Month: November 2011

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Embarrassments of riches: Managing research assets

Last updated May 15, 2013

There’s research, there’s writing, and then there’s that netherworld in between: wrangling all the digital files you gather over the course of your work. Digital files are often easier to deal with than stacks of paper, but they can also proliferate frighteningly quickly.

I teach a workshop on this topic, catchily titled Managing Research Assets (better names welcome). Below is a digital version of the workshop handout, followed by a link dump of my favorite posts about developing and refining digital research workflows. You can also download a PDF version of my handout, or a Word version if you’d like to modify it.

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Install WordPress on your Mac

This week, I’m teaching a Hack Your WordPress Theme workshop for Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons. It’s fun (and not all that hard) to customize WordPress themes. The only problem is, in order to really access the theme files, you need to install WordPress on a server. But what if you’re not quite ready for that?

You can still play around with WordPress by getting your own computer to act like a server. Your WordPress site won’t be public, but you can make changes to your theme and, when you’re ready, upload it to a real server.

XAMPP is a software package that emulates a server on your own computer. Don’t worry, it’s not hard to install — there are just a couple tricky steps.

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Teaching HTML & CSS

Image depicting basic components of an HTML tag

This week I twice taught a two-hour workshop introducing Emory people (students, faculty, and staff) to the very basics of HTML & CSS. The workshop was called How a Website is Born: The Very Basics of HTML & CSS, and here’s how I described it:

Ever wondered how a website goes from an idea to the Internet? In this workshop, designed for absolute beginners, we’ll explain what HTML and CSS are and show you how you can get started making your own website.

I’d initially thought I might be a little crazy to try to teach introductory HTML and CSS in two hours, but in the event, things went relatively smoothly, and both times we ended up with about a half-hour to spare. I wanted very much to teach the workshop because HTML and CSS were my own first experience looking under the hood of any kind of interface, and it was quite powerful for me. I was excited to show others that coding isn’t as hard as they might think.

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Customize your network visualization

In my last post, I explained how you can visualize a network of film personnel (really, any kind of network) using Cytoscape. When I left off, we’d created a network visualization, but it didn’t look exactly terrific. Here’s how you can customize the look of your network visualization so that you can see what you need to see.

Let’s assume you’re starting with the default network view.

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