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6, డిసెంబర్ 2014, శనివారం

3 Ways to Incorporate GIFs in Class Projects


If you’ve spent any time on BuzzFeed, you probably know that animated GIFs are quite popular among the millennial set. An assignment (perhaps web-based) incorporating GIFs can be an engaging way for students to connect with the book they are reading, the historical event they are studying, or the scientific concept they are learning about.

BuzzFeed accepts Community Posts here, in case you want to put a little more on the line by providing an Internet audience for your students (they don’t need to post under their real name).

Depending on how involved you would like your GIF project to be, and what the technical skills and goals of the course are, here are 3 varying degrees of projects using GIFs:


1. The Quick, Dirty and Low-Tech Approach

Use pre-made GIFs to tell a story.
Students can collect GIFs from sites like giphy.com for pop culture-oriented GIFs, or gifs.net or gifgifs.com for something more general (and a bit of vintage web 1.0 style).
From there, they can use the GIFs to relate a narrative or a concept.
Here is an example that may be used for an Intro to Astronomy course: 
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet in our Solar System.

Its mass is more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets of the Solar System combined.

Three Earths can fit inside its Giant Red Spot.


As another example, The NY Daily News retold Wuthering Heights (in a pretty snarky way) here on their Books Blog "Page Views".

2. The More-Involved and More-Technical Assignment
Use online tools to create GIFs. 
There are many in-browser web options for creating GIFs or for editing existing ones.
If, for example, the student wants to have text on all of her GIFs in the sequence above, she can use MemeCenter’s GIF Maker to add text to the existing GIFs she found on Giphy:
MemeCenter will also let users draw on top of the GIFs they are creating, or use a blank page to create a GIF from drawing and text, which is a nice feature.  
GifMaker.me, MakeAGif, Picasion, ImgFlip and other sites, let users collect images to create a GIF.
MakeAGif, Giflike, and GifYouTube make it very easy to bring YouTube videos into animated GIFs. MakeAGif also lets you bring in video from your own computer or from your webcam.
If you are on a Mac and are willing to pay $5, you can also use GIFBrewery. Buzzfeed has a tutorial for its use here.


3. Create Entirely New GIFs for a Creative and Long-Term Assignment
Use Photoshop to make GIFs.
If you have some skilled students in your class and give them a GIF assignment, they may jump to Photoshop themselves, but this can prove to be much more time-consuming and may not be ideal for every project or every student.
Making GIFs in Photoshop can be a great assignment for advanced students in Art, Design, or Web courses, who will be learning skills by doing and also be interpreting a project through narrative.
To bring videos into Photoshop, you are going to want to Import Video Frames to Layers. Here is a good tutorial using screenshots, and here is a good video to get you up to speed.
Maybe you are teaching a cinema course on tragic heroes and are teaching both Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (and my dream film prof!). One of your students may want to draw comparisons between the two protagonists in these films and produce GIFs that look like this:
To create GIFs without a video in Photoshop is similar — you will be converting layers into frames of animation. Here is a PDF that explains the process, and here is a video.
Using Photoshop, the students will not be limited in what they can create as they would be if they only use pre-made GIFs. Skilled users of Photoshop will be able to do very interesting things, and maybe even create GIF art, which is becoming increasingly popular among multimedia artists.
Some examples of GIFs created for specific projects are available on Buzzfeed — this Harry Potter example may be good for students of design, while this one bringing The Hunger Games, Dr. Who, and Harry Potter together may be suitable for Literature, Film, and Media Studies students alike.

In general, I think of this project as a Writing Across the Curriculum assignment as it is a great place to explain narrative or concepts through text and imagery. In the case of writing on top of GIFs themselves, it can be difficult to be succinct while still coherent and clear. For students who may write under GIFs, it will be interesting to see how they collect and order GIFs and piece them together through words. This can also produce funny results, leading the students to really engage with the subject matter at hand. Also, an animated GIF project can be supplemented with a traditional essay, of course!

If you are on the fence about the academic merit on GIFs, you may consider looking at the historical work being done to digitize Stereoviews as tweened GIFs. And also see how GIFs can tell a self-contained story to convey information in a quick way.



24, నవంబర్ 2014, సోమవారం

Computer Comforts



I’m currently teaching a Computer Information Science course and as part of our work, we are thinking through and writing about how innovations in technology are transforming society. My students are more or less “traditional” college students, ranging in age from late teens to early 20s. As a core course for a number of majors, my students range from freshmen to seniors.

I’m not sure whether my students are a representative example for their age group (and we are in the same generation after all), but it seems to me that they are much more comfortable with technology and data collection than my more immediate peers (or maybe graduate students are by nature somewhat leery?).

The Amazon Echo was announced a few weeks ago, and I showed my students the product video available on Amazon. In response to this, I offered prompts in a Google Doc for my students to collaborate on in real time as an in-class low-stakes writing assignment. One of the questions I asked was a binary – how is the Amazon Echo cool and how is it creepy? My question was perhaps influenced by the various journalists who used the same adjective to describe the Echo.



In our discussion that followed, it became clear that they did not find the product to be very creepy at all, and only added the text of “it listens to you” as an afterthought when I asked them if they thought Amazon may be engaging in covert big data marketing by recording every family conversation through Echo (I’m not sure if this is their intention, but consider the backlash around XBox One’s data collection through the once-required Kinect peripheral).

Instead, as you can see above, my students are more concerned about technology dependence, which runs throughout their collective class blog. They are worried about face-to-face interaction going extinct, about the narcissism and disconnection surrounding selfies, and about not being able to remember phone numbers by heart anymore (seriously). But they also recognize the relative comfort they, and many humans, feel with technology.

One blog post by a student discussed cyber bullying and provided quite disheartening statistics that did not surprise the class. In the comments on cyber bullying, one student wrote:

“Since it is behind technology, you are not actually with the people so these bullies don’t see how it affects them [the victims].”

Bullies and harassers tend to be quite comfortable with no immediate repercussions to their behavior, as also revealed in a recent survey as well as the GamerGate controversy (in response, Twitter is modifying its harassment policies). In an effort to curb cyber bullying, many of my students suggest that young teenagers shouldn’t be on social media at all, and that parents should keep a closer eye on their kids (I wonder if they would feel the same way if they were 14 now).

And it is not just cyber bullies who are comfortable working with machines instead of people – The Economist reported that studies testing Creative Technologies’ virtual psychologist “Ellie” reveal that patients who believed (truthfully) that they were interacting with an artificially intelligent virtual therapist were more forthcoming with personal information than those who believed (falsely) that the avatar was a puppet being controlled by an off-site human. What is interesting to me is that each of the human subjects were aware they were participating in a study that would be monitored by fellow humans, but were still quite comfortable talking to a computer despite being recorded for analysis by people.

This last point may explain the attitudes of my students – can they be perfectly happy thinking that it is just the computer collecting data and only some far-off humans that they do not know and do not need to interact with lefy analyzing the data? Is it because the data collection, like cyber bullying, is not giving any immediate feedback and the data that the students, as users, would be providing are only being collected by a void before it is spit out again, perhaps unbeknownst to them as a suggestion to buy product X?

Still, they may do well to read some of the long privacy policies that come along with “smart” devices, just to see how potentially terrifying they may be.


30, అక్టోబర్ 2014, గురువారం

Coding Monsters for Halloween


Google’s Made w/ Code has a fun programming toy for Halloween. “Even monsters are Made with Code”. It’s a little drag-and-drop web-based platform to show some very basic programming concepts. It could be fun to introduce even college students with no programming experience to this. The user interface is similar to Hopscotch, available for iOS.

The user interface on the left is a nice GUI that parallels a written program’s structure. On the right is the stage where I made a green Yeti with big purple feet and gave it some actions. If you use this in the classroom, you can explain Objects and Methods and have your students try to get their Yeti to dance without having it enter the stage to begin with. That is how they will learn to test and debug their code!


24, అక్టోబర్ 2014, శుక్రవారం

Technology of the Book

(source)

The Economist1 recently featured an essay on The Future of the Book: From Papyrus to Pixels, with an interactive web version that can be scrolled through, read as a “book,” listened to as an audiobook, and the last chapter can even be Spritzed through.

More than the future, the essay concerned itself with the current state of book affairs, speculating about the impending death of eBooks at the hands of multi-purpose tablets2 and considering current self-publishing trends alongside the ambiguous pre-19th century, when it was “common for writers to publish themselves, [and it] carried no particular stigma.”

However, what I appreciated, was that the essay took into account not only the history of the book, but also considered the book as the technology that it is. Today, we are enchanted with our own light-up and handheld technology, but we forget that a portable reading device with pages was not something that every historical human may recognize to be a container of text.

Since the essay did concern itself with papyrus, in the title and through an anecdote about Cicero in Chapter I, it is interesting that it did not treat the idea of the text itself — a papyrus scroll may not readily be identified as a book today. What is fascinating about the idea of scrolls in our contemporary context, is that we see them popping up again in webpages, as we more frequently begin to read top-down rather than flipping through pages.

As the essay suggests, the temporal space of emerging technology is nothing new, and may in fact be the norm. Sand and cave wall, stone markers and tablets, papyrus, parchment and loose sheets, printed books, pamphlets, websites, eBooks — sometimes the material vessels of text overlap and other times they eclipse each other. They are all just a means to an end after all.

Speaking of, Machiavelli, in a December 10, 1513 letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, speaks about having a book with him while he is out — “Ho un libro sotto, o Dante a Petrarca, o un di questi poeti minori, come Tibullo, Ovvidio, e simili…” (the section begins “Partitomi del bosco”) — he is reading the love stories of the vernacular poets or the minor Roman poets. Then, later, he goes to his study to seriously read from a book that is not portable, and which has a ritual all its own (and he describes it with pomp).

Machiavelli writes just after the Aldine Petrarca volume was printed in a handy “pocket” octavo edition instead of something large and laborious to read (Petrarch, famously, also had a handheld manuscript copy of Augustine which he took with him up Mount Ventoux). Medieval scholars had to make their way to books that were chained to lecterns, and Machiavelli repeats the ancient ritual to do his serious reading. He lived at a time when there were distinct modes of reading, and small books were not earmarked just for travel. For example, in the Renaissance and Middle Ages, a handheld book may also serve as private prayer books and books of hours, often used in female solitary devotion.

Now, too, we approach different containers of text in different ways. We may read websites in a less serious manner than the printed page, or else we use eReaders to consume erotica (The Economist suggests that eReaders cemented the success of Fifty Shades of Grey), which maybe we will not do on a centrally-located PC. Voracious reader-travelers may wish to bring ten or more books on a Kindle or a Nook, but subway commuters may prefer the lovely technology that is the 21st-century-printed book, with its infinite battery life and a screen that does not cause too much eyestrain (and the essay does agree that a book is great technology). From Machiavelli and earlier until now, we must recognize that texts were accessed in a variety of material states often for different purposes.

Today’s reader, who may find a handheld book to be ideal, may also have appreciated that during the period of Italian humanism, while the language shifted from the scholastic and inaccessible Latin to the more commonly-used vernacular, written text was reimagined from the tedious Blackletter (which persisted in many locales) to the elegant and readable Carolingian minuscule (which Petrarch extols in a 1366 letter to Boccaccio — “castigata et clara seque ultro oculis ingerens”). And this Carolingian minuscule hand was replicated in the typeset of early printed books, and later became the basis for computer fonts such as Times New Roman.

Still, the reader is only one interloper of the text, and the medium also influences the writer — as, The Economist notes, “serialisation further encouraged some novelists towards length, as well as setting up a distinctive rhythm of cliffhangers at the end of each instalment.” Even before this, as the scattered rhymes of the poets of the 13th-century Sicilian Court were distributed to readers, poets intentionally rhymed their poetry at certain points in order to prevent their stanzas from being torn apart. And, surely, if there were no book format, Petrarch would never have created the narrative sonnet sequence that influenced European poetry for centuries.

And when we consider poetry we must also consider the oral tradition, for would we even have rhyme were it not for the need of mnemonic?

Books, and other textual containers, have been the technology to deliver us communication over time and space, which, as long as there are humans, is unlikely to ever truly be rendered obsolete even if various formats of text become (as some have already done) less prevalent. It is useful to realize that — even if we live in an age when technology seems to be advancing rapidly — it may be partially an illusion since we do not consider the technologies of the past to be technology any more. As the Economist article and its interactive compendium on the Future of the Book makes clear, text can be best explored through a number of technologies, as each serves the powerful ends of human exchange.


1 October 11th-17th 2014 issue,
2 “‘In a few years’ time,’ a recent report by Enders Analysis, a research firm, predicts, 'we will look back at e-readers and remember them as one of the shortest-lived of all consumer media devices.’”


Further Reading



20, అక్టోబర్ 2014, సోమవారం

Vatican Library Digitization Project

Vatican Library Digitization Project

Vat.lat.3225

The Vatican Library is updating its online manuscript viewer and navigator and is planning to digitize 3,000 more manuscripts by 2018. There are currently 500 manuscripts and 600 incunabula available to view in a less-intuitive iteration here, but the new site is now available to browse some featured manuscripts.

The Vatican is looking for funding to digitize its remaining 76,000 manuscripts over 15 years, and they are even using some crowdsourcing techniques. You can read more about the project in an article from the International Business Times.

The viewer does impose a watermark which is less than ideal, but the images are very high-resolution and the user experience is great for browsing.




13, అక్టోబర్ 2014, సోమవారం

The Digital Scriptorium: Manuscript Materiality Workshop, Lab & Exhibit



The Medieval Forum, run by graduate students from the Department of English at NYU hosted a Workshop, Lab and Exhibit on Friday, October 10th entitled “Manuscript Materiality,” and I was fortunate enough to be able to attend.


The Workshop consisted of Digital Labs that offered lightning workshops on visualization, text mining and principal component analysis in addition to a Scriptorium that went through parchment preparation, copying and decorating, and quiring and binding. A very ambitious lineup that really shows the range of the Humanities!

The Digital Labs featured Visualization of Manuscript Fragment Networks with Tara Mendola, a recent PhD graduate from NYU, who discussed her own research with manuscript miscellanies and worked us through Excel sheets for creating CSV files to use as raw data.

The Text Mining component was lead by Collin Jennings and introduced us to R via RStudio for cleaning up texts to use later for mining.

Aaron Plasek discussed Principal Component Analysis in a clear and succinct way as we attempted to clean up text from Chaucer to plot out word distribution.

The Scriptorium included preparing parchment (supplied by Pergamena) by sanding and cutting it, then pricking and ruling the parchment so that it would be ready to be copied and decorated.

We were supplied with quills and ink that mimicked the original materials used during the Middle Ages, and we were encouraged to copy whatever text we liked. Parchment was written on in a myriad of languages and ended up having interesting decorations in addition to marginalia. Working with a quill in hand on parchment ourselves revealed the time and skill necessary to create medieval books.

Quiring and binding were also discussed by conservators from the Columbia University Libraries Conservation Program. This included a hands-on activity — each of us were able to practice both supported and unsupported bookbinding. I found it interesting that many physical books today still mimic old styles of bookbinding (such as the horizontal lines across spines that are a vestige of cord binding) just for show and not for the integrity of the book.

For me, this kind of workshop really embodies all that the Humanities has to offer, as it encompassed both digital and analog technologies in order to explore the Middle Ages. The Digital Labs helped us to appreciate some of the fascinating work being done in the Digital Humanities, while the Scriptorium enabled us to better understand the physical work put into creating the manuscripts that we study.

One of the coordinators, Angela Bennett Segler, mentioned that we no longer know how to get parchment as thin as they did in the Middle Ages, revealing how technologies are lost over time. While we are living in very technological age, not all advances that humans have made are still available to us, and it is important to keep this in mind.

Lisa Tagliaferri

But of course we are lucky to have all of these digital tools today, and I really loved participating in a Medieval Workshop with its own GitHub repository! I hope that more medievalists were encouraged by the workshop to add a digital component to their current and future work, making use of all the tools that humanists have at their fingertips.

Check out photos from the lab, in addition to the Medieval Forum’s Facebook page and Twitter feed.

25, సెప్టెంబర్ 2014, గురువారం

Assignment Using Twitter: Personify Historical Figures or Characters


(source)

Integrating technology in the classroom in innovative ways (beyond using PowerPoint slides, and Blackboard, for example), can certainly be challenging. Twitter is a fairly ubiquitous and still quite cool social media tool that may be one of the more difficult to use as a means for learning.

There are, however, a number of prominent Twitter accounts that are jokingly “authored” by historical figures of literature (@ShakespeareSays, 13.3k followers), philosophy (@ArtSchopenhauer, 5,400 followers), science (@cdarwin, 19.9k followers), etc. Although most of these are quote-of-the-day accounts (some are more aptly-named, such as @DailyPlato), others are accounts tweeting either in-character, or joking with the material surrounding the figure (as in another Shakespeare account, @Shakespeare).

@ShakespeareSays
It is this in-character tweeting that would be most interesting as a Twitter assignment. Imagine a group-based assignment for literature, using Eugene O'Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night: provide a prompt of a scenario and have each student in the group  tweet as one of the characters in the family. Or, in a computer science class, open a Twitter account for Ada Lovelace with access given to students who will tweet out things she may have tweeted about, including math, lines of code, even about interesting scientific discoveries of her day (she may be interacting with @CharlesBabbage quite a lot). Philosophy classes may take up Kant’s philosophical thoughts and apply them to contemporary issues, like Buzzfeed or drones.

If you will have students personifying Shakespeare or another poet, it would be great to have them tweet in his or her preferred meter and rhyme scheme. Maybe by contemporizing Shakespeare through tweeting, the man and his work will become more relatable to your students.


17, సెప్టెంబర్ 2014, బుధవారం

Machine Learning and the Humanities

Red Vineyards, Vincent van Gogh (source)

This past summer, I gave a paper at the Grief. Language. Art. Conference as part of the Embodiments Research Group of the University of Liverpool, where I discussed natural language processing and some machine learning algorithms to accomplish sentiment analysis. I utilized Stanford’s Java-based NLP tools to demonstrate where we are in terms of sentiment analysis and what we may be able to achieve soon.

My paper, “Parsing Grief through Sentiment Analysis,” was concerned with how sentiment analysis is largely built on social media marketing tools, and does not move much beyond positive / negative polarity at the moment (can a computer parse grief?), though the poetry I was demonstrating, care of Sir Thomas Wyatt, did manage to be assessed as “Very Negative” at times, to the delight of my fellow conference delegates.

Screen shot of NLP on the command line.

A recent paper, concerning both computer science and art history, shows that there is a lot of potential for machine learning to assess art pieces. Babak Saleh, Kanako Abe, Ravneet Singh Arora, and Ahmed Elgammal, the authors of “Toward Automated Discovery of Artistic Influence,” worked in computer vision and pattern recognition to determine whether computers can measure influence between works of art. The results, summed up here a bit hyperbolically, are pretty interesting as the algorithm seems quite capable of recognizing pattern and influence to an extent.

Among the links it made were between Frederic Bazille’s Studio 9 Rue de la Condamine (1870) and Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop (1950), which the authors claim has not been written about previously. There is certainly a compositional similarity with shared objects and architectural elements:

Posted on the site in accordance with fair use principles.
I would love to know what Art Historians think about these claims and whether they agree with the assessments. Ideally, there would be more collaboration between computer scientists and humanities scholars to work on these tools that concern the latter’s research.

Certainly, this kind of work can be a gateway to new methodologies to be employed by humanities scholars, and I hope that my colleagues do not fear a singularity will occur, as machine learning is not true learning but only pattern recognition. I think at this stage it can be problematic to be sure, but computer algorithms can do a lot of work over large corpora that researchers will not be able to make a dent in during their lifetimes. It is in this way that we would be able to see the general sentiment of Shakespeare’s texts in comparison to his peers, or look at general influences within an entire century’s work of paintings.


12, సెప్టెంబర్ 2014, శుక్రవారం

Interfacing With Books: Libraries

New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room (source)

This past summer, I was fortunate enough to be able to spend several weeks studying in the British Library toward one of my recent examinations, and I was very impressed with its digital integration.

The best part, for my purposes this summer, was the web catalogue that enables users to reserve research texts in advance, and has them ready for you behind the desk when you arrive. In comparison to other research libraries that require you to wait (sometimes for an hour or more), this was a great boon to my productivity since I could begin working with the texts I needed as soon as I got to the library.

The British Library also offers Digitized Manuscripts, as well as digital collections of news media, sounds, Renaissance Festival Books, among others. Even signing-up to use the collection was a quick Internet-based process, and staff members allowed me to use their computers to prove my academic status in order to offer me a library card that would be valid for longer.

The entrance gate to the British Library (source)
My local public research institution, the New York Public Library, also has a number of great digital initiatives, including Digital Projects and NYPL Labs that includes a fun digital humanities project that builds historical maps in Minecraft.

Many public libraries and research institutions offer cardholders access to online databases and other electronic resources that are available to use, often from outside of the library itself. Additionally, many offer ebooks that you can check out from home, which automatically disappear when the are due back.

Pew Research’s recent survery finds that millennials are avid readers and make use of the library, even agreeing that there is a lot of information found in a library that is not available online (maybe they are not only checking out Wikipedia after all). However, these younger readers are less likely to miss a library if it leaves their community, suggesting that they may not be making as frequent use of the library as a quiet place to study and as a community center.

If you or your students are not familiar with it already, WorldCat is a great online library resource that searches for material through university and research libraries, and allows you to make book lists, write or read reviews, and assists you with citations. I wish it would integrate with libraries on a more local level, but maybe this tool will become more robust over time.

My medieval Latin professor took us to the library to do a scavenger hunt during one of our classes, and that is a fun and valuable moment for teaching your students about what is truly available for them in their home institution’s library. Many university libraries have many research tools available for students, including many online, that they are simply unaware of. This would not only benefit them in your class, but throughout their college career, and maybe make them reconsider the worth of their local libraries in the future.

29, జులై 2014, మంగళవారం

Blogging Literature in Real Time


(source)

Lately I’ve been researching hagiography and sonnets from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance, and it reminds me how steeped in temporality literature can be (aside from the obvious element that literature is an art experienced while time passes).

Hagiography, or the lives of saints, are tied to liturgical calendars and saint feast days, and many medieval manuscripts include calendar rubrics as we see in the image to the left.

Perhaps coming out of a calendar-minded culture, the Italian humanist and poet Petrarch seemed to structure his Canzoniere on the liturgical calendar, beginning with Good Friday, as Dante began Inferno on the night of Holy Thursday (these are of course allegorically significant).

Additionally, story collections such as the One Thousand and One Nights and Boccaccio’s Decameron inherently connote the passage of time by providing a set number of stories a day.

Once we add in diaries, journals, and letters, human literary production becomes very bound by dates and part of daily records and activities.

Literature, especially old literature like the kind I tend to study (though maybe the Classicists will object!), can be difficult to relate to by contemporary audiences, as anyone who has tried to teach an old text to a current university student will understand. However, through employing the technology we enjoy today, we can render some of this writing more accessible.

The best example of this is the blog Orwell Diaries 1932-1942, a project of the Orwell Prize. From August 9, 2008 through 2012, they have been blogging George Orwell’s diaries in real time – that is, 70 years to the day since each entry was originally written. This project updates Orwell for readers today by employing the current iteration of journaling – the blog. Making use of all that the Internet has to offer, the group also includes a multimedia experience in the form of an image gallery and an extensive map that enriches the experience of reading the diaries.

Unfortunately, a blog that posted Petrarch’s rime (including academic glosses) in real time according to the liturgical calendar of the Canzoniere seems to be abandoned, but is still useful and live, available via voicheascoltate.com/blog.

For those working in literature, creating a blog that follows the work of texts in this manner can make texts not only more accessible but more available to a wider audience. It is not tech-heavy, but would require the text being either in the public domain or otherwise legal to use. This can be done as part of a larger class project and can involve many different participants. I would be interested to hear in any such projects either completed or in progress.


15, జులై 2014, మంగళవారం

Friending the Command Line


With touch-button apps, the Windows 8 Start screen, and the Mac Launchpad, there are an increasing number of GUI barriers that block users from interacting directly with their installed OS, making it more and more difficult to modify and automate tasks in both mobile devices and desktop machines. In fact, for many mobile devices, users have to root or jailbreak it in order to access the file system.

Matrix effect in Windows Command Prompt

This kind of access to computers you own should not really be privileged in the technological age, and I think it is therefore important for your students (and you!) to get friendly with the command line, the place where you can really get to know your computer and can have the most control over its actions.

Here are some fun things you can do on the Command Line to try to convince your students that it’s not so bad:

ASCII Star Wars through Telnet on Linux

On any GUI-based Linux system, you should be able to find your terminal by searching for “terminal” in your applications menu. On Ubuntu there is also a Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut to call it up.

From there, you can type

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

then “enter” right into the prompt and call up the text-based Star Wars to play right in your terminal window.


Star Wars ASCII version in my Ubuntu Terminal

You may need to install telnet into your machine, but it worked for me right away. You can also use the command in Mac and Windows command lines, but you may also need to install (for more info see the links for each OS below).

Here is a round-up of more fun things to do in your Linux terminal.
Here are more steps for getting comfortable with the terminal in Linux.

Retro Arcade Games on Mac

To find the terminal on your Mac (which uses all the same commands as the Linux terminal), you can either search for it through Spotlight – click on the magnifying glass on the top right corner of your screen (or use the command-space bar shortcut) – or find it in the “Utilities” folder, inside of the “Applications” folder.

Once you are there, type

emacs

then enter right into the terminal, then the escape key + x which calls up a menu.

From here, you can type one of the following

5×5
blackbox
dunnet
gomoku
hanoi
landmark
mpuz
pong
snake
solitaire
tetris

and begin playing the chosen game. The games do have graphics, but are a little laborious to play – but I am sure you will get some Mac street cred when you show this to your friends!

If you are having trouble, here are more detailed instructions.
And here are more fun things to do with the Mac terminal.
Remember you can use the Linux terminal commands in your Mac since it is based on a Linux shell.

Matrix Falling Code on Windows 

Open up Notepad and copy and paste the following code into a blank document:

@echo off
color 02
:tricks
echo %random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%
goto tricks

and save the file as matrix.bat into your home user file (this would probably be your name). Make sure there is no “.txt” extension in this file name.

To get to your Windows command line, click the Start Menu, then “All Progams,” then “Accessories.” On my Windows 7, it is called “Command Prompt” but on later versions it is called “PowerShell.” This should open into your home user file (showing your name on the left).

From here, just run the little script you wrote, by typing

matrix.bat

and enter. Your terminal should start going through numbers, as in the image above.

Here are more things you can do with Notepad and the Windows terminal.
Here is more fun with the Windows command line in general.

To further orient yourself with your command line, there are a lot of resources available online to peruse. You can start with this one from ACRL.



29, జూన్ 2014, ఆదివారం

Coding Concepts for the Humanities: Simpsons CSS


Web developer Chris Pattle posted a CSS side project onto Github that renders characters from the TV show The Simpsons using CSS.

Project Page with CSS Code


He first broke the characters down into simple shapes, as an artist may do when geometricizing a figure, and then tackled the more complex shapes and finishing touches.

(source)


By using a CSS style tester such as CSSDESK, you can help your students work on their web development skills in CSS by having them tweak the Simpsons characters. They will need both the CSS code and the HTML code of their favorite character to begin to work on this. If they are really ambitious, they can try their own hand at rendering cartoons (or perhaps create cartoons of philosophers, explorers or sonneteers?) themselves.

My own example — of course I chose Lisa!

Emerging digital humanists looking to change a character’s color would at least have to look up both the HTML hex color code and the RGB numbers as well. If she is interested in changing the pupil sizes, or making the character cross-eyed, she would look under the pupil headings. A possible assignment based off of this would be to give Bart, Lisa, or Maggie rainbow-colored hair, with each hair portion (they are numbered in the original code) a different color.


15, జూన్ 2014, ఆదివారం

Word Processor Zen


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Students who are getting increasingly accustomed to the minimalism of mobile device apps may find Microsoft Office’s Word to be a bit cumbersome. While the open source freeware LibreOffice and the cloud-based and collaboration-friendly Google Drive are readily available to students who have modest financial means or an aversion toward the older-feeling Microsoft Office Suite, there are additional options to inspire students when writing assignments for class.

So-called “zenware” word processors allow writers to write without distraction, often with ambient colors, scenery, and music or sound playing in the background. Buttons are not always visible, saving people from clutter from too many controls.

eh-hem

Meditative word processors can provide a great venue to encourage creative and scholarly juices to get flowing, and are ideally-suited for low-stakes and expressive writing assignments. Sometimes, more formal research papers may require higher-level formatting that even Google Docs cannot provide in its current iteration.

Here are some software examples to explore:

OmmWriter provides a distraction-free and beautiful design in order to facilitate much-needed focus on writing. Its controls disappear and reappear as one navigates towards or away from them. The backgrounds, colors, and sounds have been chosen with creativity and tranquility in mind, according to the developers. The price is suggested at $4.11, and it is available for Mac, PC and iPad. See OmmWriter in action via video.

ZenWriter, similarly, also offers a peaceful space for committing thoughts to “page.” This software also incorporates music and backgrounds in an effort to create a calm environment for the writer. I especially like that you can choose to write in “day mode” or “night mode,” perfect for early birds or night owls respectively. Keystrokes can be given audio functionality, and work is saved automatically. Still, it is limited in its scope and does not offer many formatting options. ZenWriter is available for Windows at the price of $9.95. Here is a short video review with demo.

WriteMonkey is also for Windows and offers a simplistic and distraction-free design with little information about the document you are working on displayed on-screen. For those interested in a more robust experience, there are a variety of plugins available to donors, but the program can be downloaded for free. A quick review and demonstration of WriteMonkey.

Paper by 53 offers an iPad app for those of us who like to write directly (like with a pencil) or to sketch along with writing during brainstorming sessions, but who still realize that keeping it digitally (so that you can save it to the cloud) is a good way to go. This app really brings out a lot of the great features of the iPad, and utilizes natural motions as commands (such as the cool rewind/undo feature). It is free to download, but there are several in-app purchasing opportunities to buy more tools, etc. It also would help to have a stylus you are comfortable with. Here is a thorough review of an earlier version of Paper.


A screenshot of writing/doodling on Paper.


9, జూన్ 2014, సోమవారం

Female Students and Online Participation


At a Writing Across the Curriculum symposium I attended earlier this year, a music professor presented some observations of student engagement from her experience in facilitating student blogs within her classroom. She asked students to submit reviews of music performances and also to comment on each other’s blog posts. Though female students and male students equally submitted the initial review blog posts, only male students commented on these posts.

(source)
Immediately, I thought of how the Internet can be a hostile place for women.

Because of intersectionality, numerous groups of people may feel excluded from any given assignment within a classroom environment, and it is important to foster a welcoming atmosphere that addresses the concerns of every student.

In the article, How to Stop the Online Harassment of Female Journalists (which also has a problematic comment), the interviewed writer Ann Friedman has a few suggestions for how to prevent misogynist trolling in comments sections. She believes small communities and comment moderation can curb this behavior, which should be possible to achieve in a closed online learning environment. Additionally, she suggests having commenters log in through Facebook so that their real names are associated with their remarks. This may not be as applicable to the online classroom, as students who do participate in hate speech will likely face institutional consequences.

Counter to this, it may be advantageous to allow students to anonymize themselves (by using neutral handles such as “Anon 1,” “Anon 2,” etc.), and to only offer comment credit if all 25 of your students do comment on a given post (this would also compel students to self-enforce). That way, female students do not feel singled out. Of course, if students do leave confrontational comments this can backfire, so it may be worth looking into allowing admins, such as professors, to see who the commenter is, without permitting student users to.

Mya Poe also has some interesting thoughts on designing assignments for racially diverse students, which may be applicable here. In her article “Re-Framing Race in Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum,” she argues that race should be situated locally:

Instead of starting with generalizations about teaching writing to racially diverse student populations, it is better to start with discussions about local students and local needs. By describing specific students — students in our classrooms and programs — we can root our conversations locally, where all teaching and assessment stories should begin.

That is, it can be more productive to think about your individual students in your current course or academic program, rather than to think more abstractly about the gender, race, religion, first language, or national origin of your students. This may be where we can begin to address disproportionate involvement online, though armed with the knowledge that different groups of people may have different experiences with online forums, and may therefore be more adverse to engaging with that platform.


31, మే 2014, శనివారం

Writing Across the Curriculum in a Technology Class

(source)

Technology courses are not typically thought of to be writing-intensive, even though programming is certainly a kind of writing — if not considered to be a traditional genre — and good programming has many elements in common with any type of good writing, such as clarity, organization, and elegance.

Still, it is beneficial to technology students to engage with discipline-specific writing outside of programming within their courses. This can include commenting their code, writing up descriptions and deliverables for larger projects, and writing abstracts summarizing the research of others (or their own).

For those in graduate-level courses or with an interest in pursuing a graduate degree, it would also be useful practice to write literature reviews. Additionally, students can write pieces in the style of academic articles, with introduction, theoretical background, research model and hypothesis, critical analysis, conclusion, and further work.

Here are some specific ideas for using Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) principles in a general technology course, with a focus on using writing as a vehicle for critical thinking:


  • You just got hired at a company as a junior-level developer, but for the work that you are doing, you are expected to use a programming language that you think is not well-suited to the task. Write a persuasive email to a senior-level developer telling her what language you think would work better for the task, and support your view with evidence. 


  • A fellow Computer Science student at another school is learning a different programming language than you in his introductory programming course. Write a dialogue between the two of you, with one arguing why it doesn’t matter what programming language you learn first, and the other insisting that the first language does make a difference. (This can also be done in pairs rather than with an imaginary student.)


  • Your parents have an old CRT monitor that they don’t want to give up because they don’t want to buy a new one. Create an online slideshow (such as a Prezi or Google Drive Presentation) to email to your parents explaining why it is worthwhile to purchase a new LCD monitor.


  • Create a short video (appropriate to upload on YouTube) explaining to someone your age that is not tech-savvy the difference between RAM and hard drive in terms of memory/storage. Now create a second short video explaining it to your grandparents. 

These assignments are all designed to give students a particular audience in mind, which is helpful when they attempt the prompt. They also allow students to reflect on their own learning through writing, and to communicate their knowledge in a way they may have to do outside of the classroom. For technology students in particular, balancing traditional forms of writing (as in the first two prompts) with digital writing (the last two prompts) can be valuable to their future work in their field.


23, మే 2014, శుక్రవారం

GIS: Digital Humanities & Classroom Applications


Google Maps can be used for dropping pins and creating itineraries through directions.

A geographic information system, or GIS for short, utilizes computer imaging to visualize geographical data for researchers to analyze, interpret and understand it. This can be useful for academics and students alike to reveal geospatial relationships, patterns and trends.

GIS is an increasingly important tool being used in Digital Humanities work. At the recent Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in New York, one of the plenary speakers, Nicholas A. Eckstein of the University of Sydney, spoke about projects used in History to build interactive maps of Florence based on texts. Additionally, Cameron Butt of the University of Waterloo gave a presentation on “Geography, Performance, Technology, and Spectatorship in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” which utilized The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) to visualize stage and city landscapes, to explore space and place in Renaissance playtexts.

There are also mainstream applications of this technology. PBS uses Interactive Maps as part of their Rise and Fall of Jim Crow project. New York City has a practical map, NYCityMap, for its residents and visitors to look up information geographically. Other historic applications include SepiaTown, which users can contribute vintage images to in order to show old photographs in their original locations on the map.

GIS can be used effectively in scholarship, particularly during talks about topics with a geographic component, as well as part of an undergraduate assignment.

Here are some free tools to get you started: (Click on images to make them bigger!)

Roadtrippers is similar to Google Maps, but, as the name implies, is geared to road trippers! This can be great for educational trips students may take, to plot their itineraries, or can be used for historical or literary plotting, especially for those taken in recent history. Here is a map I made based on an itinerary provided in Jack Kerouac’s diary, taken from July to October 1947, and an inspiration for his seminal work, On the Road:




National Geographic Education also has a simple-to-use MapMaker Interactive tool that allows users to select for Physical, Environmental and Human Systems in order to explore the contemporary planet. This can be equally useful to both science and humanities disciplines. Here is a map generated with this tool that looks at Ocean Surface Currents, Sea Surface Winter Temperatures, Volcanic Eruptions and Major Religions in South America, to show you the breadth of uses available:




Pinterest, which I’ve included in a previous assignment post, can generate pin boards with maps (by selecting “Yes” to the “Add a map?” question when creating a new board). Users can pin their own images or link relevant websites to the map, which uses Foursquare to accurately map pins. I find this option to be very aesthetically pleasing. As an example, here is a board I made that showcases sites and artifacts related to Lewis Carrol’s Alice books that are in England today:




For more advanced users, especially those looking to incorporate interactive JavaScript-based maps into their web projects, there are a number of open-source tools available, that you can also contribute to. Modest Maps is a small and free library in JavaScript (there are also other implementations) made for designers and developers. Kartograph is another simple and lightweight framework, created with designers and data journalists in mind, available in both JavaScript and Python. Maphub, with its entire code on GitHub, is based on historic maps, which used to also keep up a Web application for casual users to work with and annotate historic maps, though this does not appear to be live at this time.

Map Projections, a Kartograph project
For those of us working with historical data, it is useful to keep in mind that there are a lot of maps available in the public domain and through libraries, including The Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, and The British Library just to name a few.

If you will be using a GIS-based assignment in your college classroom, it may also be worthwhile to discuss some of the ways in which mapping can be problematic.

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