IT’s Academic

We are moving!

2011-10-03T20:31:17Z

IT’s Academic will remain here for posterity, but we are moving new updates and other interactive content to our new Educational Technologies Center site at http://etc.princeton.edu/blog

Please visit us there and let us know what you think!

Lunch and Learn: Dennis Hood on Blackboard 2011

2011-05-05T13:20:57Z

At the Lunch and Learn on April 27th, 2011, Dennis Hood spoke about what Blackboard users should expect from the latest version of Blackboard at Princeton. He demonstrated the cosmetic and functional changes that will come after the upgrade in June. Blackboard 2011 offers more straightforward navigation, tools for increased productivity with less clicks, and a cleaner look and feel.

A few changes were made in order to make the interface more friendly. In the new Blackboard, your name will again appear at the top of the page when you log in. Blackboard removed this feature in the previous release, but it reappears in this upgrade. The color of links in the page has been tweaked to improve legibility. Some people have reported confusion in the previous release about the menu-hide and menu-collapse features, and as a result, the handles for these features have been made more prominent.

Other changes focused on functional improvements. You can now choose to keep announcements ordered by a priority that you set. There are times in which instructors might want to keep an announcement up all semester, and others which they might only want to keep up for a day, or a week. The changes to the announcements area allow you to more quickly arrange, prioritize, and dismiss announcements for students.

Hood showed that significant changes were made to the content creation tools. The links in the content creation areas, in which instructors can create links, documents, and file downloads for students, now has three links for that purpose instead of the previous five. The most basic function in the content areas allows instructors to choose to create an item or create a file. Creating an Item works similarly to the way it worked in previous releases. Instructors can create a title, body and attachment in an item, and it is immediately available to their students, or delayed if they wish. Creating a File allows you to simply add a file without getting the textbox that creating an Item presents. Any file you upload to an Item or File page uploaded to a local file to Blackboard’s file storage system. When uploading content to courses, instructors can choose to browse your local desktop computer or from your course files that they have already uploaded.

Hood had a tip for Microsoft Office users. There is a particularly useful feature for people who use Microsoft Word to prepare their course content, such as their syllabus. In the past, copying and pasting content from a Word document often meant losing formatting, requiring a subsequent cleaning up of the document, and lost time and effort. There is now a Mashup button with a “Paste from Word” option in the toolbar that can help you to preserve line breaks and other formatting as you paste it in.

Hood told the audience to be aware of a misunderstanding in Blackboard that some people have reported to him. If an instructor wants to remove an item from a content area, it is important to click on the contextual menu next to the item itself. If you click on the remove command in the contextual menu for the content area at the top of a page, (e.g. Course Materials), you will remove the entire content area rather than simply an item within that area. Hood said that Blackboard has greatly improved its ability to deliver files directly to users, rather than as an attachment to an Item.

In the new version of Blackboard, you can add audio files and images as objects in content areas. Students can begin to use these files in one click, as opposed to having to click into a Blackboard item, then into the attachment. Blackboard’s mashups feature supports the use of various external media sites, such as Flickr and YouTube as a source for course content. The new Course Files, found in the Control Panel menu, can be populated with various files such as documents and spreadsheets, then browsed, linked to and shared according to access rules you set up. For instructors who wish to upload a lot of files at once, they need only drag and drop a folder or series of selected files into the course files area. Even if an instructor deletes a link to a file in course files, the file remains in storage until it is specifically deleted from course files. Also when you rename or move a file in course files, all links to it stay intact. For instructors who wish for students to have a place where they can simply drop files that will be shared with other students,, they can recreate the functionality of a WebSpace Dropbox using course files by setting sharing permissions on a course files folder. This eliminates sending students to a different application (WebSpace) for using the shared files folder.

Grade Center now has its very own top-level Control Panel item. Links to Grade Center smart views, where faculty can see, for instance, a subset of all students, can now be placed under the Grade Center link in the Control Panel. Instructors can quickly see items that require action, such as assignments that need grading, with the Needs Grading link. It’s easier to grade blogs, wikis, and journals in Blackboard now. Course Blogs allow items to be posted for student review and comment, and Course Journals & Wikis allow students to individually or collectively write about course content, all of which can be used for assessment. Instructors can now create rubrics to serve as guidelines for grading assignments and essay questions. These rubrics can be associated in the Grade center with the items to which they apply. The Grade Center now allows instructors to grade assignments without knowing who the student who completed the assignment is. This can help to prevent a positive or negative bias that the instructor may have acquired about a student. Another new and interesting feature is that an instructor can color code Grade Center entries in order to highlight certain students, grades or activity.

Finally, there is a new tab labeled Book Bag that shows students which books they selected from their course sites to order from Labyrinth. The Book Bag feature is an inter-application relationship with Labyrinth Books, and allows students to order and purchase books in Blackboard, then simply walk over to pick them up at Labyrinth.

Dennis Hood explained the ways in which Blackboard 2011 at Princeton will improve instructor and student productivity, file management, and media consumption. The interface is a bit cleaner and easier to navigate. The Course Files feature allows for more direct management and control of files in Blackboard. The Grade Center allows users to stay better informed of their recorded progress in courses. Even buying textbooks is easier. For more information, or if you have questions about Blackboard at Princeton, please contact Dennis Hood at hood@princeton.edu.

Blackboard 2011 Quick Start Guide

Audio Podcast of the talk

John Wilkin, Jon Stroop, and Marvin Bielawski on Hathi Trust

2011-04-28T13:15:48Z

John Wilkin at the University of Michigan, and Jon Stroop & Marvin Bielawski at Princeton University are helping HathiTrust to digitize and share the world’s recorded knowledge using the combined effort of fifty institutions. HathiTrust is described on their web site at http://hathitrust.org as “a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future” and their mission is “to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.” Wilkin explains that HathiTrust is often associated with the Google scanning project, but that it is a misrepresentation kkto consider the two efforts one and the same. HathiTrust also contains works scanned for institutions by the Internet Archive and by the institutions themselves. HathiTrust also has its own set of values, quality standards, and goals that are filters for data from Google, and perhaps the most important distinction is the project’s attention to detail when it comes to having the most correct metadata possible attached to the scanned items.

When Wilkin was asked what was in HathiTrust’s catalog that was not in Google’s scanning project catalog, he explained that HathiTrust has a much higher standard of quality for bibliographic and other metadata for scanned items, and sometimes must refuse scanned items from Google that do not meet these standards. The reason that Google is essential to the process, Wilkin noted, is the volume of scanning that they do. While library scanning efforts of the past might have done 10,000 volumes in a year, Google can easily do that much in a day. HathiTrust is also doing post-1923 public domain determination, while Google is not, according to Wilkin.

There are approximately 8 million scanned items (written works) with properly aligned metadata currently in the HathiTrust database, and Wilkin says that the number will rise to 10 million by the end of 2011, then 12 million by the end of 2012. It is, he says “a very, very big library.” Jon Stroop noted that Princeton has sent 255,357 items to the Hathi catalog since October 2010. Stroop listed the following collections at Princeton as contributors: Architecture Library, Lewis Library, Marquand Library (in May or June of 2011), Firestone Library, Stokes Library, and Special Collections.

HathiTrust is a digital preservation effort, but simply having a digital record is not the point. Wilkin says that access is critical. At the website is an interface that provides a catalog search, a full-text search, and a collection builder and viewer. If you belong to one of the participating institutions, you get some special rights. As a Princeton NetID holder, for instance, you can log in and create a new collection of works to support an academic project.

Given the importance of access to the project, it is important to remove barriers to diverse groups. 74% of the items in the HathiTrust catalog are copyrighted, while 26% are in the public domain. The copyrighted items are generally inaccessible, even to those associated with the project by institution. Not everything after 1922 is in copyright, and one ongoing task in the project is to review the catalog to assess the copyright status of catalog items. While 48% of the catalog’s items are in English. 400 languages are currently represented there.

Sustainability is another key goal for the project, one that HathiTrust takes very seriously. Right now the project uses a “depositor pays” business model, in which the project is paid for by the institutions that use it for storage of items. The atomic cost unit is 1 GB of content, and the price flows up and down, over time. At the time of the talk, the price per gigabyte was $3.

The costs of the project are mostly related to maintenance of the servers and datacenter. Storage is about 47% of overall costs. Staff is about 25% of cost Tape backup and disaster recovery are about 14% of cost.

In 2013, HathiTrust plans to implement a new sustainability model. Cost will be based on based on “holdings overlap”. Academic print books in the collection are already substantially duplicated in the catalog. In June of 2009, the average duplication rate between institutions was 19% of items, meaning that almost a fifth of each institution’s work was being duplicated. By sharing duplicated works that each institution owns digitally, a single digital copy could be retained, and the other copies could be deleted to save on storage and backup costs. Details on the cost model for HathiTrust are at http://hathitrust.org/cost

Wilkin described three ways in which HathiTrust makes a difference for participants.The first, collective digital curation, drives down costs for materials, increases a cataloged item’s discoverability, improves the quality of archived works through digitizing, reduces bibliographic indeterminacy via collective research, and helps libraries make meaningful decisions about formats and quality. The second, collective print curation, is a means by which to associate all of the participating institutions’ holdings of print materials, which helps librarians perform record-keeping in a coordinated way. The third way is a series of subsidiary benefits. For instance, the HathiTrust process improves descriptions of materials, and quantifies problems, such as the size of the public domain.

Wilkin, Stroop and Bielawski explained that the HathiTrust is interested in archiving and sharing the cultural record in a single searchable interface. It is a collaborative effort, which Princeton is a part of, along with 49 other institutions. Many benefits exist in the project, including the quality of metadata, the discoverability of the works, and the cross-organizational sharing of content. To learn more about HathiTrust, visit http://hathitrust.org Podcast of this talk is available here. Slides from this talk are available here.

Speaker biographies:

John P. Wilkin is executive director of HathiTrust and associate university librarian for library information technology (LIT) for the University of Michigan. The LIT Division supports the library's online catalog and related technologies, provides the infrastructure to both digitize and access digital library collections, supports the library's web presence, and provides frameworks and systems to coordinate Library technology activities. Wilkin previously served as the head of the Digital Library Production Service at the University of Michigan. Among the units in the DLPS is the University of Michigan's Humanities Text Initiative, an organization responsible for SGML document creation and online systems that Wilkin founded in 1994. He earned graduate degrees in English from the University of Virginia (1980) and Library Science from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (1986). In 1992, he worked at the University of Virginia as the Systems Librarian for Information Services, where he shaped the Library's plan for establishing a group of electronic centers and consulted for the University's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) in textual issues.

Marvin Bielawski is Princeton’s Deputy University Librarian and Head of the Library Systems Office. He’s been involved in negotiating the Library’s contract with Google and the settlement amendment. He also advocated for and negotiated Princeton’s contract for membership in the HathiTrust.

Jon Stroop is the Metadata Analyst in the Library Systems Office. He is responsible for the ingest of digital content from Princeton into the HathiTrust and is a member the Library's Google Project Steering Committee. Jon is also a co-chair of the Library's Metadata Committee and serves on the Library of Congress' MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) Editorial Committee.

Ben Johnston on New Scholarly Annotation Tools

2011-04-15T12:48:53Z

Abstract

This session looked at current and future methods of annotating and analyzing text and multimedia materials for scholarly work. From the bookmarking and annotation of webpages, to commenting Word documents for review, and the marking up of XML versions of manuscripts, annotation can take many different forms and be used in many different ways.

Reflecting on experiences of a pilot project undertaken as part of an NEH grant proposal working with a very large 19th Century manuscript, Ben Johnston presented a survey of tools available for annotation including Microsoft Word, Zotero, Pliny, blogs, wikis and also looked work currently being done through a group called Open Annotation Collaboration to standardize and explore the use of annotation in scholarly practice.

What is annotation?

Ben Johnston believes that scholarly annotation should go beyond post-its and marginal notation. In his Productive Scholar talk, Johnston said that physical ink-on-paper note-taking is traditionally the most common way that annotation is done. Post-its, those little multicolored sticky notes, are portable, stable, and work well for one book and one person. New digital tools extend the scope and capability of annotation. Johnston asked “what if I want to use a single note in multiple books” or “move it to other places and other contexts?” In this case, he argues, post-its are limited in their capability.

Newer tools such as mind-mapping applications, wikis, and shared databases, for instance, connect different ideas, often with contextual notes on those connections.. Johnston began to define what annotation is, and the ways in which it can be more or less effective. Twitter posts about Hamlet or Macbeth, for example, may be annotation on those topics, but they might not offer constructive or beneficial content adding to the scholarly discussion. More traditional methods, such as writing a scholarly journal article, is often an extended form of annotation. An article that describes central themes in Macbeth and categorically compares them to themes in a contemporary story is an example of this.

Annotation can also simply be the end-notes, footnotes and comments that you add to a document in Microsoft Word or Open Office. Johnston explained that deep reading, in which one writes notes in and adds comments to a textbook in order to record personal understanding and interpretation, is a very common form of annotation for students, but potentially compacts the experience for the next scholar reading (and annotating) that book. All of these methods are able to be done electronically, but can still fail on some key scholarly activities, such as sharing and allowing for continued discussion.

Scholarly skill sets

People who research and define the important skill sets for scholarly work often find annotation in the short list of those skills. In May of 2000, John Unsworth (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) proposed the idea of Scholarly Primitives, eight basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines. They are discovering, comparing, sampling, representing, annotation, referring, and illustrating. He chose them as a way of assessing the common threads of scholarly activity in the humanities, and how scholarly tools might be best used to focus on these primitives. Tools or workflows that allow scholars to achieve more of these tasks in a streamlined, cohesive way are potentially more useful than those that do not. (http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html)

Other groups have discovered a more condensed toolset and have included annotation (ideologically) within other terms. Project Bamboo is: “a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary effort that brings together humanities scholars, librarians, and information technologists to tackle the question: ’How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?’” (http://www.projectbamboo.org/about/). They have developed some slightly different primitives. Scholars now discover, gather, create, and share. Gathering and creation is primarily where annotation happens in their framework, though discovery supports it and sharing extends it. Notably, create and share are missing from Unsworth’s ideas, possibly because the increased ability to share has become more common in the last ten years due to web 2.0, social media and other technology platforms.

Project Bamboo works to solve problems that have emerged along with these new capabilities. They ask the questions “How do we most effectively facilitate and discuss the scholarly process in the contemporary digital style”” and ”how do we get faculty members, scholars, and IT people to work together to provide platforms to discuss what happens in scholarly practice?” New tools for scholarly annotation begin to answer these questions.

New tools

Some of the digital tools that help scholars to discover, gather, create, and share with annotation are much more than simply virtual post-it notes, but others are just that. Fleck was an example of a service that allowed you to create post-its on web sites and share them with others. It is no longer in business as an annotation service, but now develops games about battling zombies. (http://fleck.com/)

Annotate it (annotateit.org) allows you to use a bookmarklet (a small javascript that you keep in your bookmarks) to save annotations about sites that you are visiting. It saves annotations using a centralized server, which can be locally installed, or hosted by the developer. You can highlight some portion of a page and create an annotation, and you can tag it with metadata. Then, other AnnotateIt users get to see your notes and tags and (hopefully) benefit from them.

You can use Google Earth to overlay historical images on top of a particular area, then add notes and pins to denote metadata about specific locations. You might use it in order to dissect the progression of a famous battle or talk about urban sprawl over time.

Video annotation tools are coming, but are still fairly immature. YouTube.com, for example, allows for annotations, but those annotations are neither listable nor searchable, and you must own the video in order to annotate it. You also can not use the annotations in order to navigate the video. In VideoANT, a project from the University of Minnesota, you can import your video, then pause and annotate it. You can then share those annotations with students or peers.

Professor Herbert Ginsburg at Teachers College in collaboration with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learnin (CCNMTL) helped to create a system called Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning (VITAL), which is described as follows: VITAL comprises tools for editing and annotating video and for writing "multimedia essays" with text and video, embedded in an online course syllabus, and housed within a community space where instructors and peers can review work published within the system and build up a personal repository of video and written content. Students who use VITAL learn to observe closely, interpret what they see, and develop arguments using cited video content as evidence. (http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/our_services/tools/vital/)

DigressIt, which used to be known as CommentPress, is a plugin for the open source content management system (CMS) called WordPress. It allows you to create a post, and break the text up into paragraphs, then select the paragraph to add comments per paragraph. Typically you could comment on the site itself, or on an individual post, but this tool adds a level of granularity that makes commenting potentially useful for scholars.

Johnston says that Microsoft Word, Scrivener, Open Office, Adobe Acrobat, and Google Docs all allow you to annotate and discover commentary, but that the trouble lies with searching the comments, footnotes, endnotes, references, and so on. For deep reading, and pulling text apart in order to discover deep connections, these are limited tools for the job.

Gathering

New tools have been created to help you to more effectively gather (one of the Bamboo Project’s key scholarly activities) and annotate the gathered data. Zotero, for instance, is a browser plugin and local database that quickly provides references, citations, PDFs, and more from online newspapers, journals and databases that provide that metadata. You can then create relevant collections of those sources. It allows for annotation and commenting, and creates a snapshot of the content so that you can use it even if the online source disappears. A central server allows for sharing collections with colleagues and students.

Endnote is a citation management database with a long list of fields you can populate, and you can leave metadata tags on your notes. However, Johnston notes that Endnote is not as powerful for sharing data as Zotero is.

Johnston describes Mendeley as iTunes for PDF documents. It extracts information such as author, title, and date from PDFs, which you can then sort and filter. It allows you to open, highlight, comment, and search comments in a PDF. Johnston says Qiqqa is just like Mendeley, though he really likes the name and the developer’s interest in improving your productivity. According to the developer, the application “makes you work qiqqa”.

Wikis

One definition of a wiki is that it is an ecosystem of related documents. Wikis can be collections and interconnections of anything, including annotations. OneNote, which comes with the Microsoft Office suite, is a note taking tool, but also a kind of wiki. In OneNote, You can create a note, link it to other notes, and you can end up with a forest of interrelated notes.

Tomboy, an open source, cross-platform desktop wiki, allows you to create notes, highlight text within notes, link notes to other notes. It allows you to search for those items, as well as create a note that follows certain terms that you denote, such as names of characters in stories you are dissecting. Johnston said that Tomboy is a powerful tool to follow specific terms and content throughout a highly complex set of notes. You can even categorize the notes with folders. Simplicity is Tomboy’s best benefit for scholars, says Johnston.

Nvivo is an example of especially useful software for use in the social sciences for transcribing interviews, and coding responses. It comes at a price of $700, which could be a barrier, but makes codes (akin to tags) applicable to any part of the text.

Pliny, a java based desktop wiki developed at Oxford, allows you to import images, PDFs, text, and create notes about their content. It includes a web browser to create notes about web content. You can highlight a section of text on a page, and make an associated note. Then you can bring those notes up in an interconnected mind-map view, and name associations between notes.

New directions in annotation

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign has an Open Annotation Collaboration project (http://www.openannotation.org/) that is working on expanding the idea of annotation on the web. The group believes that when you create an annotation, it should be available for others to use to create a semantic web, or an interconnected, openly accessible, searchable, navigable group of organized content. In order to do this, every bit of information, rather than entire pages or sites, should have its own finite location, such as a Universal Resource Locator (URL), on the web. They feel that bits of information should cross boundaries, and be connected, searchable and available. They are focused on the goal of sharing annotation, using open and common web standards, such as RDF and URLs, creating this semantic web.

The Open Annotation Collaboration project has a specific definition of what an annotation should contain, including fields for event, title, author, expression, target, and time. They also feel that annotations can and should be of any media type, and support multiple targets and structured relationships. Annotations should also be searchable and discoverable, according to the group.

Summary

Johnston shared his understanding of what annotation is and is not, and talked about the limitations of traditional methods such as note-taking as compared to new methods that allow for centralization, sharing, and collaborative editing. His problem with the post-it is not in its simplicity or stability, but in its physical limits, keeping a single note from being shared in two articles, for example. A short review of scholarly activities shows the importance of annotation, but also the importance of the discovery, gathering and sharing aspects of scholarly work. Tools like Zotero, Mendelay, and wikis allow you to quickly collect annotation data, craft omnimedia bibliographic entries in your expertise, and share those collections with others in just a few clicks. Very often the same kind of work is being done with more traditional methods. With newer tools, which potentially increase scholarly productivity, more attention can be paid to the beneficial outcomes of good annotation: understanding, teaching, learning, and sharing knowledge.

The presentation from this presentation can be found here.

Bio

Ben Johnston is Senior Educational Technologist at OIT's Educational Technologies Center and manager of the Humanities Resource Center in East Pyne. Ben has been involved with educational technology for over ten years in positions at Columbia University, Bryn Mawr College, and at Princeton University. While at Princeton, Ben has worked with educators and researchers across the Humanities and Social Sciences to facilitate the use of digital assets, technology tools, databases, and digital video in teaching and research.

Lunch and Learn: John LeMasney on 365 Sketches

2011-04-12T13:52:38Z

Abstract

365 Sketches is a project in which I use free and open source software to do a single visual design every day. The project is currently in its second year of production, and was started as a way to force myself to do at least one thing every day to build upon my design skills. You can visit the project and follow my progress at http://365sketches.org.

As time went on, it became a public visual diary, a way for people to come together online and converse about, suggest ideas for, and critique my work. The work is occasionally practical, sometimes clever, often funny, and increasingly personal. I continue to achieve the goals that I had planned for in the beginning of the project. I have seen a gradual improvement and evolution of my design, typography and photomanipulation skills, but I also received many other unforeseen benefits, such as gaining an audience, being contracted for new consulting work, taking part in shows and presentations on the project, and feeling a genuine desire to keep making more pieces.

Origins

This project was inspired by an end-of-year inspirational blog post. In December of 2009, I read this blog post on Smashing Magazine entitled Design Something Every Day! and it echoed a sentiment I had heard in my undergraduate fine arts studies. A beloved ceramics teacher said that the best road to success as an artist was to do something every day -- shake a hand, make a call, throw a bowl, draw a scene, etc. The key was to do something that brought you closer to your goal, and to refine the goal as achievements were made. I had always loved that advice, but had not acted upon it previously.

Reading the post above triggered a memory about the advice, and the project was born. I wanted to master the open source software application called Inkscape, because I thought that it was incredibly powerful, but also because I felt I had only lightly scratched the surface of understanding it. Inkscape is a vector-based illustration program, similar to Adobe’s Illustrator, and it is free. You can download it for Windows, Mac or Linux at http://inkscape.org. I decided that working in Inkscape once a day, then sharing those designs online, was potentially a great way to improve my skills and share my progress. For the online publishing, I decided to use another open source project called WordPress, because Automattic, the company that created it, offers a free hosting service at http://wordpress.com, and because the publishing platform is highly extensible with themes and widgets, sidebar blocks where you can share information and data. I paid for a custom domain name from WordPress, and soon after, my first designs appeared at http://365sketches.org

Community

I personally feel that getting people to find your blog and appreciate your content is easier today than ever before because of social networking. I decided to make a page and advertise new work from 365 Sketches on Facebook at http://facebook.com/365sketches and to tweet about new pieces that appeared on the blog via my personal twitter account, @lemasney (http://www.twitter.com/lemasney). I also share the work on Flickr.com, Yahoo’s photo sharing site, and StumbleUpon.com, a site that allows others to serendipitously visit your site based on their interest preferences. Soon after doing this, I was able to gather statistical feedback, get an increase in comments, and ask people to give me ideas for future sketches. I also wanted people to be able to use my work freely. I decided to license all of the work generated for the project under a Creative Commons, Share-Alike license, so that people could use the pieces for free in return for attribution, but could not later take my work and make it proprietary. Because the work, social networks, blogs, and software are all monetarily and ideologically free, I wanted to ask people if I could do design tasks for them for free as a way of generating new ideas and challenging myself.

I maintain a design consulting company and I wondered what effect the project might have on it. If someone needs a quick logo or some branding work, the project is often a great way for them to get the job done for free and for me to build trust with future clients and add to my portfolio. Sometimes the needs of the request are more complicated than the relatively simple work typically created for the project, and those requests are often converted into contracted jobs. The project has inspired two shows at libraries in the greater Trenton-Princeton area, generated artwork for t-shirts, mugs, and posters, and allowed me to make connections with hundreds of people who had never heard of open source, Inkscape, or my company before. The project became a great way for me to extend my brand and its exposure.

Progression

A few people who follow the project have reviewed all of the pieces in order to look for some overarching progression in the work. Perhaps the best way to do this is to visit the 365 Sketches set on Flickr. I’ve gotten some interesting feedback about the work that I didn’t expect. For instance, one friend said that I have an obsession with hair. Another told me that my work took on a decidedly personal tone after my mother died in October of 2010. A third said that animals were a major ongoing theme. I was personally interested and delighted to discover these themes in my work, but maybe more so that people had taken the time and effort to look back through the catalog of pieces and give feedback.

In the first year, I used Inkscape exclusively, and in the second year I’ve used both the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) and Inkscape. In the future, I will likely move to three-dimensional modeling applications and animation or video. GIMP is for editing photos, and has a similar look, feel, and function to Adobe’s Photoshop. My work in the GIMP tends to be more ethereal, with more soft edges. My Inkscape work is more hard edged and contains more solid blocks of color. If I want to work with photography or realistic blending of forms, I will usually use the GIMP. When I am working with text, making wordmarks, or doing work for an infographic, I will usually use Inkscape. From time to time, the work will pass back and forth between these two applications so that I can gain the benefits of each. I personally believe that I could not have learned as much about the applications using some other method (such as reading or videos), as experiential learning has always been especially powerful for me as a way to gain knowledge.

Process

Making the work starts with an idea. Sometimes the idea is my own, such as something that happened in my life or in the news. Sometimes, I will request ideas from the page’s followers on Facebook. Sometimes I’ll get an email with a request, or someone will have a project or organization that needs some brand elements. I keep a few books nearby in situations where I am blocked. For example, I keep a book called Instant Karma by Barbara Ann Kipfer nearby because it has provided many great starting points for quote illustrations. Then I open up Inkscape or the GIMP and get to work.

The whole point is to get the visual plan that I have in my head onto the screen. As I became more familiar with the tools, keyboard shortcuts, and techniques, this became much easier. I originally started with a 500 pixel by 500 pixel canvas in Inkscape in the beginning of the project, then moved to a golden rectangle format at 809 pixels by 500 pixels. When I switched to the GIMP in 2011, I decided that I would let each piece denote what its size would be. In situations where I do not have a predetermined size in the GIMP, I will usually choose 800 pixels by 600 pixels, because I can be sure that most people can see it on their screen without having to resize or zoom in. After I have my piece done, I’ll save it to my hard drive, then move to Chrome, an internet browser, so that I can share it. I have a bookmark folder that contains several links: The current page at 365sketches.org

The New Post page at 365sketches.org
The Facebook page at http://facebook.com/365sketches
The Flickr upload page at http://flickr.com
The cloud based social aggregator application at http://hootsuite.com

By right clicking on this folder in my bookmark toolbar, I can choose to open all of these at once, and then add the image, a short description, and tags to each of these services in order to advertise the new post to each of those audiences.

Summary

365sketches is a project about design, open source, and community. The project started as a way for me to do just one thing each day to better myself as a designer. It turned into a way for me to share ideas and techniques with hundreds of people every day. By using free and open source software, I was able to maintain the project with no monetary costs, while creating objects of personal and community value. The process for publishing has been refined and modified over time, and provides me with a relatively simple way to share my work with a lot of people in just a few clicks. I hope that you’ll consider participating in the project. The best way is to subscribe to the site at http://365sketches.org or if you’re on Facebook, join the page at http://www.facebook.com/365sketches

\The slideshow for this talk is at http://bit.ly/eWJMfv

The audio from this talk is at http://bit.ly/gqyrkd

Bio

John LeMasney is the Manager for Educational Technology Training and Outreach at Princeton University. He was the Manager of Technology Training and Instructional Technology for 12 years at Rider University. He created LeMasney Consulting and Design, which serves the greater Princeton-Trenton area of New Jersey. His most recent project is 365sketches.org where he makes one design a day using open source software.

John is a husband, father, artist, designer, speaker, technologist, open web standard advocate, and open source evangelist living and working in New Jersey.

PULSe and Lynda.com - On Demand Training at Princeton University

2011-04-06T15:25:26Z

PULSe and Lynda.com at Princeton

Abstract

PULSe – the Princeton University Learning Series is a new IT learning opportunity that supports many of the technologies OIT makes available. Faculty, staff, and students – anyone with a Princeton netID – can participate in the live Friday afternoon webinars or access recorded tutorials on available services such as SharePoint, Roxen, and WebSpace. PULSe maintains a presence on Twitter and Facebook where additional resources are shared. In this Productive Scholar session, you will be introduced to the site, its features, and the iLinc web conferencing system that is used to present the weekly webinars.

Lynda.com is a California-based company that offers online training materials on popular software platforms, web applications, and consumer technology. Some are short introductions to a new technology or software package. Others are in-depth instructions on software applications or suites.

PULSe

Lorene Lavora said that PULSe, an on-demand training program and series, is made possible because of an amazing team of people with a deep knowledge of applications, and that her main goal in the series is to “push the envelope” of how technology training is done at Princeton.

The series of technology webinars, which focus on Microsoft Office products, Sharepoint. and other Princeton University-supported products. are short, to the point, and easy to digest, according to Lavora. The seminars are available to Princeton University community members, meaning that anyone with a NetID can watch prerecorded seminars. You can get to the PULSe site by visiting http://www.princeton.edu/pulse and logging in.

Live PULSe seminars take place on Fridays at 2 pm. You do need to have an iLinc account in order to see live seminars. You can get access to iLinc by visiting http://ilinc.princeton.edu and following the instructions to gain access to the system. All conversation between instructors and participants is currently done by chat in iLinc. Instructors also share video and other materials related to the featured software in each session via iLinc.

According to Lavora, PULSe’s Facebook and Twitter accounts are a great way to start a conversation about training. She says that you can find out what PULSe seminars are coming up, ask a question about the software that the seminars support, and get answers from the people who teach them.

Lynda.com

Janet Temos explained that Lynda.com, a premium technology training site with videos and other resources, currently has over 1000 courses and offers new courses almost every week. On Lynda.com, there are courses covering a wide variety of software including design applications from Adobe, productivity software from Microsoft, cloud applications from Google, social sites such as Flickr & Facebook, and 3D applications such as Blender and 3DS Max. You can see an extensive list of all supported software at: http://www.lynda.com/software/all

Princeton recently purchased a site license, and anyone with a valid Princeton Net ID can take part in the on-demand training. Users are authenticated via CAS, the same system that allows access to Princeton services like Blackboard. If you have a valid NetID, simply log in to Lynda at http://lynda.princeton.edu

Some things to note about Lynda:

In order to use the site, cookies are required. The cookies track your activity and progress so that you can go into the site, do some training, leave the site, and get right back to where you left off. If you add your customized user information (name, etc.) you can get your own name on certificates of completion, but your personal information is not required to use the service or to track your individual progress.

If you are not a Princeton NetID holder, it costs $25 per month to sign up as an individual user. This monthly fee will allow individual users to have unlimited access to training materials and videos.

Internet Explorer 8 users sometimes have an issue with the browser correctly rendering menu drop-downs. If this happens to you, look for the compatibility-mode icon in the address bar, and click it. (Additional information about this issue can be found in the forthcoming Knowledge Base article on lynda.com)

Also note that if you log out from Lynda, you cannot log back in at lynda.com — you must use http://lynda.princeton.edu in order to take advantage of Princeton’s site license. You can also set site preferences, such as whether you want to use Flash, Quicktime, or Windows Media, etc. to view movies.

With Quicktime, for instance, you can increase the speed of the playback in order to learn more quickly, as long as you don’t mind listening to the voice at a higher speed. Other features of Lynda videos include closed captioning, exercise files, and recommended prerequisites.

Lynda.com has a very active social media presence on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. You can also use your iPhone or iPad in order to access Lynda content with the lynda.com App, available in Apple’s App Store. Lynda also offers the Lynda Office ribbon, which adds a Lynda tab to Microsoft Office applications. By installing this ribbon, you get a new sidebar that offers application-contextual training from Lynda.com.

If you would like more information about Lynda at Princeton, or if you have questions, please contact jtemos@princeton.edu.

Here is the link to the presentation for Lynda at Princeton.

Sorat Tungkasiri: Internet Child Safety at Home

2011-03-25T18:27:37Z

Abstract

Child Internet Safety

This presentation is designed for parents with children who have access to the Internet to better understand the current dangers that exist in the world today.

The talk offers offer background information about past and current threats and trends. The focus of the talks will be: Your Child's Life Online, Internet Predators, Cyberbullying, dangers of mobile devices, Online Gaming, warning signs, Internet Safety Tips, and much more.

Speaker Bio:

Sorat Tungkasiri is currently a Coordinator at the New Media Center. He first joined the Princeton University community in 2004 as a SCAD, then as a web developer for the Educational Technology Center. Sorat is currently seeking a Masters of Arts Degree from Columbia University with the concentration in Communication, Computing Technology in Education.

Children texting

Your child’s life online

The increasingly "online" lifestyle of children today can cause new and sometimes unforeseen issues for parents. Kids today are in chat rooms, on social networks, writing and sharing information on microblogging sites like Tumblr, doing online gaming, texting friends, and even sometimes doing their homework online.

Tungkasiri showed a public service announcement called “Think before you post.” The complete video can be seen here.

According to statistics presented in the talk, 55% of teens are using social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Even larger percentages of younger children are involved in virtual worlds like Disney’s Club Penguin and Nickelodeon’s Nicktropolis. It was widely reported this past summer that Facebook surpassed the 500 million user mark; the less popular MySpace has over 100 million users. However, Tungkasiri noted, it seems likely that over 40% of the profiles on these sites are fake. ”The danger in fake profiles”, he explained, “is that those profiles can be used to gather information by predators.” Further statistics cited in that talk estimate that children under 18 spend between 8-18 hours a day online; more ominously, it's likely that 1 in 7 children are sexually solicited online.

Most sites have privacy settings that can help to keep personal information private. When privacy settings are ignored or configured incorrectly, dangerous online situations can take place. Tungkasiri cited the example of a girl named Rebecca who decided to put up an invitation to her birthday party, complete with address and other personal information, on Facebook. She inadvertently set the permission level of the invitation to "everyone." Within hours, thousands of strangers had accepted the invitation, and Rebecca and her parents were forced to cancel the party. In another similar case, 50 unknown guests showed up at a party that was intended to be private.

Tungkasiri offered suggestions to parents to help to protect their children on social networks:

Follow or friend your child on social networks
Make sure children choose appropriate screen names, without terms like “sexy” or “hot”
Check their friends list regularly.

Internet predators

NAMBLA or the North American Man Boy Love Association, exists on Facebook as a group. This group is just one example of the kinds of pro-pedophilia groups that exist on Facebook and other social networks, despite strict rules against such group activity. These kinds of groups exist for the purposes of fostering sexual relationships between adults and children, and are a great resource for predators. A recent news broadcast on this subject can be seen here.

While NAMBLA , upon inspection is a group that makes its intentions clear, there are other more subtle ways in which sexual predators stalk children. Predators often perform a process called grooming, a methodical method by which predators select prey, deliberately choosing to connect with vulnerable children with the intent of creating a secretive sexual relationship. Tungkasiri noted that calls to toll-free 800 numbers are not listed on phone bills, and cost nothing to the child, and are therefore now being used by predators to bypass parental oversight.

Tungkasiri listed several signs that indicate a child might be being groomed. These include:

Spending a lot of time online
Using an online account belonging to someone else
Receiving phone calls from people you don’t know or making calls to numbers you don’t recognize
Recieving gifts, mail or packages from people you don’t know
Turning away from friends and family
Becoming withdrawn or secretive
Minimizing the screen or monitor when you walk into the room

Predators use a method called SITS, or establishing 'Similar Interests Trust and Secrecy.' The guiding principle to this sort of relationship is usually a pact in which the predator requests that the child keep the relationship secret, something just between the child and their new, sympathetic "friend."

Online gaming has become another way for predators to connect with your kids, because online gaming allows for relaxed, casual conversation, similar to a phone call, but without the same level of parental tracking or controls. By joining children in a gaming space, predators have already established a common interest, and can easily develop trust through the fun and exciting team and collaborative elements of a game, or establish a rapport through play. Parents should consider setting rules and restrictions, choose games fitting for the age of their children, and should monitor gameplay. To underscore these points, Tungkasiri showed a video that outlined the dangers of online gaming.

Cyber-bullying

Cyber-bullying is often the topic of news reports with a tragic ending, and may be the biggest threat in children’s lives today. Some people, referred to as angels of death actually target vulnerable teens in the hopes of encouraging them to suicide or other self-damaging behavior. One example of this is the viral video Star Wars Kid, where a child recorded his super-hero acrobatics in a high school video studio. Cyberbullies at this school got a copy of the video, and spent hours of editing and remixing it to make fun of him.

In another example theTop 6 ways to kill Piper described the ways in which a real 6th grader might be killed in an animated short made by her peers.

Tungkasiri noted some ways in which parents can combat cyber-bullying:

Take an active role in your child’s online activities
Frequently check credit card and phone bills for unfamiliar account charges
Take your child seriously if they report an uncomfortable online exchange
Advise kids to never trade personal photographs in the mail or over the Internet
If your child meets a new “friend” online insist on being introduced
Contact your ISP and law enforcement if your child receives pornography via the Internet

Dangers of Mobile devices

Tungkasiri described some of the ways that phones and other mobile devices can be misused, putting children in danger.

Sexting is the act of simulating sex over the Internet, sometimes done with phones over the SMS messaging system, but also using video chat that exists on newer phones, as well as other videoconferencing methods.

Textual harassment is where people engage in text based battles, hurling insults or threats in a silent, but still very hurtful way.

If the child's phone is under control and supervision, it becomes less dangerous. Parental controls exist in most modern phones. Parents can check, and block, track, or remove applications of the phone, to make sure that they aren’t being misused by children.

Parental controls

In the second session of this talk, Tungkasiri then focused on how to enforce parental controls on various devices and platforms. He explained that the parent should use an administrative account on the child's computer and give the child a non-administrative account

Tungkasiri demonstrated how to set parental controls in the following platforms:

Windows 7 Parental controls overview

Mac OS Parental Controls overview

Firefox addons

MySpace privacy settings

Facebook privacy settings

YouTube privacy settings

Geotagging & cybercasing

Another danger lurking in technology is literally invisible. Geolocation sharing is an important passive data sharing technology that provides specific location data along with photos and other messages. Used by a predator, it could lead directly to a child, disclosing personal facts about them, including their personal appearance, the location of their home, car, or other information. Similarly, bluetooth, a common local networking protocol, can be used to track the presence of specific people via their devices within a 50 foot radius.

In a demonstration of Icanstalkyou.com Tungkasiri demonstrated that cameras and cameraphones that record geolocation data can show where the content from a particular photo was taken. The site shows how to disable geotagging in your phone, so that this danger is diminished. Tungkasiri demoed how to download a photo from the internet and then use a free digital photo data (EXIF data) viewer to see all of the recorded information on the photo. Picasa has this functionality built in. Also, many solutions exist for removing EXIF data from photos. One example is EXIF Cleaner.

Safe sites and services

Tungkasiri showed some examples of kid safe browsers and browsing services, including:

kidzui browser: http://www.kidzui.com/

kido’z service: http://kidoz.net/plus/index.html

Webkinz: http://www.webkinz.com/

GirlSense: http://www.girlsense.com/premium/

there.com

Club Penguin: http://www.clubpenguin.com/

Moshi Monsters: http://www.moshimonsters.com/

Final tips

Tungkasiri reminded us to keep an open dialogue with our children, and to stay on top of what they are doing. Don’t allow an unmonitored computer to be housed in a private space like a child's room. Keep it in a high traffic area, and keep an eye on what’s going on there, so that you can help them to stay safe, or to give help if they encounter unwelcome activity on the internet.

Podcast from Day 1 available here. (MP3)

Slides from day 1 available here. (PDF)

Slides from day 2 available here. (PDF)

AllPrinceton: The Hyperlocal Media Experiment

2011-03-10T21:11:13Z

Introduction

At the Lunch ‘n Learn session on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011, Donna Liu explained and demonstrated AllPrinceton.com, a "hyperlocal multimedia experiment" of which she is the founder and Executive Director. AllPrinceton is not Liu's first multimedia project. After she came to Princeton in 2002 as a Ferris Fellow in journalism, Liu founded the UChannel, in collaboration with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Before Princeton, Liu had a long career as a news producer and manager with CNN, where she launched CNN’s first production center in Asia. She is an Emmy award winner for coverage of the Tienanmen protests in 1989. Liu opened her talk by describing the history and evolution of the AllPrinceton.com project.

Overview and History of AllPrinceton.com

Liu described her transition from analog to digital media during the development of the UChannel at Princeton. Now a digital convert, she not only understands the benefits of new media, but advocates it to others. During the UChannel project, Liu described having conversations with George McCollough, Executive Director of Princeton’s community access TV station, about he future of news and broadcasting, and what the transition to digital might mean for traditional news outlets. Liu noted that she would have loved to experiment with a local news organization during that transitional period, but that there wasn’t enough time to spare among her other responsibilities. When the UChannel was “unplugged," and Donna completed her appointment at Princeton, she suddenly found she had time and decided to begin a local news site that would focus on all topics relating to Princeton.

Liu started AllPrinceton.com with essentially no capital investment and a shared space on a server. She began searching and experimenting with capturing and posting information that seemed to her to be missing or elusive on other local news and civic websites. In order to create the AllPrinceton site, she selected an open source content management system called Drupal especially because there was a supportive community of developers, and also because AllPrinceton's funding organization, The Knight Foundation, was a Drupal advocate as well as being a prime supporter in experimentation with news media. Since Liu considers herself more of a journalist and organizer than a technologist, she chose a pre-configured Drupal theme that was already a favorite among other news organizations using Drupal because it had a lot of news-centric features. As she showed the Lunch 'n Learn audience the new website for AllPrinceton, she explained that the project was in “constant beta” and that the skeletal framework would soon be filled with focused local content, gathered with help from the community. She has welcomed local residents to participate in the AllPrinceton experiment, and has begun to offer regular workshops to get the community involved and informed.

The AllPrinceton.com site

The AllPrinceton.com site is organized into various content streams. There is original content from AllPrinceton writers as well as related, aggregated content from third party sources. The original content is created by students and Princeton community members who are interested in reporting the town’s events and issues. In the center is Town Talk, a group blog where people write their own content about events and issues. Liu described Town Talk as being akin to embedded journalism, where people on the ground report on what they see in the area, and everyone is clearly identified and associated with their various organizations. A calendar, including arts, cultural and civic events, exists where community members might post. A classified section and directory section allow people to exchange information, though it is not yet as popular as other areas on the site. (Liu plans to make these sections more robust over the summer.) The directory, for example, might contain biographical and contact information for Princeton's civic leaders, or other information related to community governance.

Other content on the site is aggregated using curated feeds from established news sources such as The Princeton Packet. The aggregated content exists as a teaser, consisting only of the first few lines of a story, a fragment linked to the entire article on the original site. Princeton Community TV offers a media feed, so that the site also includes links to audio and video content about Princeton.

A search for "Princeton" populates a twitter feed on the site, and as a result, the feed offers not only tweets about Princeton township, Princeton borough and Princeton University, but occasionally picks up a "Princeton" reference that is unrelated to the community. Liu described the accidental inclusion in the feed of lively tweets that referred to an up and coming hiphop prodigy named 'Princeton' (results which Liu was mostly able to filter from the feed). Liu intends to continue applying feed filters so that future twitter content can become more reliably focused on actual Princeton-specific tweets. Liu's goal is to make the twitter feed provide a vibrant and immediate source of information -- as a point of comparison, she described the kind of immediately-aware feeds that we’ve seen occur spontaneously during natural catastrophes such as the recent earthquake in Japan.

Liu identified such timely and specific information as a local news gap, one that AllPrinceton might be able to fill. For instance, although there are alerts and institution-specific alerts of snow and wind emergencies, perhaps there is currently no centralized online presence for such alerts in the community. If simple tools could be made available to let the community self-report emerging situations or outages, AllPrinceton could move from simply being useful to being truly essential service. Liu described a recent meeting during which the proposed school budget was discussed. After an extensive search, Liu concluded that the specifics of the budget weren't described anywhere in the local websites associated with the school board. Information about the budget did not exist on the web until a student reporter from AllPrinceton went to the meeting, got a paper copy of the proposed budget, scanned it and posted it on the site. "Public information does not necessarily mean accessible information," Liu explained, "unless there are media channels to make it available."

Technologies, people and Ideas

Liu cited examples of other technology leaders and popular web based tools that have helped to inspire her work on AllPrinceton. One such tool is Steve Johnson’s Outside.in which takes information feeds from a specific zip code and pulls them together into a cohesive collection of local updates. (Liu also mentioned that Johnson's site was purchased by AOL for $10M the day before her talk.) Johnson continues to improve the algorithm that collects the data to feed the site. But even Johnson has come to admit that algorithms are not enough, and that the information gathered by machine has to be supplemented by human reporting, a kind of "hybrid" concept that is central to Liu's visions for the future of AllPrinceton.com.

Liu also quoted Jeff Jarvis, a guru of digital news and media, as having said “Do what you do best, and link to the rest”--which Liu sees as a sound philosophy, and is the rationale for bringing aggregated content from other established sources to the AllPrinceton site. George McCollough, the director of Princeton’s Community Television and Digital Media Center, remarked Liu, gives people the tools and knowledge to create their own media--and then broadcasts the results. Liu sees McCollough's station as a model for what AllPrinceton.com might provide for Princeton's online community.

An intense focus on local news, a concept Liu refers to as hyperlocality, is, she says, similar to a pendulum swinging back from the overtly global concerns of mass media. Mass news media organizations might be perceived on one hand as media monsters, absorbing and eclipsing local media channels. Locality is gaining in importance, said Liu, especially with regard to news. Media sources are regrouping around communities of interest and geographical locations. Liu decided to focus on the geo-location trend in designing AllPrinceton.com -- in part because she loves the town, but also because Princeton, although small, is a place where many interesting things happen..

Liu spoke of the information-gathering tool Ushahidi as an example of the new trends in crowd-sourced reporting. Ushahidi was originally deployed in Kenya to help monitor elections, The tool allows average users to share information and has been used in emergencies such as Haiti's recent disasters, and the Washington snowstorm. SeeClickFix.com (a possible future addition for AllPrinceton) allows local residents to use smartphones to take pictures of problems, record their geolocation, and report details of what needs to be fixed. The information is then posted to the SeeClickFix. site, and remains there until the problem is resolved. Liu shared her own SeeClickFix view of Princeton after the wind storm we experienced last spring. Liu, armed with her phone, took a walk around her own neighborhood and noted the location of several downed trees. If a similar system was in place for Princeton, information about the specifics of weather, or other sorts of emergencies, could be shared more easily through increased reporting at the neighborhood level. However, without the buy-in of the municipal services such reporting would have little effect. If the community reports an issue and no one with the power to fix it is listening, such a site might actually increase confusion and frustration.

Liu concluded her talk by citing how two Princeton faculty members as being influential to her growing interest in using online media as a public concern. An example of bottom-up reporting can be found in Professor Matthew Salganik's AllOurIdeas.org (itself the subject of a recent Lunch 'n Learn talk). AllOurIdeas is a collaborative tool where a group of people with a shared interest can pick a favorite when presented with two ideas. The ideas presented are posed in response to a shared question or problem. Favored solutions rise to the top of the polls, and participants are encouraged to enter new ideas or solutions to the topic being discussed. Liu noted that Salganik's polling tool is being used in New York City to decide upon the use of new public spaces. She would love to see this tool used to discuss local issues, such as the ongoing talks about the consolidation of Princeton's Borough and Township. The second faculty member who influenced Liu's thinking about new media was Professor Ed Felten. Liu recalled a talk she attended a decade ago, where Felten outline a striking description of what he called "the Celestial Jukebox." This was a visionary future device that could be used to make phone calls, take photos, watch and listen to media, connect to the internet and more. Now that we all can have a "Celestial Jukebox, " in our pocket in the form of a smart phone, what, asked Liu, can we do to make sense of the vast amount of information that now flows from individuals to the internet? She recently asked Felten to consider that question. "Filtering," he replied, "is key." Filtering, curating, and selecting information from the web can result in an incredibly rich source of information about a single topic.

For the AllPrinceton.com project, that topic of shared interest is Princeton itself, and Liu hopes that some creative filtering and channeling through a community collection of "celestial jukeboxes" might result in something that can benefit and enlighten all Princeton residents.

Want to get involved?

If you are interested in working with Donna Liu in developing the AllPrinceton.com site, drop in on one of her regular Friday workshops from 10-12 at the Princeton Public Library. Additional, more advanced workshops are scheduled on an as-need basis at Princeton Community TV.

A podcast of Donna Liu's talk can be heard here.

The new AllPrinceton iPhone app can be found in the iTunes store.

The "Mapping Globalization" Project

2011-03-02T19:58:23Z

Detail from "Steamship routes of the World" circa 1900, the American Express Company.

"Mapping Globalization" was the topic of today's Lunch 'n Learn featuring Professor Miguel Centeno and graduate student, Manish Nag, both of the Department of Sociology at Princeton.

Centeno began the talk by describing the origins of his interest in globalization, about 11 years ago, about the time of Thomas L. Friedman's first publications on his theories about the relationships between nations (The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 2000 and The World is Flat, 2004). Centeno said it occurred to him that there were many ways to frame the subject of globalization, and that the process, in fact, had been going on for thousands of years. How, he wondered, was the best approach to grasp the complexity of the concept without resorting to banalities--and what was the best way to diagram information as complex as that describing global trade?

The International Networks Archive

Centeno's first attempt to answer that question was to develop the International Networks Archive, (INA), where he used graphic arts, among other things, to try to depict complex relationships in easy-to-understand ways. Using some common reports published by the United Nations, he used trade data to support the generation of diagrams that showed some stunning conclusions about global transactions. Centeno calls these images "infographics." An example, The Magic Bean Shop and The Fries that Bind Us, are two of the diagrams in the INA collection. They show the effects of McDonalds and Starbuck's franchises on global trade. This diagram, he noted has been the most popular on the site, having been reprinted multiple times as an example of the sort of trends the INA is best at describing.

The fries that bind us? A diagram showing the effects of Starbuck's coffee shops and McDonald's restaurants on world trade. Image copyright 2003, INA.
See full size image.

"Globalization is nothing more than a complex series of transactions across the planet," said Centeno, alluding to the strong connections that can be made by analyzing trade data. "Most of these data sets are available publicly," he noted, showing a table that tracks the annual number of minutes spent in phone communications between countries. Data about the imports of movies, books, as well as trade data, are among the many other ways to show how these transactions take place through what seems like simple exchanges.

The INA project was followed by the "Mapping Globalization," where data was visualized in three distinct ways.

Mapping Globalization

The first section of the Mapping Globalization site contains a collection of maps, and links to maps of various kinds: these include historic maps, interactive maps, and modern satellite imagery that help to convey the notion of geographic location as a critical, but often overlooked aspect of globalization. "Globalization involves connections between at least two places," the website explains, "and the first step in our understanding must be an appreciation of what this means in a concrete sense of place."

The second, and least developed, section of the "Mapping Globalization" site is the "Narratives" section, a series of animated movies that show general trends in globalization over time, such as "Migrations" and "Empires."

Finally, the "Data and Analysis" section uses diagrams generated by technology from NetMap Analytics, which creates diagrams showing the density of trade between nations. Using data from GKG trade statistics, NetMaps are circular diagrams that show relationships between various countries, grouped by continent. Thresholds can be set on the data depicted to clarify the diagrams. For instance, setting a threshold of f "0.3%" means that links corresponding to a trade share less than 0.3% of the total dollar value in the category are not shown in the diagram.

Trade in Apparel and Accessories in 1980 and 2001 with a 0.3% threshold. From "Brief Introduction to the Data and Selected Images from the GKG Project" by Miguel Centeno and Abigail Cook.

Despite best efforts at the time, there was no way for the NetMaps to be generated dynamically on the website, however images of several of the most interesting patterns can be found in the section of the site called "NetMap Combined Studies."

MapTrade

The talk next focused on a project undertaken by Manish Nag, a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at Princeton who now studies with Centeno. Nag explained his past career as an IT consultant, and his first interest in studying globalization at Harvard, studying with Jason Beckfield. At Harvard, Nag worked on a project called Sonoma, as a way to visualize statistical data using maps. When he came to Princeton to continue his studies, he began to work with Centeno on making an interactive database that would allow anyone to diagram world trade relationships. The result was the MapTrade project.

MapTrade, still in beta, shows various projections of a world map (Robinson, Winkel Trippel, Gall-Peters, or equirectangular are the map views that the interface supports). Trade flows can be diagrammed on top of the world projections, showing trade between selected nations, based on specific commodities, or all trade between all nations. Trade data is available for 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2009.

Using the interface, it is possible to save generated maps, so that comparisons can be drawn, and the results saved for use in research and presentation. As with the earlier NetMaps projects, filters can be applied to clarify the data by setting thresholds, or by limiting the transactions by their total percentage of world trade.

Centeno and Nag used the MapTrade interface to generate a series of maps, showing the shift in trade centers over time.

A diagram showing the top 75% of trade in wheat among all nations, 1980. Image generated by MapTrade.

A diagram showing the top 75% of trade in wheat among all nations, 2009. Image generated by MapTrade

The audience then requested several maps showing various commodities, countries and time periods.

Who knew so many fish sticks were traded between the U.S. and China in 2009? That the top 50% of word trade involves only 10 countries? You may have suspected these things; MapTrade can draw you the picture to prove it!

A future phase of Centeno and Nag's collaboration will include making the NetMaps data interactive, much in the way that MapTrade currently is, so that users can generate and save their own diagrams.

Links to all three of the projects discussed in today's talk can be found at:

www.princeton.edu/globalization

A podcast of the talk can be found here.

Collaboration Tools for Scholars

2011-02-23T18:35:36Z

Photo credit: Johann Larrson, via Flickr. CC license, 2010.

Today's Lunch 'n Learn, presented by Angel Brady of Princeton's Humanities Resource Center considered the topic of "Collaboration Tools for Scholars."

Brady demonstrated several free tools that facilitate scholarly collaboration. Most were on sites external to the Princeton computing environment, one, WebSpace, is a Princeton-only resource.

Brady explained that these new tools are popular because they are stored on external servers that keep shared resources up to date, and ensure that collaborators are always working on the latest versions.Most of the tools also include social media features that allow further communication and sharing.

Formerly, trying to share, write, or gather research materials while working collaboratively relied upon repeated email exchanges, possible mis-matches between software versions, cross-platform issues, email boxes going over quota, and various versions of a file being in circulation at the same time. A major advantage to these new cloud-based services is that they are browser-based, are cross-platform, and that they allow multiple editors to work simultaneously.

Many of the functions performed by these tools can be replicated by other applications at Princeton-- often more securely. However the ease of use, the fact that these tools are in common use among scholars, that students have equal access to them, and the advantage of synchronous editing make them very attractive for the types of collaborative documents and resources that require medium security, and that need to be shared with people from all over the word. For university business that requires the transmission of sensitive information, web-based external services should NOT be used.

The tools discussed today were Mendeley and Zotero, tools for amassing an online research collection, bubbl.us, a mind-mapping service, Posterous Groups, a sub-function of a popular micro-blogging site, Google Documents an online office suite of applications, Dropbox and WebSpace, two file-sharing services, and Diigo, a social bookmarking tool.

Mendeley and Zotero

Medeley and Zotero perform very similar functions in that they organize reference and research materials found online, and also have social-media functions. These tools can be used to gather links to resources such as journal articles and web pages, bookmark, and annotate them. Downloading similar documents and links to one's desktop can result in file names that don't reveal the actual content of the downloaded file, and these "mystery PDFs" can be difficult to share. Mendeley and Zotero allow you to make online folders of documents, and automatically download the metadata associated with files, including titles, abstracts, and tags, listing them in a clear library-like format. You can also alter and add to the metadata. Notes, highlighting, and organization within groups and folders can be accomplished in either application. Reference collections can be make public or private, and both tools have the ability to find other public libraries organized by people who share your research interests,

Mendeley is a desktop client originally designed as a PDF annotation tool (it also supports .txt files). It also has app versions for the iPhone, iPad and iPodTouch. Mendelay works with bibliographic citation formats such as BibTeX, Research Info Systems (RIS), Zotero Library and Endnote XML. A free account in Mendeley allows for 500MB of personal storage space, as well as 500MB of shared space. Both private and public groups are supported, but the free account limits private groups to 5; with each group having a maximum of 10 members. Group folder track all group activity, and it is possible for the original group owner to reassign ownership to another user if necessary, so that existing group work does not have to be recreated in a new account. There is a bookmarklet tool to make it easy to import sources found on the web.

Mendeley platforms:

Cloud-based, with desktop apps for MacOS, Windows and Linux.

Zotero Groups is part of Zotero, a Firefox add-in that works with Mac, Windows and Linux (a stand-alone version of Zotero for Chrome and Safari users is available in alpha). Group Libraries, both public and private can be created. The Firefox plugin can capture journal and book information with one click. Highlights and notes can be added to content. Library ownership can be transferred to another user. Zotero can also be used as a bibliographic tool, with a drag and drop feature to MS Word (Zotero export bibliographic information in the RIS format, which EndNote can import.). Your Zotero library has an RSS feed that can be followed by group members, to notify them of updates. Zotero was designed for academics, and was originally created at George Mason University. Storage space for a free account is 100MB.

Zotero platforms:

Cloud-based, and a Firefox add-in compatible with MacOS, Windows and Linux versions of Firefox; a client for Chrome and Safari is in the works.

Bubbl.us

For the visually minded, Bubbl.us is a tool that allows collaborative mind-mapping via a series of connected bubbles that diagram related concepts. The free version of the cloud service allows 3 "sheets" of mind-maps to be created; more are available with a paid upgrade. Groups can be made for editing (read/write/delete) or read-only access to Bubbl.us mind maps, but group members must join Bubbl.us to participate.

Finished mind-maps can be exported as .jpg or .png image files, but the application itself uses Adobe Flash to create the interactive maps. Maps can also be embedded in an external web page as a way to share them with others. Although the tool is very simple, as mind-mapping tools go, it also has a very minimal learning curve. Most similar tools are fee-based.

Bubbl.us platforms:

cloud-based

Posterus Groups

Posterus, a popular micro-blogging site (think "Twitter," but with the ability to make groups) also has the ability to make simple collaborative websites for blogging among group members or multiple groups. Posterous posts can include both text, images (with automatic slide shows for posts with multiple images), links and PDFs with a 100MB upload limit per post. Posterous sites can be private (password-protected) or public, and posting is possible using a number of devices, including mobile phones, emails or bookmarklets. Responding to or adding to posts is also possible via email. For a researcher in the field or on the go, it can be an invaluable tool to share information with group members almost instantly. Groups are private by default, and have no limits on the number of members. Posterous can be linked to existing sites on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.

Posterous platforms:

Cloud-based, works on mobile browsers as well as desktop ones.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a great tool to use for real-time or asynchronous collaboration with colleagues; several users can be working on a document at any given time (with visual hints to other editors as to what parts of the document other users are editing, and almost instant updating of new content.) The Google Docs include familiar office-type applications including a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, a slide show creator, and a tool for building forms. Documents created in Google Docs are compatible with other similar desktop based applications, such as Open Office, Microsoft Office, and iWorks, and files can be imported and exported from one to the other.

Collaborators all need a Google account to use Google Docs, but it does not need to be a Gmail account -- any email address can be registered with a Google account. Various saved states of a documents are stored and can be reviewed and reverted to when needed. Ownership of various shared documents can be reassigned to another group member, and colleagues can be invited to edit as a private group, or be completely public.

Google Docs is very popular with Princeton students, but should not be used to share secure course information that would be better put into Blackboard or another Princeton-managed storage space, however for casual collaboration, particularly outside Princeton, it's a great tool.

Google Docs platforms:

cloud-based

WebSpace and Dropbox

WebSpace is a file-sharing platform that Princeton has licensed from a company called Xythos, a subsidiary of the Blackboard Learning Management System. Xythos is an enterprise-level document management system that allows for users to set up workflows, retention strategies, and enter metadata for stored documents. Everyone at Princeton with a valid netid has 5GB of storage on WebSpace.

WebSpace has built-in integration with Blackboard course websites, allowing shared storage for course participants. A popular feature of the Blackboard component is the drop box, which allows students to share work with each other, and another feature that allows instructors to post links to files stored in WebSpace directly to one, or more, Blackboard sites.

WebSpace can also do simple file sharing on a file-by-file or folder level. WebSpace integrates with the University LDAP, so it is easy to make groups within the Princeton community. A "ticket" to a file or folder can also be shared with anyone in the world with an email address. Tickets contain a specific URL to the shared material that sets editing permissions, the duration of these permissions, and shares the file directly via WebSpace rather than sending it as an email attachment. In all cases, users can "subscribe" to a folder or file that is shared with them to receive notification of changes. Files in WebSpace can also be made public, and each has a unique URL so that others can link to them.

A desktop client is available for 32-bit Windows machines. A Mac version is in beta. For those for whom the client does not work, the WebSpace drive can be mapped as a network drive.

Dropbox is the most popular of the cloud-based file sharing services as a stand-alone application, and is also used by many other applications as a storage mechanism. Dropbox allows for public or private file sharing among groups and individuals. Dropbox group members must also be members of Dropbox.

Dropbox can be mounted as a web drive on Mac and Windows, and also has a desktop client for Mac, Windows and Linux. Dropbox is used for many mobile applications, and automatically syncs all versions to the web. Dropbox free accounts have 2GB of storage, and can track changes, for some level of document versioning control.

Platforms:

Cloud-based, Mac, Windows, and Linux. Both tools can be used for file sharing, and collaboration, and while Dropbox is the easier tool to use, WebSpace has integration with Princeton-specific resources that can aid collaboration.

Diigo

Diigo is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to bookmark web pages, annotate and highlight them, and then share your marks publicly or privately. You can create groups for gathering and sharing bookmarks. Bookmarks are organized by tags, and group ownership can be transferred to another user. Diigo, and Diigolet, the Diigo bookmarklet tool, work with Firefox and Chrome. For fans of Delicious, a popular social bookmarking among scholars that has been around for years, Diigo is a good alternative. (Delicious's new owner, Yahoo!, has announced that it will soon "sunset" Delicious.) Diigo has an import tool that will ingest your existing Delicious bookmarks, and at lest for now, has a setting that will allow you to bookmark sites in Diigo and Delicious simultaneously.

A copy of the presentation used in the talk is visible here:

The presentation can also be viewed online here, or downloaded from this location.

A podcast will be posted here shortly.

Research and Writing on the iPad

2011-02-17T13:39:23Z

Image courtesy remiforal, Flickr. Licence: CC.

Will Howarth, Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton, spoke to a large Lunch 'n Learn audience on February 16 about how he uses his iPad as an essential companion to reading, writing, research and travel.

Howarth began the talk by describing his long search for a lightweight, portable device that would be convenient for use while writing and traveling. From small-format computers of various vintages, to PDAs, Howarth has found the iPad to be the best solution to date. Its light weight (24 ounces), long battery life (approximately 10 hours), responsiveness, and the availability of useful applications have made it one of his favorite tools for productivity.

Howarth showed the basic mechanics of navigating several iPad screens, and using the screens to organize applications by function. He also demonstrated how to customize the persistent tool "dock" that appears on all screens, useful for storing one's most commonly used applications.

Howarth's preferred layout is to have news and information applications on the first screen of his device, writing tools on the second, and on the third screen, a miscellaneous assortment of apps that are either not fully tested, or exiled as being of secondary importance.

Citing the limitations of the virtual keyboard on the iPad's touch screen for someone with larger hands, Howarth showed his solutions in the form of two Bluetooth keyboards that can be synced to the device to allow typing on a more conventional set of keys. One of the keyboards was integrated into a small carrying case. The other, more suited for desktop use, was a compact stand-alone keypad that allowed for typing on full-sized keys. Another limitation to the iPad is the lack of a USB or other data port that would allow for easy file transfer via portable storage media. However, since several of the applications that Howarth customarily uses have mechanisms to sync and share files among several machines, this shortcoming has been largely overcome by application developers. Howarth proceeded to describe and share his favorite iPad applications for writing and research with his audience.

Howarth's talk was divided into eight general categories of iPad applications. Reference tools, Database applications for storing and organizing, Readers for books and periodicals, Note-taking tools, Notebooks that sync files between applications, tools for working with PDF files, Storage on Cloud servers, and a Productivity suite with familiar office tools, formed the outline of Howarth's talk. Each of these categories is discussed separately below.

Author's note: Although the talk was cut short owing to time constraints, Professor Howarth was kind enough to share his notes with me. This post contains material that may not have been presented in the talk, or was mentioned only briefly last Wednesday.

Reference tools:

Safari

Safari (included with the iPad) is the browser included on all machines using the Apple iOS. Safari on mobile devices can be customized for fast browsing, for bookmarking popular destinations, and customized to take advantage of the highly portable nature of the iPad. Howarth demonstrated how he has tailored his particular Safari toolbar so that he has research tools, particularly remote access to scholarly research collections including Princeton's Library, available at his fingertips. Among the headings in Howarth's customized list of bookmarks are Reference tools, Authors, and Libraries.

Wikipanion

Wikipanion (free in the app store) is a tool designed to optimize searching, navigation, and display of entries in Wikipedia. The tool's graphical display of a Wikipedia entry includes a sidebar outline of main headings in a Wikipedia entry to facilitate navigation and exploration, as well as contextual links to related topics.

Google Earth

Google Earth (free in the app store) is a portable version of the popular desktop application, made even more stunning by the iPad's high resolution screen. The application includes all of the features and imagery of the desktop version, with the added ability to find your own location on the globe using the built-in GPS features of the iPad. A good companion to travel, Google Earth, like Google Maps (included with the iPad) can help to find local landmarks, businesses and cultural locations.

National Geographic World Atlas

The National Geographic World Atlas ($1.99 in the app store) is another application for maps, this time featuring high-resolution images of National Geographic's own distinctive cartography. The app features 3 different styles of maps, and can be zoomed down to the granularity of a satellite image focusing on a particular street or building. (Street-level maps are drawn from Bing satellite imagery.)

Recommendations:

The Safari browser should be the first point of departure as a source for reference materials, as the bookmarks can be customized to point to many excellent online tools. Howarth recommends not buying too many reference apps until the potential of Safari is exhausted.

Database Applications:

Things for iPad

Things for iPad ($19.99 in the app store), also available in a desktop version for Macs, is a task manager that fits with the category known as "todo" apps. The app allows you to enter notes, projects, and due dates, in an easy-to-use interface that syncs with the desktop version of the application. Since Howarth uses both versions, he finds it easy to set up lists at home, and have them automatically updated on the iPad. He uses the Categories to set up priorities and to schedule tasks, and uses the built-in lists for "Today," "Next," "Scheduled," and "Someday" to help keep him on track with deadlines.

DEVONthink To Go

DEVONthink To Go ($14.99 in the app store) is a companion program to DEVONthink and DEVONnote, both desktop applications for the Mac. The program can be used on its own, but according to the manufacturer "unfolds its full potential ONLY when used in conjunction with these applications. Howarth uses DEVONthink Pro Office and DEVONnote, and uses the applications together to save web clips, bookmarks, files for courses, notes on alumni trips he has led, and writing projects. A sync folder in the applications keeps the iPad version updated; conversely any changes on the iPad are reflected in the desktop versions at the next synchronization.

Bento for iPad

Bento for iPad ($4.99 in the app store) is a personal database program made by FileMaker Pro. It comes in a desktop version as well, and can sync with Bento 3 for the Mac. The database includes templates for many sorts of organizational tasks, from to do lists, to events, to household inventories, to expenses--even logs for diet and exercise. Howarth uses Bento at home on his computer, and uses the program mostly for listing addresses, book inventories, lists of films. The application, Howarth notes, can export and import spreadsheets in various formats.

Recommendations:

These apps, Howarth noted, are best suited to those who are enthusiastic users of their desktop counterparts. For those who don't own, or intend to own the companion programs, similar functionality can be found in the Note-Taking applications, described below.

One major lack in this category of applications is one for organizing bibliographic references. Howarth told the audience he has been in contact with the makers of EndNote, a popular bibliography program among scholars at Princeton. They report that an iPad version of their database is currently in the works.

Readers:

Writing begins with reading, according to Howarth--here are his favorite tools:

iBooks

iBooks (free in the app store) is Apple's own e-book reader, with content purchased from iTunes. iBooks also has the ability to read PDF documents, which can be included in the library from email attachments sent to the iPad. Items in one's library can be viewed as book covers on a virtual bookshelf, or in list view, and it is possible to arrange collections within one's library. Howarth showed an 8-page PDF report written by one of his students that is now part of his iBooks library. The interface controls include adjustments for screen brightness, a search feature, and bookmarks. The interface also has an animated page turn feature, and a "scrubbing" progress bar to slide rapidly from one section of the book to another. Books can be annotated, but PDFs cannot. Although iTunes sells many popular current books, it also has many free offerings, mostly for books in the public domain.

Kindle

Kindle, (free in the app store) an app that share the name of Amazon's popular e-reader, allows Kindle books to be read on the iPad and the iPhone. There are numerous versions of the Kindle reader, available for most portable devices, desktops, and a web-based version. Content for the app is purchased from Amazon.com, or uploaded by the user. The reader accepts .azw files, .mobi files, .rtf and text files, as well as PDFs. Howarth showed how to navigate his Kindle edition of Deep Creek, a novel he co-authored with Anne Matthews under the pseudonym Dana Hand. The Kindle interface turns pages with a swipe or a tap, and tapping on a word will simultaneously offer the options to highlight the word, make a note about the text, and , and to display the entry for the word in a built-in dictionary,--with links to related entries on Wikipedia and Google. Notes bookmarks and highlights are stored on Amazon cloud servers, and can be referenced and printed through the online interface. The Amazon Kindle bookstore has the most titles of any digital bookstore, including more than 25,000 free titles from Project Gutenberg.

Stanza

Stanza by Lexcycle (free in the app store) is one of the first e-readers ever made, and has been recently acquired by Amazon. Less sophisticated than the other two readers mentioned in this section, it offers annotations, bookmarks, search, and reverse black/white screen view. Stanza is backed by a library of more than 100,000 books, all of them free.

Recommendations:

Working across e-readers can be problematic owing to the fact that formats, citations, annotations, and page numbering are not standard, which as Howarth notes, is a major headache for scholars. One bright note on this topic is the recent announcement that Amazon will include references to the pagination of the print edition on which the Kindle edition is based, which will allow more accurate citations and place finding for readers who are using both paper and digital editions of books. Apple's threatened restrictions on books purchased from non-Apple apps also has caused some worry among consumers.

Among the three readers discussed here, Howarth declares Kindle the winner, because it is the most affordable and flexible platform for reading.

Note-Taking applications

These applications are ideal for taking, sharing and synching notes with other machines. In some cases, they can provide an alternative for the Database applications listed above. There are hundreds of such apps available for the iPad; here is Howarth's selected list. Some of these applications have a browser interface that will update information on your mobile device.

Index Card

Index Card ($4.99 in the app store) is a simple non-linear writing tool for the iPad. It allows notes to be captured in an interface that resembles index cards pinned to a corkboard. Notes can be reordered, recolored, written, edited, and "stacked" into projects. Index Card exports a text file of your notes that can be read by most word processors. Howarth finds this a favorite tool for brainstorming, organizing, categorizing by color, and for organizing projects. He shares his cards via email, or using Dropbox.

PlainText

PlainText (free in the app store) is a simple app for editing text on the iPad. It looks much simpler than Index Card, and does many of the same things. Sharing and syncing is done via a Dropbox interface. Howarth and other writers like it because it is simple, elegant, and has a very "paper-like" interface.

SimpleNote

SimpleNote (free in the app store) is a note-taking app, that despite its name, is a little more complex than the other apps mentioned in this section. Howarth uses SimpleNote in conjunction with a Mac iOS application called Notational Velocity (a free, open-source download) that stores and retrieves notes. Howarth finds it a great way to type up quick or related ideas, which auto-sync to SimpleNote. There is also a browser application for SimpleNote that can be used to share ideas with others. There is no choice of font, and the user interface is less attractive than the other two options.

Recommendations:

All three of these note-taking applications have unique strengths, but of the three, SimpleNote is the most versatile.

Notebooks

Notebook apps group items, sync them to cloud servers, allow for exports into various word processors, and allow entry of data either via a web browser or a desktop application.

Springpad

Springpad (free in the app store) is an application that allows you to save notes, tasks, links, images, nearby places, barcode scans (from products, books or media), lists of things (movies, books, wines) in virtual notebooks that organize your materials by topic. It syncs via Springpadit.com to a browser interface that includes a web-clipping tool. Your notebooks can be shared with family and friends using Facebook or Twitter. Howarth likes the application for its organization and synchronization, and notes that it is a very good tool for working with groups. His notebooks, containing items related to Teaching, Writing, Travel, and Local topics were displayed against a background of a favorite picture.

Evernote

Evernote (free in the app store) is probably the most popular notebook app for Apple devices. It stores many kinds of files including webpages, PDFs, text, links, audio files and images, and organizes them into notebooks based on project type. Each media type can also be geo-referenced for mapping and searching. Evernote syncs to Mac, PC, and web interfaces, and the desktop versions are also a free download. The "todo" functions of Evernote are quite good, and works best when used in conjunction with one of the desktop versions (also free). Monthly uploads of up to 60MB per month are free on Evernote; the premium version ($45/annum) allows for monthly uploads of up to 1 GB. The premium version also allows for read/ write notebook sharing with colleagues, whereas the free version is read-only for those you share with.

Recommendations:

Howarth notes that other notebook applications allow writing and drawing and speaking instead of typing, but his recommendation is Evernote as the best notebook app.

PDF Tools

PDF documents are part of the lingua franca of scholarly documents. There are several apps that allow PDFs to be read, annotated and shared on the iPad. Getting PDFs into your iPad can either be via a server, download, file-sharing via iTunes, or as an e-mail attachment

iAnnotate

iAnnotate ($9.99 in the app store) as the name suggests is a tool made for annotating PDF documents ( PDF readers are more numerous.) The tool allows highlights, notes, freehand drawing or writing, bookmarks, stamps, underscoring, strike-through, and tabbed reading of multiple documents. The standard toolbars can be customized with a wide range of possible commands, and the program allows display through VGA out. Search is possible at the document level, or full-library. Markups can be "flattened" for printing and sharing in a way that preserves annotation as an image, or emailed "as is." Sync is possible through iTunes, Safari, email and Dropbox. The same company makes a desktop PDF companion for iAnnotate calld Aji PDF Service. Using the desktop program in conjunction with iAnnotate makes it easy to manage large libraries of PDF documents.

GoodReader

GoodReader ($2.99 in the app store) is another PDF reader/annotation tool. It allows sticky notes, highlighting, freehand drawing and writing, rubber stamps, underlining, strike-through, and shapes such as arrows, boxes, ovals, and others that can be used to draw attention to sections of a document. Transfer and sync can be done via MobileMe, iDisk, Google Docs, Dropbox, SugarSync, box.net, and WebDAV and FTP services. The application is most versatile in the document types it can read: not only PDF, but MS Office, iWork, HTML, image and audio and video files can be used with this application.

Papers for iPad

Papers for iPad ($14.99 in the app store) is mainly for scholars of science. Although the app is a PDF markup tool, allowing highlighting and notes, and emailing annotations, the chief benefit of the app is the built-in search engine that allows you to find and download PDF articles in the following databases: CM, NASA-ADS, arXiv, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, JSTOR, Pubmed, and Web of Science. There is a desktop version for the Mac that can be used for synchronization, but it also works with Dropbox, iDisk, iTunes and email. PDFs are stored on your iPad, so you need at least 100MB of free space. A limitation in the current version is that although documents are synced between the mobile and desktop versions of the app, your annotations are not.

Recommendations:

GoodReader is a good value for most PDF use, and also works with other document types. iAnnotate has more markup features, and the advantage of VGA-out. Papers is invaluable for a researcher who commonly uses the scholarly databases supported by the application.

Storage on Cloud Servers

Getting documents on and off the iPad, keeping them up to date, and sharing them with people, other applications, and devices relies mostly on wireless forms of document transfer. Cloud servers perform an important function in achieving this goal.

Dropbox

From the numerous times that Dropbox (free in the app store) is mentioned in other entries, you may have concluded that it is a very popular program for file sharing. Dropbox is available for desktop and mobile devices, has a built-in public html file for sharing, and a photo file for making automated slide shows you can send to other people. Using any of the Dropbox interfaces syncs to all others. The free service is up to 2 GB, and the next upgrade takes you to 50 GB for $99/ year.

MobileMe iDisk

MobileMe iDisk (app is free in the app store, but a MobileMe subscription is required) is a popular Apple service that allows you to view and share files from a number of devices. File types from iWork, Microsoft Office, PDFs, QuickTime movies, JPEGs and more, are supported, however files larger than 20MB may not be viewable on all devices. The iDisk has both public and private folders to facilitate sharing. Paid subscribers of MobileMe who have legacy iPhones can subscribe to a service on MobileMe that will find their lost or stolen iPhone. Owners of the iPhone 4, iPad, or fourth generation iPod touch with iOS 4.2 or higher can get this service with a free account, but storage space still costs money.

Air Sharing HD

Air Sharing ($0.99 in the app store) allows you to mount your iPhone, iPad or iPodTouch as a wifi drive on your computer. It works with Mac, PC or Linux. Mounting your mobile device as a remote drive allows you to drag and drop files between devices for syncing and sharing. Documents can be viewed and emailed. The app also allows you to mount other web-based servers such as MobileMe iDisk, Dropbox, Box.net, WebDAV, FTP, FTPS, and SSH/SFTP, and allows downloads of files from the web. Air Sharing can zip and unzip files, print to printers shared by Mac OS X 10.5 and above or Linux. It has an advanced image viewer for hi-res images, and an PDF viewer that supports large, structured PDF files. There's a long list of viewable file types that includes most office applications and media files. The HD version is made especially for the large display of the iPad; the same company also makes a fun app that allows you to turn your Apple device into an extra computer monitor.

Recommendations:

Dropbox is the Esperanto of file sharing apps, and you should have this one. Other cloud services can provide extra features.

iWork

iWork for mobile devices started a revolutionary trend in office-type applications. Rather than buying bundled software that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program, and a presentation program, as is typical, Apple decided to market these applications separately for the iPad. Each app costs $9.99. The unbundled desktop version costs $19.99 each for the same three apps.

On the iPad, files can be shared using email, iWork.com, iTunes, MobileMe iDisk, or WebDAV.. There is one-tap AirPrint available on all three apps that allows for automatic printing on any AirPrint-enabled printer.

Pages

Howarth describes Pages as his favorite word processor, one he customarily uses on both the iPad and his Mac to share files with MS Word users. The iPad interface is described by Apple as "the most beautiful word processor ever designed for a mobile device." They may be right.

Keynote

Keynote is Apple's version of PowerPoint, and in Howarth's opinion, is in many ways better. Presentations are easy to build, and sync between devices (although fonts can be an issue). Keynote is one of the few Apple apps that works with the VGA-out feature of the dock connector on the iPad, which makes it possible to use the iPad as a display, as well as editing, device for Keynote presentations.

Numbers

Apple's spreadsheet app, which Howarth says he uses mostly for grade sheets, and built-in formulas to make calculations easy. The app has many built in design features so that spreadsheets look less like boring tables, and much more like a polished publication.

Recommendations:

These apps make the iPad a viable laptop replacement. An external keyboard is almost required to get the most out of them, but the applications cost so much less than expected, you can use the money you save to get a fancy iPad case with an integrated keyboard that makes typing a breeze.

Conclusion

According to Howarth, the iPad is a lot more than entertainment -- the constant evolution of apps have made it into a valuable tool for writing and research. New, useful apps are emerging everyday to extend the usefulness of this device.

Howarth concluded his presentation with this video, which he said, makes it clear that research is "the coolest, sexiest work on the planet."

The podcast for this talk is available here.

The handout for this talk is available here.

Patents and Patent Searching from a Librarian's Perspective

2011-02-10T15:36:18Z

CC license, Steve Snodgrass, via Flickr.

David Hollander, Law and Legal Studies Librarian at Princeton, and Willow Dressel, Assistant Librarian at Princeton's Engineering and Furth Libraries, gave a talk on Wednesday, February 9th about the history of patents, the complexity of the law behind them, and how one can use this knowledge to perform better patent searches to find patents, and how to conduct historical research on past patents and patent applications.

Hollander began the talk by remarking that the concept of protecting inventions and ideas had been a part of English law for hundreds of years before the existence of the United States. The first idea of something like a patent can be found in laws relating to English craftsmen’s guilds. In the U.S., an inventor's right to an ideal was written into the original version of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Cause 8, by the inclusion of the phrase allowing congress "[t]o promote the Progress of the Useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Inventors the exclusive Right to their Discoveries."

This language authorized Congress from the very beginning to grant and protect patent rights, and the idea of patent protection was passed into law in the first Patent Act of 1790. Since then, these concepts have undergone only three major revisions (with many smaller amendments and changes): patent acts were passed in 1793, 1836, and 1952, the last of which is the version that is still current today.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was formed by Congress to handle the application process for, and granting of, patents. Challenges to patents are handled by the U.S. court system. What are the basic steps involved in securing a patent and what are the results of a successful application?

First, the inventor must prove that he or she has come up with a new, useful and non-obvious process or product.

Second, if the patent is granted, the inventor is entitled to a 20-year period of patent protection. During that time the inventor has the exclusive right to, make, use, or sell the invention.

Hollander continued to say that there are two main views of what a patent represents. First, some view the patent process as a means to ensure further progress and invention by virtue of the fact that patents are made public for others to study. By securing the inventor's rights, disclosure of a new invention can further the state of the art in that particular area. Some others regard the patent process as largely protective of private property, because an inventor has the right to keep any new invention or process secret. The patent process mediates in this case to make disclosure possible through the government's guarantee of 20 years of exclusive rights to the inventor. In both cases, disclosure is a prominent part of the patent process. Patents are by nature public.

The specific terms "new," useful, ““non-obvious,”“process and "product." are critical to understanding patent law. The concept of "process," or "product" is a description of the actual thing being patented. There are several types of patents including “utility,” “design,” “plan,” and other patent types, however utility is by far the most common. A process, a machine, a manufacture, or a composition of matter can constitute the basis for a patent that describes a new process or product. A useful improvement on any of these aspects of invention can also warrant granting a new patent that builds on an older patent. Nothing beyond this list of four categories can be patented. Ideas, for example are not patentable.

Computer-related patents raise an area of ambiguity in patent law, because computers rely upon math and algorithms to operate. Math is regarded as a "law of nature" by the patent process, and until recent decades, was not patentable. Because of this, early inventions in computing were not patentable, although that opinion has relaxed somewhat in recent years, as the lack of protection for inventor’s rights became an obvious detriment to progress in computer technology.

How then is a new patent application examined for viability? According to Hollander, there are three main points of consideration for a successful patent application:

First is novelty. In order to investigate this quality, events that occurred before the patent that might have anticipated its development are examined, and the current state of the art related to the patent in the U.S. and other countries is examined.

Second, the patent must show some degree of minimal usefulness. If a new invention has no perceived use, it cannot be patented.

Third, the patent must be non-obvious. Even if it was never done before, if it is deemed to be an obvious aspect of the art to which it applies, it is not patentable.

Although these criteria might seem very subjective, the Patent Office employs a 3-part test to validate claims of a new patent. The Office examines:

The scope of prior art
The difference between the new invention and prior art
The level of "ordinary skill" required to have come up with the process or product represented by the patent.

Hollander explained that "ordinary skill" is defined by that of an ordinary person who is also skilled in the subject area of the process or product, and if the new patent describes something that would be obvious to someone familiar with that art, it cannot be declared a new invention.

Inevitably, patents are also infringed, challenged, and otherwise questioned, which leads the discussion to the topic of “remedy.” In the instance a new invention is thought by a prior patent holder to infringe on an earlier patent:

The new patent’s claims are examined against prior art
The original patent’s is compared to the newly patented invention’s or process’s claims
The courts decide whether or not an infringement has taken place

Multiple similar patents that are filed at the same time, a process called “an interference procedure,” trying to determine which application has priority.

Hollander cited an example of a complex patent challenge in a current case of Microsoft vs.. a small company, i4i, which successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement. The courts decided in favor of i4i, and granted a hefty settlement, but Microsoft has twice challenged that decision, arguing that Microsoft knowingly infringed the i4i patent, but that patent was wrongly granted in the first place, and so, was invalid. (The technology in question was the use of custom XML, patented by i4i, and used by Microsoft in Word 2007). Here is a link to i4i’s summary of the case so far. An account of the same case from The New York Times can be found here.) The case is expected to go to the Supreme Court later this year.

A question from the audience about international patents prompted Hollander to explain that patents can be filed in different countries simultaneously, a labor-intensive process. Alternately one can file a patent in any country that abides by the Paris Convention of Industrial Property—which gives the applicant a one-year grace period for filing in other countries.

The third option for international patents, Hollander explained, is to file under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, to which 125 countries have agreed, before filing in any other country. This also gives the inventor a one-year grace period for filing individual patents, but patent applications under this treaty must subsequently be made individually in other countries.

Hollander concluded by showing a patent for “pet display clothing,” a wearable structure that allows a pet owner to carry small pets like gerbils in visible tunnels on his or her body. Despite the extensive, and somewhat ridiculous drawings of the “pet display garment,” the only part of the patent application that mattered in securing this odd patent are the list of claims at the end of the application.

Willow Dressel next explained how to use various web-based searches to find existing patents for research and discovery. For those searching for patents because they want to file their own patent, Dressel recommended engaging a patent professional for the most accurate and comprehensive results. Professionals are best qualified to do these sort of searches of prior art in patents, whether they are a patent attorney, or--in the case of patents arising from work-related inventions at Princeton--the Intellectual Property and Licensing Office, part of the Office of Research and Project Administration at the University. However, a desire to file a patent is not the only reason for doing patent searches, and Dressel explained several resources that aid in doing comprehensive patent searches.

Dressel showed a LibGuide she has made containing a list of links to resources to aid in patent searches for scholarly and historical reasons. For legal advice on patents relating to research, she referred the audience to the website of the Intellectual Property and Licensing Office, cited above, which can advise inventors on patenting inventions and processes that arise from their work at Princeton.

There are many reasons for searching patent literature, for historical research, where as she remarked “patents are a great gateway into the literature of a particular field or technology,” and can simply help to understand how things work. Patents also contain a wealth of information about research, as many corporations do not publicize their research interest, but are obliged to file patents for new discoveries. Each patent contains references to prior patents that relate to that technology. Patents also contain a lot more information about a process or invention than is generally available otherwise. Particularly since the patent office has records of patents since 1790, the literature can provide an unparalleled historical view as well as providing a greater understanding of how certain inventions and processes developed over time.

Dressel emphasized the importance of defining synonyms for search terms describing patents, by thinking of the words that describe an invention or process, and consulting a thesaurus to find similar terms in order to conduct the most productive and complete searches. A huge keyword set will help in making the most fruitful searches. Searching patents, said Dressel, is an iterative process that can be added to as new searches provide more ideas for searching.

Patents can also be searched in a specific field by using the class numbers defined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Citation searches contain references to patents that refer to other patents, as each patent cites references to other relevant patents.

A Google search for “free patent search tools” revealed several sites of more or less value. The U.S. Patent Trademark Office database is the authoritative guide, with the most current documents, but full-text searches are only available for patents since 1976. Patents from 1790 to 1975 can only be searched by date, classification number, or patent number.

Free Patents Online combines keyword searches for European Patents, and other World Patents, and combines both applications for patents as well as patents in their database, two sources of data that would require separate searches at the U.S. Patent Trademark Office. This resource, however, also has ads.

Google Patents attempts to provide full searching of patent documents from 1790 to the present, but the searches depend upon many documents, some handwritten, that were scanned, and which may miss some terms that were not recognized by the optical character recognition used by the software.

Dressel used Free Patents Online to search for touchscreen technology in mobile devices, using terms “mobile,” “computer,” “input,” “phone,” as search terms. The search revealed that each patent is filed under a code that describes the class of technology that the patent belongs to, and the classifications can be nested by hierarchy into other classifications. As an example, Dressel searched for inventions that might relate to touch-screen input technology for mobile devices. She demonstrated how one needs to think about a variety of search terms that might relate to a touch screen, and discovered a fairly recent patent that contained a large amount of information that could lead in other directions for searches in this area. The search result turned up patent titles and a excerpt of each abstract, listed in order of relevance. Looking at a patent for a “touch screen for a mobile telephone,” revealed a summary of the patent application, its primary class, its inventor, and a PDF of the actual application.

Following the primary class listing, Dressel visited a link to the U.S. Patent Trademark Classification listing for the patent she found, in order to visit the classification homepage to find out more about that classification number. (She pointed out that U.S. classification numbers can be translated into European classification numbers using tools on the Patents Online site, which extends searches to other countries.) Drilling down on the patent classification for “visual display systems” revealed a number of entries in the hierarchy of that classification, as well sub-classes and parent-classes indicating their level within the classification hierarchy. Both patent applications and patents were returned in the search at Free Patents Online.

Dressel concluded by mentioning a catastrophic fire in the U.S. Patent Office in 1836, when all the patents from 1790 to 1836 were destroyed. Only a few--less than 3000--of the lost patents were eventually recovered from other sources, for example patent holders who had a copy of a historic patent. Because of the loss of information, all pre-fire patents were renumbered, beginning with an “X,” to show that they are part of this fragmentary period of record. There are other databases at Princeton, Dressel explained, that help to cover the missing data from pre-fire patents, scans of supporting documentation for lost patents. A special tab on Dressel’s LibGuide labeled “1836 Patent Fire” provides information about how to find information about patents prior to 1836.

New Tools for Writing with Professor Emeritus Will Howarth and Jon Edwards

2010-12-21T16:54:15Z

Photo: morguefile, courtesy kumarnm.

Scrivener, an innovative software package for writers, was the topic of last week’s Lunch ‘n Learn, led jointly by Professor Will Howarth, Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton, and Jon Edwards, who has recently retired from Princeton’s Office of Information Technology. Howarth and Edwards spoke of their enthusiasm for this fairly recent tool, with Howarth demonstrating the latest version for Macintosh computers (Scrivener 2.0), and Edwards using the new beta version for Windows (Scrivener Beta 1.4).

The idea for the software, Professor Howarth explained, was conceived in 2006 by Keith Blount, a primary school teacher from England turned self-taught programmer, because he was frustrated by the capabilities of existing commercial word processors. Blount wanted to design a different set of writing tools to support his ambitions for writing fiction. His vision for a new type of writing tool became a reality when the first version of Scrivener for the Mac was released in January of 2007. A beta version of Scrivener for Windows was released in November 2010 to coincide with National Novel Writing month. Blount’s software firm, which now employs 4.5 full time staff members, is called Literature and Latte; Scrivener is its sole product. Although entire documents can be written and formatted in Scrivener, the program is really designed to help with more creative aspects of writing than just typing words and making them look good on a printed page.

Scrivener was described by Howarth as being part “content-generation tool” and part “idea-and-structure processor.” Scrivener deals with all aspects of a writing project from first ideas, to research links and notes, to outlining, structuring, and eventually, composing and editing a document. Scrivener-created works can later be exported to a traditional word processor for final polishing and formatting. Apart from supporting common word processor formats such as .DOC, .DOCX, .RTF and HTML, text can also be translated to e-book formats such as ePub, a standard platform, .MOBI, a non-proprietary format that can be read on the Amazon Kindle, and PDF. It isn’t only this multi-platform flexibility in file types that sets Scrivener apart from other writing tools. By design, the software attempts to follow the creative process that takes place before writing begins, starting with half-formed ideas and sketchy notations; the writer then proceeds with research, composing and organizing, adding to and editing these beginnings into a more complete work. Although the production version of the Mac edition of Scrivener has only been around for a few years, it has already become the top choice of many professional fiction writers, particularly in the United Kingdom.

Howarth demonstrated the software interface, showing its three-part workspace: there is a binder pane (a collection of all written parts and research material for a particular work), a central editing pane (where writing and edits occur), and an inspector pane on the far right of the screen, where metadata and other information about items in the binder can be entered and viewed. Pre-existing templates for several specific types of writing are included in the software: screenplays, novels, short stories and non-fiction, are several examples of templates that contain formatting commonly required by publishers and producers of such works, particularly those in the UK. The scriptwriting template, for example, has many of the standards required to submit such works to the BBC, as well as being a general guideline for standard script formatting.

Howarth demonstrated many ways to view an existing work in progress in Scrivener, showing both a traditional outline format, as well as one that represented the outline as if each part was an index card pinned to a corkboard. In either view, highlighting and dragging one part of the work to a new position in the outline structure, or on the pin board, caused the document to immediately reflect that change in organization.

Screen shot showing the Scrivener "corkboard" view. (Note: this image shows the interface for Scrivener for Windows Beta 1.4).

Using an e-text version of Walden by Henry David Thoreau, taken from the Project Gutenberg online repository, Howarth showed how easy it was to break an existing long work into component parts. In the case of Walden, Howarth quickly divided the book into its published chapter structure, by using search terms and keyboard shortcuts. He also demonstrated how search results of certain terms (searches that look both in the work’s text and all of the research materials in the binder) resulted in saved collections or smart folders that can be used for later reference. Expanding upon the visual strengths of organizational tools in Scrivener, Howarth even color coded each chapter of the Walden document to reflect the seasons of the year described in the narrative. This resulted in a handy way to group chapters by Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall, and back to Spring, in the same way that Thoreau organized his account of a year’s life in the woods. Using the same Project Gutenberg file as research material for a new Scrivener project, Howarth showed how he was able to adapt Thoreau’s work into a correctly formatted screenplay, using the templates already built into Scrivener as his guide.

The e-text of Walden and other supplemental files that Scrivener can save in the course of working on a project serves to illustrate how external documents and files can be organized for easy reference and later citation. Research materials saved in Scrivener can include web sites, images, notes and bibliographic references. EndNote field codes (also known as “Cite While You Write”) are placeholders for including properly formatted bibliographic citations in a written work. These codes are supported by Scrivener.

Howarth described his Scrivener workflow-- from using storyboarding and notation software on the iPad to capture ideas (the Index Card and Simple Note apps), synchronizing those notes with Scrivener, working on the document in Scrivener, and later exporting to Apple’s Pages software, or Nisus Writer Pro for the Mac (an RTF text editor; Scrivener supports RTF) for final formatting. The end result is a finished file that can be shared with publishers via Microsoft Word. Howarth described how this process helped him to collaborate with co-author Anne Matthews on their latest work Deep Creek, published under the pseudonym Dana Hand. Howarth and Matthews were both able to seamlessly share files and resources using Scrivener in the planning and writing phases of their work, and later delivered the finished novel in the .DOC format accepted by their publishers, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Coincidentally, Deep Creek, which has met with great critical acclaim, has recently been named one of The Washington Post’s Best Novels of 2010. What is next for the Dana Hand authors? Howarth showed a glimpse of a screenplay based upon Deep Creek that he was working on in Scrivener. Will this Dana Hand film be coming soon to a theatre near Princeton?

Howarth concluded his portion of the talk by reflecting on how his discovery of Scrivener, coinciding with the extra time afforded by his retirement, has allowed his writing to develop in directions he had never imagined possible in his earlier career. He informed his audience that he could not guarantee using Scrivener would make them all authors of best-selling novels—but that it would certainly help to make their writing projects easier and more enjoyable.

Jon Edwards next spoke of his experiences with the recently released version of Scrivener for Windows, software that is still in beta development. His new book on Gioachino Greco, a chess player active in the early 17^th century, is due for publication in February; however, Edwards used parts of the completed manuscript to experiment with the new Scrivener software, and concluded that it might be a valuable research tool for future works.

During a recent trip to London, Edwards extended his experimentation with Scrivener into new research paths. He took the opportunity of his trip to explore the British Library’s extensive holdings on the history of chess, and used the beta version of Scrivener for Windows to begin organizing projects based on several topics in chess-related history.

Edwards described how easy it was to write using Scrivener, noting that for any author with a tendency towards writer’s block, the simple, almost playful, workflow in Scrivener, which captures initial notes, research items, web links, outlines and fleeting ideas, might serve to overcome any hesitation in putting ideas to paper. Edwards used Scrivener to begin outlining and researching a proposed work documenting the chess matches played at the 9^th Chess Olympiad of 1950 at Dubrovnik, a tournament in which 480 games took place. Using Scrivener, he was able to save all of his notes, references, and writing about the event, including building a stored collection of photos and biographical information about each team taking part in the competition.

Edwards recalled participating in meetings of the Scholars’ Environment Committee, which took place at Princeton in the late 1980s. The mission of the Committee was to improve research methods for scholars in an environment where computer-based resources were becoming increasingly more important. One tangible result of the Committee’s work that year was an idea for the formation of a project would eventually be called JSTOR, the online resource for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. However, the guiding phrase for the committee’s goals that year was, said Edwards, was the idea of taking the “search” out of “research.“ Scrivener, Edwards noted, in some sense does that, by allowing all the materials needed for the writing of a serious scholarly work to be gathered in one place; with the split-screen format used in Scrivener, it is possible to write in one pane, while viewing citations and other research materials in another. Cutting and pasting from one workspace to the next is quite easy, and Scrivener makes storage of many types of document and file types possible.

Much of the historical literature on chess, Edwards noted, was published between AD 800 and 1890, which means that many of these text have been digitized and are now available for searching and download via the Google Books interface. Having an entire text downloaded as a resource file in Scrivener is a great convenience for a researcher, said Edwards. Writing clearly about the history of chess involves gathering and presenting many types of information. These might include diagrams of chessboards, and lengthy notations that recount the history of a particular game. As an example, Edwards mentioned his interest in the subject of “The Troitzky line,” a classic series of moves that begin an endgame by using two knights against a pawn. The strategy can take up to 50 moves to achieve; documenting it can require extensive illustrations and explanations. One of the main benefits of Scrivener to him, said Edwards, is that all of his notes, documentations and diagrams are finally captured in a single environment, so that he can keep his supporting documents close at hand and organized by specific topic.

Edwards described his particular Scrivener workflow, at least as far as his experiments have taken him to date. He uses an online content management system, in this case Princeton’s WebSpace, to save the latest versions of his Scrivener files. He can then retrieve the files from anywhere using a web-based interface, and continue working without worrying about where he left the latest version of his project, or any of its supporting files.(Scrivener also has built-in support for syncing files with the popular Dropbox service.)

It is to be noted that the Windows version of Scrivener is still in beta, and is currently free until certain known bugs are fixed. For the moment, PC and Mac versions of the software don’t recognize the other’s files, and compiling documents into a final format using the Windows version has some documented issues. Still, in the short time the program has been available since November of this year, it has gone through several versions. The latest, version 1.4, said Edwards, shows significant improvements over earlier releases. While Scrivener may still lag behind more familiar word processing platforms in terms of document versioning and formatting, it is a particularly agile tool for the first stages of writing. “It’s an excellent brainstorming tool,” Edwards remarked, noting that other tools such as Microsoft Word, were designed for a corporate environments, and reflect the sorts of tasks required by business. Professional writers have very different aims and needs. Scrivener, thanks to the interests of its inventor, was specifically created for such writers and researchers.

Scriptwriter, poet, novelist, short story author or historian? You may want to check out Scrivener as a platform for organizing your next writing project.

A podcast of this presentation can be found here.

The Mac version of Scrivener 2.0 currently retails for US $45. A 15% discount is available to academic users. There is a growing online community of Scrivener users who share their experiences and tips for greater productivity. The Windows public beta version is currently free to download, and is available here.

This session is the final Lunch and Learn of 2010. Check out the Lunch ‘n Learn schedule in early February for next semester’s program.

Arts Libraries on the Edge: Hey, where do I shelve this?

2010-12-13T16:53:18Z

Where do I shelve that? Photo of Decode, a digital art installation at the V&A, London, December 13th, 2009. Photo courtesy of Rain Rabbit, Flickr. CC license, 2009.

Note: to access resources cited in this blog post, you must either be on a machine on the Princeton University network, or have a VPN or proxy server running on your machine. For instructions on how to set up a VPN or proxy server connection, click here.

"These are exhilarating times to be arts librarians," said Darwin Scott, librarian of the Mendel Music Library at Princeton. Today's Lunch 'n Learn session explored just how exhilarating - and challenging-- it is to deal with new modes of delivering various media to library patrons, when the media exists outside the traditional collection of books, manuscripts, disks, drawings and other tangible assets one usually thinks of as library holdings. The presenters represented the three main arts repositories at Princeton; Darwin Scott was joined by librarians Sandy Brooke (Marquand Library of Art and Archeology) and Hannah Bennett (Architecture Library), to discuss their respective collections.

Sandy Brooke began the session by describing the tension between a library's mission to collect, provide access, and preserve for the future, in an age where digital media seems to be increasingly difficult to quantify in terms of ownership, shared access, and sustainability. "Old literature is good literature for art historians," Brooke said, explaining that scholars rely upon important documents from past centuries. Marquand's holdings are still largely print-based, she noted, however, there is an increasing number of digital versions of both text- and image-based references. Art has traditionally been studied through surrogates, whether photographs, drawings or descriptions of works that are either housed in remote places, or may no longer survive.

A new form of art--that which is born digital--presents certain challenges to those who would study it, because the delivery medium is no longer a surrogate for the work, but may be the work itself. Digital art is often recorded on perishable media, the formats of which can migrate to incompatible formats in a fairly short period of time. It might be posted directly to the web, and lost when its link later disappears. The work itself might be a record of an ephemeral event that is almost impossible to capture in its entirety. When offered for distribution by a vendor or dealer, its licensing terms can be extremely limiting and restrictive with regard to how the work can be later viewed, shared, or migrated to more stable digital formats.

Such licensing terms, Brooke noted, are much more restrictive than the terms of fair-use usually applied to educational use of copyrighted materials. Many digital objects handled by dealers and vendors are delivered with the idea of restricting access to them, thus creating an artificial scarcity. Ensuring future access to this media that comprises an original work is uncertain, since access is often provided via an online resource with a fee-based delivery method. If the online resource were to go out of business, its digital content might well be lost.

As an example, Brooke showed an installation by Swiss video artist, Pipilotti Rist (1962 - ). Brooke cited Rist's Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), an award-winning 2008 installation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, as a problematic example for scholarship. What resources would a researcher today have to study this recent work of art, since it is no longer viewable at the museum?

Brooke showed several still photos of Rist's work found in ArtSTOR, an online database for the study of art history, but found no images of the 2008 MoMA installation. The artist's own website contains links to her gallery and some visual references to other video projects, but not the MoMA installation. The MoMA website has some valuable documentary video footage about Rist's installation, but there is no video that presents a complete idea of what it was like to experience the complete work in situ. A YouTube search offers the MoMA videos again, along with two amateur videos made by people who attended the exhibit while it was at the MoMA; one of these videos, obviously shot with a cell phone, is enhanced by a sound loop provided by the amateur videographer--however it is music composed by the phone's owner that has nothing to do with the original installation. Since Rist's works tend to deal in dreamlike, distorted imagery, it's almost impossible to tell whether the distortions seen in the YouTube clips were intended by the artist, or simply a result of a highly-compressed, low quality copy of the original work. Authorized digital copies of such ephemeral works are typically priced at hundreds of dollars apiece, so collecting them on any scale is beyond the financial resources of most repositories; trying to capture something tangible and complete about such works, as Brooke demonstrated in the searches described above, is no easy matter.

For the moment, Brooke concluded, the sustainability of this kind of digital art is uncertain; questions of rights, of access, of preservation are only partially answered by current means of distribution. Guerilla websites such as ubu.com, a web-based educational resource that operates on a gift economy, posts avant-garde works under an assumption of fair use. Ubu.com was created in protest to the marginal distribution of these elusive works, but the fact that the site sometimes knowingly violates copyright in posting links makes their sustainability tenuous, at best. Many of the sound and video works on the site are represented by highly compressed video and audio files introducing uncertainty as to their accuracy; as with the YouTube video of Pipilotti Rist's video installation, it's impossible to say whether the files represent the artist's vision--or the technological limitations of a bad digital copy. More sustainable solutions may be in the future, however. Brooke mentioned the Electronic Arts Intermix site, a not-for-profit venture that is trying to preserve digital art for cultural repositories such as libraries and museums. An educational streaming solution to providing high-quality copies of video art for art libraries is one licensing model being considered by this organization, which has preservation and sustainable access to video art as its two chief missions.

Architecture librarian, Hannah Bennett, next described some of the unusual challenges faced by those wanting to preserve records of contemporary architectural works. Long gone are the days of architectural drawings being produced in drafting rooms, with paper being the medium that recorded a building's design from first inspiration to the delivery of final plans to builders. Digital rendering of architecture is now the standard method for design, a method that creates a dense stream of information that originates from architectural offices, and eventually results in documents that builders can work with to construct the building. In fact, the transmission of architectural information from architect to builder these days is commonly referred to as BIM - building information management--where the information critical to making the building is captured, but certain aspects of the design process might not be preserved. This partial capture of data creates a new level of complexity for those who would like to study the entire history of an architectural work.

Most information that is ultimately transferred to builders, Bennett explained, is taken by sampling from the complex array of digital data that is generated in the design process. As illustrated, Bennett showed several examples of architectural renderings, including some of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao by architect Frank Gehry. Gehry, in common with other architects currently in practice (including many of Princeton’s faculty members in the School of Architecture), developed a pioneering proprietary software program, CATIA, to realize his particular design methods. Other firms have since developed their own software unique to that particular architectural office or project..

Bennett showed some examples of design sketches made by Princeton faculty member, Axel Kilian, and demonstrated the CADenary software that Killian developed for his own design practice. These tools allow for amazing flexibility in terms of drafting complex shapes, but their uniqueness means that it may be a challenge to read the files they produce in the future. Bennett commented on this reliance on technology, saying that "design language has now become internal to tools, rather than to the form." As enriching as a complex design such as Bilbao is to architecture, preserving the output of many different proprietary software packages presents a set of preservation challenges for custodians of architectural history.

Bennett enumerated the queries posed by these new design tools. "How will they maintain technical currency?" she asked. "How will we archive them?" And, ultimately, "how will we present them to the future scholar?" Bennett concluded her portion of the talk by showing some hanging loops of chain used by Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926) to explore the catenary curves he often used in his architecture - in a photograph someone just happened to take of that experiment. "Older material can be equally valuable" Bennett said, citing this early architecture experiment exploring forms that are very hard to draw using traditional drafting tools. Today's computer-generated architectural designs present a myriad of such capture-able design moments - and librarians need to find a way to preserve them for future scholars.

Darwin Scott, librarian at Mendel Music Library, concluded the Lunch 'n Learn by discussing various online databases used to present digital copies of music and the performing arts. Scott mentioned that rights management is a major consideration in this area as well as in other forms of the arts, even though the resources for presenting them via subscribed services are more numerous.

Rights issues, particularly in the case of theatrical works, become more and more complex as more people (and their intellectual property) become involved in a production. "Most recordings of Broadway shows are illegal," Scott noted. Older forms of media that preserved works such as concerts, or plays were "collectable objects." Tapes, disks, LPs and other media at least provided one way that an event could be captured and preserved--and purchased to form part of a collection. By contrast, streaming libraries of musical and dramatic performances provide subscribers with thousands of recordings for an annual fee, but this model provides an interesting challenge for a library collection, since the library does not in fact "own" the content to which it subscribes. This raises important questions about sustainability and preservation.

Several vendors of streaming services promise that they will provide a form of perpetual access to the material in their library to subscribers in the event they go out of business. This usually means that data files will be available in some form for bulk download, but perhaps not with a sustainable model to preserve the user interface that makes it possible to use them. Scott mentioned some commercial streaming services that are available to retail consumers. Until recently, institutional clients had been shut out of the distribution model for these popular services. However, some distributors are now bridging the gap by providing high-quality streaming subscriptions for libraries and other cultural institutions. Scott demonstrated a few of these services, using the Quick Links section of the Mendel Music Library's home page, and Scott's own Lib Guide list of links to music and performing arts resources.

The Naxos Music Library, various collections from the Alexander Street Press, and DRAM (The Database of Recorded American Music) were among the collections that Scott featured in his presentation. Naxos, a respected record label, offers a large collection of musical recordings of various genres, including classical, jazz, folk, blues and world music; DRAM also offers streaming music; here, the focus is on American composers and performers. The Alexander Street Press offers a wide variety of sound and video offerings, including Opera in Video, Dance in Video, and Theater in Video. The videos offered from the Alexander Street Press not only will play on your computer, but are captured in a high enough resolution to project on a larger screen. A new service from Alexander Street even allows you to stream some of this content of these collections to your compatible mobile device (currently supported are iPhones on a 3G network or better, and devices running the Android OS) by using a link, a text message containing the link, or a QR reader on the device. These links stay current for 48 hours, allowing plenty of time to enjoy the content. Recent enhancements to the library's online catalog also allow direct links to many of these digital assets via searches done in Princeton Library catalog.

Got a QR reader? Get ballet! A screen shot of the ballet Sleeping Beauty, showing the interface to mobile devices

The video content in the Alexander Street databases come from various sources. For the Theater in Video collection, many of the videos are drawn from performances intended for broadcast television, Scott noted. TV content also accounts for much of the Dance in Video collection, whereas the Opera in Video collection has more access to commercial releases. The quality and range of the works offered are sometimes not ideal, although in some cases, they record spectacular performances. Each vendor also uses their own proprietary user interface - there is no standardization--so it can take some time to familiarize one's self with each interface in order to get the best results. Links to the resources mentioned in this post--and many more--as well as tips to help users navigate and search these online repositories can be found in this PowerPoint presentation, which Scott prepared for Lunch 'n Learn attendees.

The session concluded with Darwin Scott's summation about it being an exciting time to be an arts librarian; the challenges presented by the diversity and volume of new media types also make this a wonderful time to be a subscriber to many online resources that make it possible to experience art, architecture and the performing arts in increasingly accessible ways. The fact that old media has little in common with new forms of delivery presents challenges for librarians and for patron access, but as sources for these materials become increasingly more numerous and more diverse the end user and the scholar can only benefit--and enjoy.

Got bandwidth? Welcome to live performances on a device near you!

Bottom-up Social Data Collection with www.AllOurIdeas.org

2010-12-02T17:26:40Z

How cute is this kitten? Let's vote!

(Photo: morguefile, courtesy hotblack)

In this week’s Lunch ‘n Learn on Wednesday, December 1^st, Matthew Salganik, an Assistant Professor in Princeton's Department of Sociology, presented some recent research that has resulted in the creation of an open-source polling site called www.allourideas.org. One of the inspirations for Salganik’s project came from an unlikely source-- the popular website, www.kittenwar.com, where visitors to the site vote on which of two randomly paired photos of a kitten is cutest. Given two competing choices--in this case photos of two cute kittens—this site rapidly gathers user opinions in a way that makes it easy to track social signals; the site uses a fun mechanism for gathering information, and allows any user to easily upload a his or her own kitten photos, thereby instantly entering new contestants into the competitive arena of cuteness.

Considering the popularity and broad appeal of the kittenwar site, Salganik reflected on standard forms of data collection that have been, (and still are), commonly used for gathering information in the social sciences. For many researchers, collecting information from the general population depends upon using survey mechanisms that have changed little in the last century. In this traditional method of data-gathering, researchers think of the questions they want to ask their survey audience well in advance of any feedback from the actual survey. Participants in the survey either take all of the survey -- and have their opinions included--or none—since partial data is rarely considered valid for the final results. Although in the 20th century, the mechanism for conducting surveys evolved from face-to-face, door-to-door polling, to random phone calls, to web-based research, this model of assessment has several unavoidable shortcomings. For example, one might ask "what important questions might the original survey have missed?" or, "how can the final interpretation of data be made more transparent to other researchers?" Focus groups and other open discussions methods can allow more flexibility in gathering input from respondents--as well as revealing why respondents make certain choices--but these methods tend to be slow, expensive, and difficult to quantify. Most significantly, all are based on the same methodology of the face-to-face survey, and are merely conducted with increasingly up-to-date and scalable methods of delivery. Web-based surveys admittedly reach many more people with far less overhead than did canvassing door to door, but are such computer-based surveys really taking advantage of the unique strengths of the World Wide Web? Kittenwar.com suggested to Salganik that there was another, more intuitive way to present ideas and gather data on the web.

Using the model of Wikipedia.org as an example, Salganik remarked upon the internet’s strength in engaging people at their own level of interest. Wikipedia, he said, has become an unparalleled information aggregation system because it is able to harvest the full amount of information that people are willing to contribute to the site. Describing this phenomenon as "the Fat Head vs. the Long Tail," Wikipedia makes it possible to gather knowledge from people who have vastly different levels of commitment to improving the site. On one hand, there are those (fat heads) willing to spend days or months carefully researching and crafting entire Wikipedia entries -- while others, (long tails), are content to insert a missing comma into an entry they happen to be reading at the moment. As such, Wikipedia.org is an example of what might be achieved by an application that truly understands how the internet works best. Traditional surveys can only capture a tiny segment of this range of audience participation and engagement.

So what does the intersection of kittenwar.com and Wikipedia suggest to a researcher who wants to design a 21st-century web-native survey? Salganik's site,www.allourideas.org illustrates one solution: a model that takes advantage of the most essential quality of the World Wide Web – where, according to Salganik, "an unimaginable scale and granularity of data can be collected from day to day life." The development of allourideas.org--funded in part by Google.com and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University (CITP)-- uses the same” bottom-up” approach of kittenwar.com, paired with an algorithm developed by Salganik and his team, consisting of a single web developer, and several student researchers. The result is an open-source system where "any group, anywhere, can create their own wiki survey.”

Salganik describes the www.allourideas.org website as an "idea marketplace," designed to harvest the full amount of information that people are willing to provide on any given topic. Participants in a survey on the site are presented with random pairs of options, and pick the one they most favor; they then are given a second pair of different options, and vote again. Eventually, the most popular ideas -- either provided by the survey author(s), or submitted by any person voting on the site -- can be quickly identified.

The homepage of www.AllOurIdeas.org

An early version of the site was developed for the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) at Princeton, as a mechanism to assess the most important campus issues according to Princeton students. Voting began with ideas submitted by leaders in the USG, with additional suggestions submitted by students participating in the polling. In the end, two of the top five ideas that emerged as the most important to the student population were contributed by student voters, and were not among the ideas originally suggested by the USG. The percentage of participation in the poll was also remarkable: 40% of the undergraduate population took part, resulting in nearly 40,000 votes on paired ideas--as well as generating 100 new ideas not thought of by the original authors of the survey. Salganik and his team concluded that using this survey tool on an audience that is already engaged in the issues being presented can result in an incredible amount of quality added to the data generated. "In the old survey method," Salganik explained, "tons of data are left on the table." New methods of data collection, such as allourideas.org, are by contrast inclusive, from the bottom up, and reflect the effort, interest, and participation that engaged respondents are willing to contribute to the discussion.

Since its public release, www.allourideas.org has generated 700 new idea marketplaces and 6,000 new ideas, uploaded over the course of 400,000 votes. Users of the free web-hosted interface include Columbia University Law School, The Washington Post, and the New York City Department of Parks. Anyone with a few ideas and a target audience willing to provide feedback can make their own space for collecting and prioritizing ideas on the allourideas.org site. Results are returned to the survey authors with full transparency, including some basic demographics about the geographic location of voters, the length of participation in each individual voting session, and the pair of choices at which a participant leaves the voting. (Salganik explained that leaving a session is sometimes indicative of the voter's perception that their only choice is between two bad ideas, although in other cases, voters leave because they feel they’ve voted enough.) Voting is anonymous, and voters are encouraged to return to vote as often as they wish.

Salganik described some of the mechanics used to keep the voting fresh and current, such as weighting recently submitted new ideas with more frequent appearances in the polling to give them equal footing with older ideas. The polling mechanism is designed to handle a very large number of ideas, and the more people voting, the better the results.In future releases of the code, idea pairs might even be adaptive to prior choices made by an individual voter. It's important to the success of such a binary voting system, explained Salganik, that voters don't know previous results, because that ignorance avoids the mentality of the flash opinion. The ideal sized group for polling is at least 20 people, although any number of respondents can be accommodated. The poll currently being conducted by The Washington Post on reader feedback and participation is the largest to date on the site. At the time of this Lunch ‘n Learn, the poll had been open for 3 days, and had already generated more than 40,000 votes.

The concept behind www.allourideas.org consists of a few basic characteristics. The site is simple. It's powerful. It's free. It's also constantly improving. It proves, Salganik concluded, that when information is presented and gathered properly, there is wisdom, rather than madness, in the opinions of the crowd – and there needn’t be a cute kitten anywhere in sight.

Free "idea marketplaces" can be created by anyone on the hosted site at www.allourideas.org. If you are interested in creating a site, come prepared with a target audience and a few ideas in mind -- then invite your audience to begin voting and contributing their own ideas.

allourideas.org is also an open-source-code project. The code is available at github.com. You can also follow the project on Twitter and on Facebook.

Step Out of the Plain--3D is the Next Dimension for Consumers

2010-11-16T13:33:23Z

Doug Dixon, an independent technology consultant, author, and speaker specializing in digital media, presented an overview of the burgeoning market for consumer 3D devices-- as well as explaining the technology behind those devices-- this past Wednesday at OIT's Lunch n' Learn session.

Armed with an array of 3D viewers, from a stereoscope (invented in the late 19th century), to a ViewMaster (invented in the late 1930s), to the Magic Eye books (popularized in the last two decades)--to the latest in 3D cameras (a Fuji FinePix 3D)--Dixon proved to his audience that 3D technologies have already experienced a long history in home entertainment, particularly in the area of vicarious travel and special events.

The success of recent films such as Avatar, and the 3D-capable and 3D-ready TVs now available in the consumer market, introduce the latest chapter in the 3D experience. These displays promise viewers a new, more immersive way to enjoy movies and broadcast TV at home.

3D technology for movies and television is not actually as great a technological leap as was the recent transition from low- to high-definition in broadcast TV, Dixon explained. Many current blu-ray players will only require firmware upgrades to be able to display 3D images; some 3D-ready TVs on the market now only require a moderately-priced upgrade kit to be able to display images in three dimensions. Existing 2D media will also be able to be 'dimensionalized,' and transformed retrospectively into 3D video for those films that warrant this enhancement. For most consumers, transitioning to 3D technology should be relatively painless, should they wish to upgrade their current home equipment when purchasing their next TV.

The glasses currently required to view 3D TV content, however, are a shift from the sort of home viewing practice to which we have grown accustomed. "Glasses are a commitment to focus on the entertainment," Dixon explained, a dedication to the screen that is at odds with many kinds of TV content. At the same time, the glasses "are an impediment to the social aspect [of watching a movie or broadcast TV at home]."

"HD works for everything, including Jay Leno;" said Dixon, . . "3D works for special events and movies and things like that, so I think there's a little less demand, a little less leverage you get by going to 3D, but in niches like games, for example, [3D is] going to be very successful." Dixon remarked by way of example that watching a basketball game at court level was nothing short of "spectacular."

Dixon outlined the technologies that underlie 3D displays to his rapt audience (all of whom were given 3D glasses in order to view several images of 3D technology done right -- and wrong. "You don't turn a 3D camera sideways," Dixon pointed out, after showing one particularly disorienting 3D image that elicited groans from the audience.

Inexpensive 3D glasses with magenta and cyan lenses--such as the ones Dixon gave to his listeners--use colored lenses to achieve an anaglyptic effect that simulates three dimensions. Movies such as Avatar used more expensive polarized lenses to achieve a more natural effect. Home 3D systems come equipped with shutter lenses that coordinate with images presented separately to each eye in rapid succession. These glasses, which currently retail for about $150-- provide an additional social impediment to the 3D experience at home -- "are you going to buy 40 pairs of these glasses when your friends come over to watch the big game?," Dixon asked.

While the consumer market has so far settled on either anaglyptic technology for viewing 3D content on 2D screens or shutter-glasses and transmitter technology for dedicated 3D TVs, Dixon explained that creating 3D images was something that anyone with fairly basic imaging tools could achieve. Dixon demonstrated the new 3D YouTube channel, and showed various ways of making 3D images with a 3D camera. He also showed some inexpensive computer software for creating 3D images. In all cases, images of the same scene, taken approximately 2.5 inches apart, were used to replicate the stereo quality of human vision.

3D, Dixon explained, is not only for blockbuster films; it can be enjoyed by anyone who owns a decent computer and basic photographic equipment, and it can be enjoyed at very little cost.

"3D is coming," Dixon concluded, "and it's lots of fun to play around with. I hope you enjoy it!"

More information about the many technologies described by Doug Dixon can be found at this link to his website, Manifest Technologies.

Links to a podcast from this session have been posted; the podcast will also be available on the Princeton's iTunesU channel dedicated to the Lunch n' Learn series. (For more information about Lunch n' Learn podcasts at iTunesU, click here.)

The next Lunch n Learn talk take place on Wednesday, December 1st. Matthew Salganik, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton will speak on Bottom-up Social Data Collection with www.AllOurIdeas.org, a research project to develop a new form of social data collection.

For more information about this, and other upcoming talks, visit the Lunch n' Learn homepage.

[Photo courtesy rialee on Flicker.com (Rebecca Cottrell). CC license, 2009.]

Computing at Princeton: Short Observations and Tall Stories

2010-11-12T20:30:27Z

Few people know that Princeton University’s association with computers and computing predates the ENIAC. Jon goes back to the days of John von Neumann, Oswald Veblen, Alan Turing, John Tukey, and winds his way forward through the memorable days of the mainframes to 1985 when Ira Fuchs arrived to create the University’s high speed network and begin the drive toward ubiquity of access and use. His many stories all have one thing in common… they all used to be funny.

About the speaker:

Jon Edwards graduated from Princeton in 1975 with a degree in history. He got his PhD from Michigan State University in Ethiopian economic history. After a three year stint as Review Editor of Byte Magazine, he returned to Princeton in 1986 to serve as the Assistant to the VP for Computing and Information Technology. He served as the Coordinator of OIT Institutional Communications and Outreach until his retirement on November 11, 2010.

Listen to the podcast (.mp3)
Download the presentation slides (.pdf)
Video clip, featuring Serge Goldstein, Director of OIT Academic Services (.mp4)

Optimizing Fusion Particle Codes for Massively Parallel Computers

2010-11-05T19:14:23Z

The last decade has witnessed a rapid emergence of larger and faster computing systems in the US. Massively parallel machines have gone mainstream and are now the tool of choice for large scientific simulations. Keeping up with the continuously evolving technology is quite a challenge though. Scientific applications need to be modified, adapted, and optimized for each new system being introduced. In this talk, the evolution of a gyrokinetic particle-in-cell code developed at Princeton University's Plasma Physics Laboratory is presented as it was adapted and improved to run on successively larger computing platforms.

About the speaker:

Dr. Stephane Ethier is a Computational Physicist in the Computational Plasma Physics Group at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). He received a Ph.D. from the Department of Energy and Materials of the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Montreal, Canada. His current research involves large-scale gyrokinetic particle-in-cell simulations of microturbulence in magnetic confinement fusion devices as well as all aspects of high-performance computing on massively parallel systems.

Download the presentation slides (.pdf)
Listen to the podcast (.mp3)

Video Journey: Past, Present, Future

2010-10-29T19:39:40Z

In its youth, which seems only now to be ending, film-making and film-editing required an immense amount of expensive and specialized hardware and a hefty range of fine technical skills. Today, suggested Dave Hopkins and Jim Grassi at the October 27 Lunch 'n Learn, even teenagers with affordable hand-held devices can shoot, edit, and even distribute films for the mass market.

Be sure to run through their slides which contain a range of clips that tell the story through film. There you can watch Francis Ford Coppola predicting in the 1970s that children would someday be able to make movies of quality. There too you can watch Gus van Sant, a master film editor splicing tapes. Imagine the cumbersome task, when every scene and every noise involves a separate reel of 35 mm film stock. There are still editors who persist with such handiwork, manipulating bins of reels, but the immense power of new software, notably Final Cut Pro, has compelled most filmmakers to make the transition to digital. Films are now shot, edited, and delivered digitally. The films never touch tape.

And watch the simple film made by a father of his young son after a trip to the Dentist. Meant to be shared with grandparents and close friends, 70 million through YouTube have now viewed the amusing clip. An 8^th grader named Brook Peters made a documentary about 9/11 that was so good that it is up for consideration at Tribecca. The point is, of course, that anyone with a camera, an idea, and some talent can now reach a very large audience. The barriers to entry have been drastically reduced.

Such technologies always trickle downward, suggests Hopkins. Quality no longer costs $15K. He showed a remarkable piece of footage taken with an iPhone. Without having to rely on tape, there's also an immediacy with the film. There's no longer a need to wait for post-production. Efforts, good and bad, can be sent instantly to YouTube.

New light panels are not only less expensive, he adds, but they also do not overheat and no filters are required for indoor shots.

Expect to see more use of the smaller technologies. The final episode of House this season was filmed on a very small camera, making possible footage in very closed spaces.

Hopkins and Grassi suggest that, as a result of the new technologies, a new breed of producer has evolved, a videographer "preditor," a one-person film shoot, from idea, to the writing, the shooting, the editing, and even the distribution.

Software certainly plays an important role in making the technology so accessible. With Apple iLife, users can easily locate related clips and produce compelling movie trailers.

In the future, they suggest that we can look forward to better compression to compensate for larger hard drives, more video on walls, sidewalks, streets, and 4-D TVs that will fill all the senses.

View the presentation: direct-download video (.mp4), streaming video (Flash)
An audio podcast of the presentation is also available.

Improving Wikipedia

2010-10-20T17:00:26Z

Wikipedia, said David Goodman at the October 13 Lunch 'n Learn seminar, is by far the most used online encyclopedia, and the most referenced source in the world, with more than 338 million unique visitors a month. It contains articles in more than 260 languages, has an impressive geographic reach, and extensive coverage of topics, currently with more than 16 million articles and 5 million illustrations and media files.

It owes its success as a modern, comprehensive, encyclopedia, and its challenges, to its five pillars. It is designed for its online environment, it has a neutral point of view (which sometimes requires multiple points of view), its content is free, and all involved should act in a respectful and civil manner. Beyond that, suggests the fifth pillar, Wikipedia does not have firm rules.

Number of articles on en.wikipedia.org [Source: Wikipedia]

The staggering and unexpected growth, even to those close to the project, carries with it an inherent problem: the reliability of the information. Conventional methods of certifying information are not applicable: basic principles of the site are that anyone can edit, and decisions on content are made by consensus among whoever wishes to participate, rather than by any form of centralized editorial control or peer review. There is therefore considerable resistance to its use for serious purposes. Nevertheless it is inevitably being used for such purposes, including in the academic world. This imposes a responsibility on those working at the encyclopedia to try to upgrade and maintain the quality.

This responsibility has given rise to multiple layers of control , for preventing the inclusion of improper material, and evaluating the accuracy of what is included. In his talk, Goodman explained some of these procedures, and demonstrated them in action. Though they have an effect, he acknowledged that they work erratically and unsystematically.

Their effectiveness depends upon a sufficient number of suitably qualified people participating in writing, screening, and upgrading the articles. Therefore, there are organized efforts to recruit qualified users to work in a systematic way on content in specific areas. There are informal workgroups of skilled amateur and professionals in some subject areas. And there are experiments where some college faculty use Wikipedia writing assignments in their courses.

Most successful method, says Goodman, is the individual participation of knowledgeable people. Most involved encounter certain barriers: an anti-elitist lack of respect for formal qualifications, the somewhat artificial prevailing style, the peculiarities of the interface, the difficulties in writing simultaneously for readers with a wide range of background, the impossibility of getting one's own way with an article, the impossibility of stabilizing a finished article, and the lack of personal authorship for completed work--in short, the crowd-sourcing environment. Goodman recognizes that Wikipedia will never be a medium for academic authorship. But it is an unmatchable medium for communicating knowledge to the widest possible audience. The barriers can be overcome with skill and patience, he insists, and the necessary abilities are the same as those for teaching a class of beginners.

Above all, he hopes that more will become involved with the writing projects. Some you you, he hopes, will also become addicted.

David Goodman [Source: Wikipedia]

Speaker Bio: David Goodman is one of the volunteer administrators at Wikipedia, and Vice-President of the New York City chapter. David was previously Biological Sciences Bibliographer and Research Librarian at the Princeton University Library. He has a Ph.D in Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and a MLS from Rutgers University. Goodman's Wikipedia page contains a link to the notes he presented at the Lunch 'n Learn talk.

A podcast of the presentation is also available.