy and sometimes have trouble with the phone, I always end up really glad I made the effort to talk instead of email.
That’s why I love this resource: the Directory of Corporate Archivists in the United States and Canada. What could be more fun than geeking out on the phone with just the right person?
I’ve been thinking about PowerPoint lately, and about how I might use it productively.
It seems pretty clear that the blizzard-of-bullet-points method is not useful. Who can make sense of such tiny print so quickly? What’s the point of slapping bullet points on a screen?
"Why I Hate Most PowerPoint Lectures," by fling93. I have to admit, though, that I feel for this professor. The poor guy put so much work into his slide!
One popular alternative method is the one Cliff Atkinson advocates in the book Beyond Bullet Points. Atkinson has two basic suggestions. First, he argues that a single, dominating image, plus a trigger word or two is the best approach for any single slide. Second, he advocates crafting a presentation as a narrative, with a clear, logical, problem-resolution structure.
Here’s the thing that bothers me about that, though. Continue reading →
The National Library of Medicine has just launched a revamped Images from the History of Medicine online catalog, and it’s kind of blowing my mind. There’s a lot there, and a totally redesigned interface.
In theory (and mostly in practice), you can add images to a workspace and then create slideshows and “media groups.” You can then embed these creations in a blog or website, like so:
So that is very cool. My only thing is, the site is awfully slow, what with all the bells and whistles and JavaScript, and the interface could be slightly more intuitive. It’s a bit confusing to get from workspace to presentation or media group.
But, clearly, a lot of thought went into this site and it’s a really fantastic resource. They’ve even done research into the images’ copyright status, and you can download high-resolution versions of these images. I think it’s great that the NLM is treating their images as resources to be shared.
If you’re showing film clips in class, you’ll probably want to make a DVD clip reel — your own DVD with the clips you want preloaded on it. That way you can avoid the frenzied scan through chapter titles and the awkward dead time while you wait for the menu sequence to load. And making a clip reel is easier than you think.
(If you’d like, you can download a PDF manual of this guide.)
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Photo of Columbia University's Minerva sculpture, Alma Mater, by wallyg.
Mark Taylor, the chairman of Columbia’s religion department, has published a New York Times opinion piece that’s sure to cause a splash. “End the University as We Know It” argues that the university’s current incarnation is obsolete and irrelevant.
Taylor advocates getting rid of the “division of labor” model of academic departments, in favor of “problem-based” ad-hoc departments like “Water” and “Life”; increasing collaboration among institutions; encouraging grad students to produce works other than dissertations (Taylor mentions, oddly, video games); training grad students for jobs other than faculty positions; and abolishing tenure.
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I spent the last couple of days in Cleveland, where I was taking part in the American Association for the History of Medicine annual conference. I gave a talk on a project I’ve been working on, about the largely forgotten twentieth-century tradition of physicians exhibiting for each other at medical conventions. I got some great references to archives during the Q & A, and I was able to meet some people working on similar stuff, so it was exactly the outcome I hope for at these conferences.
Just for fun (fun?), I’ve put my slides up on SlideShare, along with an audio recording of my presentation. I’d wanted to use FlowGram, since it’s supposed to do exactly what I wanted to do (record audio and match it with slides), but I kept getting errors when I uploaded my slides. SlideShare just worked.
I actually design my slides in Apple Keynote, not in PowerPoint, so I was happy to see that SlideShare supports Keynote slides directly, no converting required. Audio was a little trickier, since SlideShare doesn’t host audio files for you. I recorded the presentation using Audacity, converted it to an MP3, uploaded the file to my own server, and then linked it to the SlideShare presentation. SlideShare has a really cool, intuitive tool for synching up audio with slides.
Anyway, here’s the presentation. The topic is obscure enough that I can’t really imagine that anyone who wasn’t at AAHM will want to see it, but it was fun to put it up on the Web. I think I’ll do this again with some more accessible, general-audience presentaions.
Okay, I don’t actually have an iPhone — I can’t afford the monthly fees. I do have an iPod Touch, though, and I love it with all my heart. I use it most frequently to watch movies at the gym, to listen to music and audiobooks, and to check email anywhere there’s WiFi. I guess you could be productive with it, though.
Here‘s a cool list of iPhone applications for librarians. Some of these I’ve never used, but now I’m curious enough to check out Remember the Milk.
(Via librarian.net.)
Posted in Tools
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Tagged iphone, productivity
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UNESCO’s World Digital Library launches today. It’s a site where you can view artifacts from every UNESCO member country, or, in the words of the WDL, it “makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.”
Screenshot of the World Digital Library homepage
Right now, there’s a bit of a mismatch between the lofty mission statement and the actual site — there are only 1,170 artifacts as of now. But it’s growing, so it will be interesting to watch the site develop.
The layout is cool. It’s actually a pretty simple idea to lay artifacts out on a map of the globe, but it changes my experience of the artifacts. It makes me think about the objects each country chooses as repositories of its history, and about what values and expectations went into making these decisions. Plus, it’s so easy to use that everyone from elementary school students to grownups could benefit from it.
Prezi is a presentation maker (still in beta) that avoids the standard linear slideshow model. Instead, you can zoom in and out of one big presentation, hopping between ideas however you want. Here’s an example of Prezi in action.
I like the ability to escape the rigid structure of the PowerPoint presentation, and this seems like an answer to Edward Tufte’s criticisms of the pedantic linearity of PowerPoint. But the free version has a 100 MB storage limit, is not embeddable, comes watermarked with the Prezi logo, and stores your presentation online. You can purchase premium versions, but I’m not sure many people who already have PowerPoint or Keynote installed will shell out.
Plus, I’m so anal about orchestrating presentations that I don’t like to leave room for any deviation. I know, it’s not very Tufte-ian, but I’ve seen too many people left totally speechless after a software glitch. So while I’d play around with Prezi in class, I think I’ll wait ’til it’s totally stable and more prevalent to use it for a big presentation.
(Via Lifehacker.)
Posted in Tools
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Tagged presentations, Tools
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Here’s a kind of fun new visualization tool from GoogleLabs. Google News Timeline lets you search for a topic (after you pick a category) and then arrays significant events on a timeline. I don’t really understand how the Wikipedia category works, and I wouldn’t trust the timeline to have every relevant piece of information, but, hey, it did a good job spitting out Hitchcock movies. (Via Google Operating System.)
Hitchcock timeline from Google News Timeline
Image from noblackboard.org.
A lot of schools use a “learning management system” called Blackboard to make course materials and registration functions available online. If you’ve ever used Blackboard, though, you know that it’s like a magic portal back to 1999.
Blackboard’s design is truly hideous (frames everywhere!), the options for customizing course sites are dismal, and the interface makes even the simplest functions baffling. (Google “I hate Blackboard” for some entertaining commentary.) The City University of New York recently got an object lesson in Blackboard’s shortcomings when the system crashed and burned, paralyzing CUNY’s online functions.
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The Internet Archive (which administers the Open Content Alliance) has sought leave to file a motion to intervene in the Google Books settlement. (Announcement, text of motion.)
Google Book Search has been in the news lately for a settlement it made with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over Google’s plan to scan books. You may have heard that people are pretty worked up about the settlement.
It matters for academics because the settlement will in large part dictate the terms under which many books are available online.
If you’re confused about the settlement, you’re not alone. I’ve been wading through blog posts and news items trying to get my head around what’s in the agreement. Here’s my best effort at a description of what’s going on, for us non-insiders. I can’t promise all the details are 100% accurate, and please correct me if I’m mistaken, but this is my understanding.
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Photo by Nesster.
Lately I’ve been volunteering to do usability testing for Yale’s library. Well, “volunteering” is probably too generous a word, since Yale pays pretty well, in the form of iTunes and Barnes & Noble gift cards. I like the gift cards, but I love the excuse to rant about what I do and don’t like about the library interface.
I have no idea how much of my ranting is actually relevant to the subject of the tests, but I enjoy it anyway. Most recently, I enjoyed ranting about what I’ve been calling “curated” databases, since I don’t know the technical term for them.
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At the Providence Public Library a few days ago, I ran across a copy of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. The book gives excerpts and essays from a cache of recently rediscovered newspapers for the “sporting male.”
Seeing the book reminded me of one of my favorite online resources, the digitized version of The National Police Gazette. Yale has the entire run (1845–1906) of this newspaper, keyword-searchable through ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Illustration from the National Police Gazette, October 5, 1901
The Police Gazette is really not a police gazette; it more often covers burlesque shows, boxing, violent crime, and other bawdiness. One particular specialty is engravings and photographs of burlesque performers.
I always find bawdy humor from bygone ages really entertaining. Plus, I actually did find the Police Gazette useful for a genuine academic purpose, a paper about boxing.
If your library doesn’t subscribe to the digital version of the National Police Gazette (outrageous!), you can still get a taste of it in a fun book, The Police Gazette, edited by Gene Smith and Jayne Barry Smith. Introduction by Tom Wolfe! And if your library doesn’t have that, well, what kind of library is it, anyway?
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities is a blog featuring amazing finds from Yale’s phenomenal Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I like the lesbian pulp novels, the Revolutionary War-era lottery tickets, and the WPA textbooks from the 1940s. The blog is maintained by Tim Young (curator of the Modern Books and Manuscripts collection) and Nancy Kuhl (curator of poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature).
Riding a moon bat to Saturn (obviously), from Voyage dans la Lune, a 1900 book about lunar travel in the Beinecke's collection.
I think a blog is a great way of showcasing a collection, since it portions out awesome finds in manageable chunks. I often feel overwhelmed by the number of digital collections out there, and a blog helps me to process things at a reasonable pace.
Also awesome: the Beinecke produces podcasts about its events and exhibitions. To be honest, I’m not likely to listen to a podcast of an event (although maybe others are?), because an event is an event — designed for the people who are there in person, and not necessarily suited for recording. I’d really like to see them spotlight individual items in the collection, the way they do in the blog, and explore them from a bunch of different angles.
HEY! WAKE UP! Photo by Sara!
I’ve been going through some old teaching evaluations and in between cringing (“I hate Miriam!”) and patting myself on the back (“I love Miriam!”) I was struck by one student’s comment.
This was for a film theory section. I think generally the class was successful, but it a) was a theory class and b) took place during late-afternoon dead-time (oh, and c) I’m not exactly Robin Williams), so occasionally the tenor of the classroom would get a little, shall we say, less than wildly enthusiastic. Anyway, this student said, to paraphrase, that when things got slow, “I wish Miriam would have said, ‘HEY! WAKE UP!’ to get our attention.”
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Bright colors make a big difference. Photo by the Brown University Class of '60.
I liked Yale’s Mudd Library for its endearing obsolescence, but for the Study Space of the Future, you can’t beat the Friedman Study Center in Brown University’s Science Library.
The Friedman Study Center, which opened in 2007, is a 24-hour study space designed by the Architecture Research Office. It’s in the basement of Brown’s Science Library, a Brutalist monster that’s about as inviting as a prison. The study center, though, plays against the cave-like, concrete walls of the library with exposed cables, bright colors, and an open atmosphere.
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Audacity is a great choice when you need to edit audio. It’s free, but it’s also pretty full-featured: it can record audio, import and export different file formats, and edit sounds. You can even use it to change the pitch of a recording without altering the tempo, remove static or hiss, or create sound effects.
Personally, I don’t need most of these features, since I’m not about to mix a masterpiece. So for me Audacity’s greatest feature is its user-friendly interface. I can download a Franklin Roosevelt speech from American Rhetoric’s Online Speech Bank, cut it up with Audacity, and drop it into a teaching presentation. Easy!
You can use Audacity with Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems. It’s free, no registration required.
Posted in Tools
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Tagged audio, tools i like
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Photograph by Scott Dierdorf.
(Via MetaFilter.) Syracuse University has started digitizing its Belfer collection of cylinder recordings. So far it has 293 online, but they’re hoping to get 6,000 recordings digitized by the end of the year. You can search the recordings by keyword or browse them by subject (e.g., “Elks (Fraternal Order)” and “Foot’s resolution, 1829″), and you can download the recordings as MP3s or WAV files.
My favorite, hands down, is the 1910 anti-daylight savings song “We Don’t Want More Daylight.” My one tiny criticism is that I wish there was a straightforward list of all the recordings.
Also see U.C. Santa Barbara’s Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project. (To their great credit, the two institutions are comparing notes to ensure they don’t duplicate their online offerings.)
If you work on multiple computers, you probably need a way to get ahold of your files and documents. You could email them to yourself, put them on a USB drive, or use a file server, but it might be easier to use a free service called Dropbox. This service allows you to stick a folder on each of your computers. Whenever you drop a file or document in your Dropbox folder, it’s synced onto every computer where Dropbox is installed.
The cool part is that Dropbox updates whenever you make a change to your documents, so you know you’re working on the latest version. It also allows you to access your files and documents through a Web interface, and it even allows you to recover documents you’ve deleted or changed.
You can also use Dropbox to share files with other users, so it might be a good solution for a collaborative project or to share photos. It works on both Windows and Mac. I learned about Dropbox through Pattern Recognition, whose owner uses the service to set his desktop wallpaper across multiple machines.
It’s springtime! Which is great, except it’s also the season of rejections: fellowships, jobs, postdocs, conference presentations. You don’t hear about other people’s rejections, but they’re as much a part of academic life as coffee and procrastination. For all of us in rejection mode, here is something that will help.
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Drawing by Travelin' Librarian
I’m a little creeped out by the messianic quality of a lot of talk about technology and society. Take the TED talks. Don’t they have a weird, hucksterish vibe? I love me some social networking and whatnot, but spare me the long-tail-tipping-point-world-is-flat-crowdsourcing-flashmobs rhapsodizing.
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Mudd never claimed to be a beauty queen. Photo by yan.da.
Who could love a library named Mudd? Especially when the library in question looks like a bunker, has terrible lighting, and offers no good places to sit? Well, I do (or did), and I’ll tell you why.
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Photo by number657.
A film class needs film. Duh. Close-analysis of film clips is an important part of teaching sections, and nobody wants to mess with scanning DVD chapters to find the right clip. So most TAs I know make clip reels — DVDs of clips — to show in class.
I was interested to see that the Society for Cinema and Media Studies has issued a statement of best practices for fair use (the doctrine that covers this area of copyright law). As far as clip reels are concerned, SCMS has this to say:
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I’m always kind of scandalized when presenters connect to the Internet to show YouTube videos. I mean, if they want to risk it, fine, but why take the chance? The Internet connection could cut out, the wifi could fail, the connection could be slow, an embarrassing ad could pop up … I think people have the idea that you can’t download videos from YouTube, but it actually couldn’t be simpler. Just enter the address of the video at KeepVid, press “convert,” and there you go: a file in the format of your choice, ready for you to drop into your presentation.
KeepVid also works for other Flash-based video and music sites. It’s free, no registration required.
Photo by denn.
Ugh, the blank page. Nothing sends me spiraling into procrastination faster. OmniOutliner can’t eliminate my fear, but it does help. It’s a little hard to describe this software, because you can use it in a lot of different ways. Its authors describe it as a tool for “idea organization,” and that’s about right. OmniOutliner makes it really easy to make bulleted lists with as many subsections as you want. You can also drag and drop images, files, and webpages right into the document.
I use it in a few different ways.
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Flowgram looks like it could be an interesting tool for putting teaching materials or presentations on the Web. It allows you to build presentations using PowerPoint slides, websites, your own images and documents, and your voice or music. Once you’ve built a presentation, you can share it by linking to it, embedding it in your website, or putting it on Facebook or other social networking sites.
It’s free (registration required) and you don’t have to download anything. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to work in Firefox, but it did work in Safari. The creator and player interfaces loaded really slowly but were pretty straightforward once they showed up. I wouldn’t use Flowgram to make anything crucial, at least not until it’s more stable and better established, but it could be fun to play with — and perfect for digital storytelling.
