In an ETC Spotlight, MR Daniel gave an overview of the basics of audio recording and equipment setup, with a focus on podcasting and field interviews. MR covered the introductory basics of digital audio recording in five parts: (1) Sound + Sampling Rates, (2) NMC Audio Booth + Audio Software, (3) Microphone Selection, (4) the Zoom H4N (portable recorders), (5) Interview and Recording Prep.

About the presenter

MR Daniel is a doctoral candidate in the music composition program at Princeton, and a student consultant at the New Media Center. She was previously Carnegie Mellon Visiting Professor in African American and Film Studies at Emory University.

First, in an ETC spotlight on Tuesday, John LeMasney gave an overview of Picasa, Google’s image and video cataloging tool. In the session, John showed users how to metatag, geotag, caption, and enhance media items. He went over Picasa’s face recognition, moviemaking, publishing, and album making features. Finally, he demonstrated Picasa’s key functionality: searching for items in large media catalogs using filters, keywords, and flags. Here’s the entire session for your review.

On Wednesday, during the Lunch & Learn session, Yannis Kevrekidis, Garnet K.-L. Chan, Curt Hillegas spoke on Princeton University’s most recent research computing activities. From the abstract: “Computational modeling and analysis continues to grow as the third paradigm of research alongside experiment and theory. Princeton University’s research computing activity has grown to keep pace with and provide leadership for this international trend including faculty across many disciplines and departments. We will highlight two professors’ work – Professor Garnet Chan from Chemistry and Professor Yannis Kevrekidis from Chemical and Biological Engineering – to show how computational science and engineering is enabling and accelerating scientific discovery. Curt Hillegas, director of research computing, will also talk about the central HPC resources that are available to the University community and how to access them.” Here is the session for your review.

On Thursday, during the Productive Scholar session, Shaun Holland and Sean Piotrowski talked about using gaming to engage students in the classroom. They presented the idea that games and services like Foursquare, Minecraft, and Portal provide good examples of collaborative engagement that can be applied to the classroom because these games appeal to an average student’s sense of achievement, competition, and challenge. This presentation demonstrated some popular forms of gamification in higher education and real world examples to apply to one’s teaching. Here’s the entire session for your review.

In this session on the digital humanities, Ben goes over the definition, examples, and best practices in digital humanities, or the digital study of the human condition. Highlights include an overview of the Whitman Archive, image collection analysis, and encoding of text and semantic metadata, such as the implementation of  Text Encoding Initiative, or TEI markup. Watch the video below to see the entire presentation.

Last week we had three great ETC sponsored events take place on campus, and we recorded each of them. Below are the abstracts and results.

Tuesday February 14th – John LeMasney on promoting personal brand with Social Media.

In this session, we will discuss how companies may be searching for you and checking your posts for alignment with their organizational culture. We will discuss the different grouping methods in these social networks, and tools for managing them. We will look at privacy settings for each of these social networks, and look at conferencing tools in Facebook and Google Plus.

English: Species: (Helophilus intentus ) Curran & Fluke, 1922 Finding place: Restoule Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada — 2008 September Français : Helophilus intentus ) Photo prise dans le parc provinçal Restoule en Ontario au Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here is the slideshow from out tech Spotlight Session on 10/21/2010.

Here’s a link to the handout (PDF): Finding and Using Free Images on the Web.pdf

Photo Story (Photo credit: Mark Emery Photography)

PhotoStory is a free program by Microsoft that works with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. With PhotoStory you can create a slide show with you digital pictures, edit your pictures, create a story with original music and add narration. PhotoStory also allows you to add titles to each picture and select different transitions between slides.

PHOTOSTORY Instructions.pdf