This blog has been discontinued. For recent articles, please visit http://etc.princeton.edu/blog
A variety of new software has recently been installed in
the HRC.
Abbyy FineReader - OCR software that allows scans, PDFs and digital photographs into searchable
and editable documents.
AntConc - A concordance program that lets you create word lists and search natural language text files for words, phrases, and patterns.
Final Draft - Is specifically designed for writing movie scripts, television episodes, and stage plays. It combines word processing with professional script formatting.
Gephi - Is open-source software for visualizing and analyzing large networks graphs.
Office Proofing Tools - Installed for a variety of languages allows you to check spelling or grammar, hyphenate text and look up words in the thesaurus.
Oxygen XML Editor - This editor will provide full operational support of schemas, XSL, XSLT, XQuery and XPath. It is designed to test documents for validity, color code elements, number lines, highlight syntax errors and more.
Scrivener - A content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. Scrivener provides the tools you need to prepare your manuscript for submission or self-publishing.
For more information about these programs and many more stop by the HRC and speak to one of our staff members.
The website Google Lit Trips makes available studetn-generated Google Earth maps outlining literary voyages.
http://www.googlelittrips.com/GoogleLit/Hi_Ed/Hi_Ed.html
A website called Flick and Share (http://flickandshare.com/), allows for you to download all your photos in a Set and share the link with others. You will need to have this website connect to your Flickr account (the same way other 3rd party apps for Flickr do-if you do not trust other parties accessing your account, then I would suggest to download each photo manually to save a backup). Then you choose the set you want to share/download. Click on the share button. Click on the "Get Your Sharing Link" button. You can copy that link to an email to share with others, or if you want to download all your photos to back them up, click on the Open It button. you can click on the Download the set button and use a Java Applet to download the images, or you can click on the Get List of Photos link. I did this and used the Firefox plugin DownThemAll! and asved them into a local folder on my computer. After you are done, make sure you revoke the permissions for Flick and Share to access your Flickr account. Click on You --> Your Apps--> Apps You're Using. This is a good site to use if you want to backup all your Flickr photos.
I just recently tested a map overlay generator called MapTiler. MapTiler is a free software that allows you to use a map of your own and you can overlay it on a current Google Map or a section in Google Earth. This tool is handy if you teach a course, such as history or architecture, where you can compare a layout of an area and how it has changed over the years. This free software is also beneficial to the Sciences, because you can use it to show environmental impacts on areas over a period of time. You can download MapTiler here (cross-platform): http://www.maptiler.org/
I just recently tested a map overlay generator called MapTiler. MapTiler is a free software that allows you to use a map of your own and you can overlay it on a current Google Map or a section in Google Earth. This tool is handy if you teach a course, such as history or architecture, where you can compare a layout of an area and how it has changed over the years. This free software is also beneficial to the Sciences, because you can use it to show environmental impacts on areas over a period of time. You can download MapTiler here (cross-platform): http://www.maptiler.org/
I recently had to match a master list with another list to see what terms matched in both lists in Excel and keep them in order. Another thing I wanted to do was to make sure if there wasn't a match in my second list with the master list of words, that a space was inserted in the column (representing no match). Here are the steps I took to make my list in Excel (I am working in Excel 2010).
- Copy and paste your master list (the list with all the terms you are checking) into Column A.
- Copy and paste the list of words you want to see a match for against the Master list into Column B.
- To put the two list into alphabetical order, you can select the two columns and go to Sort--> A-Z.
- We will use column C as the column to match our column B data and put spaces for none matches with Column A (Master list)
- Select the first cell in Column C and type the following formula in the formula textbox: =IF(ISNA(MATCH(A1,B:B,0)),"",A1)
- Copy that formula all the way down the column (stopping at the last master list word).
- Now Column C will be a sorted matched list to Column A with spaces if there isn't a word match.
I recently came across a free web interactive tool by Stanford Visualization Group called DataWrangler. This tool is great if you are downloading public data sets or have data sets of your own and want to clean them up before putting them into a data anaylsis program or data visualization program.What's great about this tool is that DataWrangler suggests different operations to perform to clean up the data or you can manipulate the operations to reflect how you want to data cleaned up. Some of the operations also give you a preview of what the data will look like before you commit to that operation. You can export the cleaned up data for DataWrangler in Python or Java or can choose CSV, TSV, Row-Oriented JSON, Column-Oriented JSON, or Lookup Table. If you want to try out this tool, click on the link below to get started: http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/
If you are wondering what all this Digital Humanities stuff is all about, you might want to check out this list by the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative of digital humanities related course syllabi.
Memrise is a vocabulary / flashcard website. One thing that makes it unique though is its association of mnemonics with vocabulary words. Users can post short mnemonic devices that helped them to remember the word in question. It will be interesting to see if one person's memory device is useful for others, but it seems worth a try.
http://www.memrise.com/welcome/
http://www.memrise.com/welcome/
