Articles by Arno Bosse

This TechTalk was targeted at people already somewhat familiar with the division’s wiki which can be accessed at http://humanities.uchicago.edu/wiki/. During the presentation and Q&A we discussed various matters including how to plan and structure complex documents, employ simple wiki macros to generate pages (such as a table of contents) automatically, how to share or restrict access to your pages and gain more control over their look and feel.

Probably the best place to start to learn more about the capabilities of the software (Confluence) we use to power our wiki is the Feature Tour on its website. This is a great place to get a succinct overview of its main features. The Confluence website also hosts several excellent introductory videos explaining the product.

Following this, to dig deeper, you’ll want to look at the official documentation pages. These are actually fairly well written and organized from the perspective of a user looking to accomplish a specific task, for example, working with images. Please keep in mind too that if you are a staff or faculty member in the division you can always contact Humanities Desktop Support to help you solve a problem with the wiki.

Advanced features in Confluence are generally accessed via a system of simple macros and (optional) plugins. If you’ve browsed through the lists of plugins and macros and found something that may look useful for your project, please contact Humanities Desktop Support for assistance.

Finally, to make the most of your wiki, it’s going to be very helpful to keep abreast of ongoing new features and updates. These so called “major releases” generally get rolled out three or four times a year. To read a brief summary of the highlights of recent major releases, please consult the following links:

v2.10 (December, 2008)

v2.9 (August, 2008)

v2.8 (April, 2008)

This Thursday in the on-going Humanities Computing Lunch Series, Professor Ronald B. Inden, Emeritus, History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, will be presenting a digital text created using LaTeX, a document mark up and type-setting language. While TeX and LaTeX has long enjoyed dominance in the Physical and Social Sciences as the preferred method of writing and presenting research, it has a relatively light footprint in the Humanities. That, however, is changing as more scholars in the Humanities are focusing on Open Source alternatives to dominant word processing programs or desiring better implementation of non-Western languages and characters in their documents. LaTeX is a key solution to both of these issues.

Prof. Inden will present Vishnu’s Will, created using LaTeX. He will discuss some of the choices and decisions that informed and his usage of LaTex to create and present his research. After his presentation, we hope to hear from many of the other users of LaTex on campus – and discuss some of the resources Humanities Computing can help provide to spearhead the growth of LaTex in the Humanities. Just recently, we have added LaTex to the Humanities Wiki. Please visit the wiki page for more links and information about LaTeX.

This event is open to all staff, faculty and graduate students. Please circulate.

Where: Rosenwald 405
When: 12 – 1:30
RSVP: manan@uchicago.edu

This Wednesday November 27th from 12-1pm in Rosenwald 405, Humanities Computing is going to offer another of informal, lunchtime “Getting to Know” presentations to staff and faculty on various technical topics and internet buzzwords du jour. The goal of the “Getting to Know” series is to help introduce and explain current technologies in a way that is relevant to your own daily work and research.

Our presentation will be highlighting “visual technology in research projects” – we will focus on visual representation; photographs, paintings, sculptures, but may digress.  We may also  discuss what technologies are available for particular research problems. How collaborations with individuals in other disciplines help in Humanities research. One example demonstration will be of photo visualization project we are working on with Microsoft and how our research may assist in visual software design.

Light sandwiches and refreshments will be provided, or else just bring along your own brown bag lunch.

Over the last two years, Humanities Computing has created over 30 projects on the divisional wiki. The most widely used is the Divisional Resources wiki which offers a wide range of practical “how-to” information for staff and faculty.

We know that many people already use this wiki as a reference (with up to 800 page views on a single day..) but did you know that with a login you can add to and amend any of the text on these pages? From the outset, wikis were conceived as easy to use, web-based tools for collaborative writing, editing, note taking, planning. Adding and modifying texts and images offer one perspective for thinking about wikis. But perhaps as importantly, wikis are also databases whose content can be commented, tracked, tagged, sorted, reverted, searched and re-arranged in a wide variety of ways.

At the next Humanities Computing technology brown bag on Tuesday, October 23rd, 12-1pm, in Rosenwald 405 we’ll offer you a beginner’s introduction to wikis along with existing, practical examples of their use by faculty and staff in the Humanities Division.

Light sandwiches and refreshments will be provided, or else just bring along your own brown bag lunch. Please R.S.V.P. on the divisional calendar (using the “Sign-Up” button) if you plan to attend.

For answers to common questions about the Divisional wiki, please see our Blog FAQ. And please feel free to contact me directly with any questions.

Humanities Computing will hold its third “Getting to Know” informal technology brown-bag at 12 – 1pm on Wednesday, May 30th in Rosenwald 405. This session will introduce Trumba, the Division’s web-calendaring system.

Improvements to our web-calendar are making it a useful resource for learning about what’s going on throughout the Division and individual departments. It also includes a number of additional useful features, including: event registration, reminders by email or text-message, automated entry of events onto personal calendars, regular digests of calendar events, and more. Next week’s brown-bag talk by Carl Nash will offer a general overview of what our web-calendar can do for staff and faculty with plenty of time afterwards for discussion and questions.

Sandwiches and refreshments will be provided or just bring along your own lunch . Please see this link for details.

The New York Times is now making TimesSelect free to any student or faculty member with a valid college or university email address. TimesSelect includes access to articles from the New York Times Op-Ed and news columnists in both text and podcast forms, along with up to 100 articles per month from the full New York Times Archive, which contains content back to 1851.

In case you haven’t noticed, NSIT has increased everyone’s email storage from 300MB to 1GB. You can check your current usage status by:

• Logging on to webmail.uchicago.edu [it is displayed on top]
• In Firefox Thunderbird mail, there is an indicator bar at the bottom (if you don’t see this in Thunderbird on your computer, you need to install the free Mail Quota extension)
• In Apple’s Mail, you can choose the mailbox from the left and then type Apple-I to get that information.

Every researcher in the Humanities wonders, where do I put my notes? Yellow legal pad remains a popular option. But there are some who would like to do searches on their notes, add keywords, citations, and append materials to it. All this is made easier by using database-based note-taking programs that allow you to organize and use your research most effectively.

My recommendation is the freeware Scribe 3.2 written and designed by historians at the Center for History and New Media.

Scribe allows you to :

manage your research notes, quotes, thoughts, contacts, published and archival sources, digital images, outlines, timelines, and glossary entries. You can create, organize, index, search, link, and cross-reference your note and source cards. You can assemble, print, and export bibliographies, copy formatted references to clipboard, and import sources from online catalogs. You can store entire articles, add extended comments on each card in a separate field, and find and highlight a particular word within a note or article.

Scribe works on both Macs and PCs and does not need any software purchase. You can download it here.

The newest generation of Apple hardware use the Intel processor chip. As a result, they are able to now run Windows [and Linux] Operating Systems, in addition to the Mac OS. There are two ways of running PC on your new MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac etc:

If you’ve ever wished you could resize a digital image someone sent you before attaching it to an email or adding it to a Word document, then this tip is for you. There are several new web based image editing sites that make this process quick and painless.

Picnik and Pixenate both work the same way. You go to the respective website and click on a link to upload your image to your browser. After that, resizing, cropping and re-saving your original file in JPEG format (best for photos) or PNG (best for graphics) is just a mouse-click away. Best of all, both services are completely free. Aufwiedersehen, Photoshop.

NSIT recently rolled out a new campus-wide service called WebShare which allows you to share your files and directories with other people including off-campus users. WebShare is especially well suited for making a large file (or files) temporarily available to a group of people instead of sending it out as an email attachment. It also offers many other useful features such as the ability to create a public drop-box that can be used to receive files from others.

Please note! You need to be very careful to ensure that the access permissions in your WebShare account are set correctly to avoid inadvertently exposing personal or confidential files.

Divisional staff should not use WebShare to store or save any work related files (please read the section below on the “Humanities File Share” for more information). Humanities faculty are encouraged to use WebShare to temporarily share or receive large files but should carefully check their access settings to prevent unintended access by others to sensitive files. Please consult the online documentation for WebShare or call/email NSIT’s 4-Tech support line for assistance.

WebShare is currently limited to 1GB per user which reduces its effectiveness as a long-term backup/storage option for many users. Humanities Computing offers all faculty in the Division 50GB of free space on our research servers (additional storage is available on a cost basis) which can be easily accessed from any Windows or Mac computer or via Unix command line tools. These files are regularly mirrored at a second campus location and backed-up using NSIT’s central backup service. Please contact Lec Maj in Humanities Research Computing if you would like to set-up a user account and space on our servers.

We have also just begun to roll out a service roughly analogous to WebShare for all staff in the Division. The Humanities File Space (HFS) allows staff members to place all of their work related files (in particular, confidential financial, student or personal data) onto a secure server managed and backed up by NSIT. Groups can create folders with shared content and staff will be able to save files in personal folders and allow others to transfer files to them via drop-boxes. The initial pilot rollout of the HFS service was to core divisional staff. Departments, committees, interdisciplinary and area centers in the Humanities Division are scheduled to get their access to HFS later this year. Please contact Manan Ahmed in Humanities Administrative Computing if you have any questions about the HFS service. Technical support for HFS will be provided by NSIT’s 4-Tech support line.

During Manan’s Getting to Know session this afternoon on blogs and academic blogging someone asked a question about RSS.. what is it, what should I know about it? The term RSS (or, an RSS feed) is a bit like a Matryoshka doll. Take off the first layer (RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”) and you’re no wiser than you were before you started. It’s actually not a difficult concept to understand per se – the problem is that the terms used to describe it often require their own explanations, and so it goes…

We will probably offer a “Getting to Know” session on RSS at some point in the near future. But in the meantime, here’s something I ran across recently that offers a witty and entertaining explanation of RSS using the time honoured academic lecture technique of “hand waving”. Watch this short video animation, and you may not want to come to our brown-bag session anymore.

Until then, for those of you who prefer written explanations, we’ve taken a first stab at it on this page of our blog.

You’ve probably seen these – an email with a long, multi-line web address (URL) that doesn’t work anymore. Half the address is underlined to show that it’s a link, the other half isn’t. So now you have to laboriously copy and paste the two halves together again to produce a working web address. Or ask that the email be re-sent.

But we can do better. The next time you need to send someone an email with a very long URL, like this…

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=humanities+university+of+chicago&btnG=Search

…don’t just paste this into your email.

Instead, first copy the URL, then goto this site, TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com) and paste the long URL into the form at the top of the page. TinyURL will convert your long URL into a permanent, short URL that you can then easily copy into an email message. For example, TinyURL will take the long Google URL shown above and turn it into: http://tinyurl.com/3cpvol

How many times have you wanted to make a screen-capture of your monitor and wondered… how can I?

Such a thing is of immense usage for desktop support, or documentation or even archival purposes.

Here is how to do it easily in OS X with three simple keystrokes:

• Simultaneously press down APPLE+SHIFT+3 … you will hear a nice camera click… whatever you can see on your desktop will be saved as an image file on your desktop. Usually, the file is called Picture 1 etc.
• Simultaenously press down APPLE+SHIFT+4 … and you will see a tiny cross hair which you can drag and click over the area you want to capture. If you press the SPACEBAR, you will see a camera icon which will allow you to take a snapshot of a particular window. Same as before the image file will be on your desktop.

On the PC front, you can hit the print screen key on your keyboard. Next, open a graphics editor such as Microsoft Paint [usually found in Start/Programs/Accessories] and press paste to create the image which you can save anywhere.