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.

Continue reading “Customize your network visualization”

Visualize a network of film casts and crews

A friend of mine wrote to me recently with a request. For his dissertation, he’s unearthing the filmmaking culture of a particular time and place. “I keep running across these names of actors and filmmakers,” he wrote, “and I know I’ve seen them before, but I can’t remember all the relationships. Is there a way I can visualize the overlapping networks of people within this culture?”

There is! To demonstrate, I’ll use the last dozen films of one of my favorite filmmakers, Alfred Hitchcock. This is a fun way to get started making network visualizations.

Continue reading “Visualize a network of film casts and crews”

PowerPoint as a mode of knowledge production

I think about PowerPoint a lot, and judging by the reams of blog posts, screeds, and instructional books on the topic, I’m not the only one.

The interesting thing about PowerPoint is that it’s not that new. Well, PowerPoint is, relatively speaking (the software package emerged in 1980), but the basic idea — the slide presentation as a way to convey specialized knowledge — has been around a really long time.

Continue reading “PowerPoint as a mode of knowledge production”

The iPad in academic settings: what I like, what I’d like to see

Woman using her cat as an iPad Stand
"iPad Stand" by Veronica Belmont

One of the developers here at the library asked me to tell him a little bit about my experience using the iPad in an academic setting. Here are his questions:

  • Where do you find your self using the device the most?
  • What do you really enjoy/hate about the device?
  • Is there anything that you think is really missing(software or hardware)?
  • How would you use the device in an academic  setting?
  • Is there any app that you think must be written for use in the academic setting?

And here are my answers:

Continue reading “The iPad in academic settings: what I like, what I’d like to see”

Film Study: an iPad app built for cinephiles

Film Study iconI’ve been using an iPad for about six months now. I like it, don’t get me wrong, but it hasn’t been the life-changing device I’d sort of been expecting. I haven’t found that many apps that really take advantage of the specific qualities of the iPad: its shape and size, the multi-touch surface. (Some exceptions: Flipboard, for reading news, and Aweditorium, for discovering new music.)

I’ve been excited about one particular app, though, because it evinces such careful attention to the way that film scholars want to spend time with their medium. Film Study is a free iPad app that makes it easy and natural to take time-stamped notes on films as they play.

Continue reading “Film Study: an iPad app built for cinephiles”

Batch-processing photos from your archive trip

The National Archives in College Park, Maryland, where it seemed most researchers were using digital cameras or scanners.

Today at THATCamp Southeast I helped organize a session (with Andrew Famiglietti from Georgia Tech) called Research Hacks. We brainstormed ways to use technology to enhance research, both at the archive and when examining born-digital sources. After I proposed the session, I had a moment of panic when I realized I didn’t really have any great hacks to offer. Luckily, I had a few hours and the impetus to finally put together some techniques I’d been meaning to investigate.

Like many researchers, I use a camera to take photos of documents during archival research trips. My problem comes when I arrive home with a bunch of photos that look like this:

File full of images labeled "DSC ..."

Ugh. What to do with all these “DSCs”? Here’s a way to convert those images into documents that are actually searchable and usable.

Continue reading “Batch-processing photos from your archive trip”

Multimedia ebooks (THATCamp SE session idea)

A group of us at the Emory Library are deep in the throes of organizing THATCamp Southeast, an “unconference” on technology and the humanities. It’ll be on March 4, 5, and 6, and we’re expecting about a hundred people. At THATCamps, everyone posts session ideas in advance. Then, on the day of the camp, we all decide together which sessions will actually be held. Here’s the idea I posted:

As part of my job, I speak to a lot of grad students about what tech projects they’d like to see happen. Increasingly, students are describing something like this: “I work with a text that I know better than anyone else. I’d like the ability to add video, text, and audio annotation to the text — like a multimedia annotated edition.”

The technology to make this happen does exist. A recent Chronicle article describes something similar, and this company is working on “books” that are perhaps even more advanced than my students are imagining.

The problem is, as far as I can tell, creating these multimedia ebooks requires comfort with XML. Much as I’d like for every grad student to possess this knowledge, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

So in this session, I’d love to hear ideas for ways to create multimedia ebooks that might be accessible to the tech-curious grad student who is nonetheless not prepared to invest the time in learning XML. Perhaps these techniques already exist, or perhaps we need to build them ourselves.

Some notes:

  • Adobe InDesign is (purportedly) one way to create multimedia epubs, but my experience with it suggests that learning to create epubs in InDesign is little easier than learning XML
  • The Anthologize plugin for WordPress seems to offer intriguing possibilities. WP is a CMS that many students are already comfortable using, and they’re comfortable embedding video in posts. Perhaps Anthologize could be extended to handle video and audio.
  • I asked a question on this topic over at DH Answers and got some really good responses.
  • I found the Wikipedia article on epub helpful in understanding the standard

Building a conference website on WordPress

Hey, we launched the new site for the digital humanities conference at Yale! You should come! It’s February 19 to February 20, and don’t forget to register.

I was interested in the challenge of building a conference program that’s easy to access. I wanted to make the program pretty dynamic, by which I mean I wanted to make it easy for users to click on individual events or array them all on one page. It was surprisingly difficult to do this, though. I looked at a bunch of other conference websites and they mostly have static pages of event listings. For the sake of anyone else with the same challenge, I thought I’d explain what I did.

I tried a bunch of WordPress plugins — Events, Events Manager, other permutations of the word “event” — but they’re really designed for events that are spread out over many days. Our events are taking place within the space of two days.

Eventually, I gave up on the event plugins. Instead, I made each event a post and created three categories: Friday February 19, Saturday February 20, and See All Events. (Alas, WordPress would not let me add a comma between the day of the week and the month. Don’t think I didn’t try.) Each event is categorized as both the day it falls on and “See all events.”

I then loaded up the SuperSlider-Menu plugin, which creates an accordion-style sidebar menu that lists categories and posts. See where I’m going with this?Screen shot 2009-12-31 at 12.39.59 PM Each event is accessible via the sidebar menu, and by clicking on “See all events” you can get all the events on one page.

It took some tweaking. I CSS’s out the meta information for each post (like the date posted and the auhor) and used the Custom Query String Reloaded plugin to make the posts appear in chronological, rather than reverse-chronological order.

I think it works. If I have time, I’d like to add abstracts for every paper and bios for every panelist.

Drupal would probably be a better choice for anyone building a conference website, but for various reasons we had WordPress as our starting point. So I hope this will be helpful to other conference organizers using WordPress!

Forget my hard drive, I’m moving to the cloud

BSOD Stop c218 by Justin Marty
"BSOD Stop c218" by Justin Marty

A couple weeks ago, I pulled out my laptop and noticed a suspicious splash of water sandwiched between the plastic case and the computer. Pressing the power button yielded nothing but a sad, whirring fan. I was seriously bummed about losing my expensive laptop, but I took solace in the fact that I’ve been obediently backing up my computer with Time Machine and an external hard drive for the last year.

So imagine my dismay when my external hard drive refused to be read.

Continue reading “Forget my hard drive, I’m moving to the cloud”

Dapper: Create an RSS feed for sites that don’t have one

picture-12It seems like most sites offer RSS feeds (a method of subscribing to new postings), but every so often I’ll run into a site that doesn’t, but should. For example, say you want to be notified every time a certain company posts a new job listing, or every time a library adds a book on a certain topic.

For those situations, you may find Dapper useful. Dapper is part of a new breed of Web ventures called (unpleasantly enough) “scrapers” — they scrape data from other sites and turn it into usable chunks of information that you can manipulate.

Continue reading “Dapper: Create an RSS feed for sites that don’t have one”