TechTalk

Here’s a recap of the Thursday (Thu, May 14th, Rosenwald 405, 12-1:30pm) presentation on Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/) and Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/). Google Earth is a powerful yet simple to use mapping and visualization tool. For this presentation, we focused on advanced features of Google Earth. Several interesting humanities related projects utilizing Google Earth were showcased, including ‘Ancient Rome’, ‘Las Vegas Growth’, ‘Rumsey Historical Maps’ and ‘Historical Imagery’.

Media

The presentation was recorded using Podcast Producer. You can view the recording now in Quick Time player. This and future Tech Talks can be subscribed to using iTunes or another RSS reader.

Links

• My previous blog post on this subject.
• Google Earth itself
• Satellite imagery of the growth of Las Vegas
• A gallery of KML files that can be loaded into Google Earth
• The newest and most exciting feature: Time Slider
• Rumsey Historical Maps. Note that this actually is built into Google Earth. It can be found in the “Gallery” list in the “Layers” panel.
• Also see Ogle Earth, a blog that “documents how Google Earth and other neogeographical tools are affecting geopolitics.”

Tech Talk presented Thursday March 19 2009.

Peter Thorson provided an introduction to the Division’s blog software (WordPress Mu) with a specific focus on the admin interface chances coming in the the 2.7 revision of WordPress.

Watch the screencast (requires QuickTime)

http://mahimahi.uchicago.edu/media/pcast/2009-03-19/Blog_Tech_Talk_2-reference.qtl

More about WordPress 2.7

The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version. (Download it now, or read on for more.)

Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, and sticky posts.

You can read more (and watch the video) about WordPress 2.7 on the launch press release:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/

Tech Talk presented Thursday Feb 12 2009.

For your convenience, information provided in the talk has been made publicly available on the Division of the Humanities Wiki. Please follow the link below for more information, tips and tricks.

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation.

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)

Tech Talk presented Thursday Jan 15 2008.

For your convenience, information provided in the talk has been made publicly available on the Divsion of the Humanities Wiki. Please follow the links below for more information, tips and tricks.

Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a popular email client available on both windows and mac platforms. The talk hinged on getting the most out of Thunderbird’s sorting and searching capabilities.

Phishing Emails

Phishing emails are scams designed to trick the mail recipient into revealing sensitive information. Often these messages appear to be authentic communication from NSIT or computing groups on campus. Please keep in mind that NSIT and Humanities Computing will NEVER request your password, nor will we ask you to change or “validate” your password at a site other than http://cnet.uchicago.edu. If you receive a message that asks for your CNet password, it is a fraudulent email.

Tech Talk presented Thursday Dec 11 2008. 

Pixenate
Simple one-off editor. Free, no registration or user account required. Allows you to upload a photo and perform basic operations. You can save edited photos back to your computer or to a Flickr online photo sharing account.

- Rotate/Resize
- Crop
- Redeye reduction
- Basic color correction/enhancement
- “fun” effects; black & white / sepia, borders, text captions/speech bubbles

Photoshop Express
More complex, full featured solution. Free, registration required. Photoshop express has all of the features of Pixenate as well as an online photo organizer/manager. This lets you upload and edit multiple photos at once. It also lets you provide a live internet link to your edited photos that you can email to friends/family. Photoshop Express also has handy presets to save huge digital camera photos appropriately sized for emails and websites.

Links
- www.pixenate.com
- www.photoshop.com/express/
- flickr.com

Here are some brief notes and links on the Google Earth and Google Maps tech talk presented Thursday Dec 11 2008. 

Google Maps

Google maps, available at http://maps.google.com is a powerful and easy to use web-based map program. Its most frequently used features include viewing maps, finding directions by car or public transit, finding businesses, and viewing traffic. Many locations also have a street-level view that allows you to view a street as if you were driving down it. In addition to these features, there are simple tools for adding your own content to maps. 

I recommend this page as a starting point. Google has very good documentation on the basic features of Google Maps.

Tips:

• You can search for businesses near your location. For example, search for “noodles near the university of chicago”
• When a point of interest is found through a search, a red marker will be placed on that location. Click on this marker to see a number of context-sensitive options. For example, you could click on the Noodles Etc marker and choose “get directions to here”.
• After clicking “get directions”, the default directions will be for transit by car. Click “Public Transit” on the left to get directions for public transportation. I sometimes find that google will give me a public transit route I don’t want to take. If you want to force it to take another route, try moving your start location close to the start of the route you do want to take.
• There is a lot of additional content available on the map. Click the “More” button at the top of the map, and choose one of the options. For example, there are photos and wikipedia entries pinned to locations.

My Maps

Google My Maps is an extension to Google Maps that allows you to add your own content. Though you can mark maps you create as unlisted, there are no truly private maps. If you don’t want to or can’t share the content you want to add, you should use Google Earth instead. To create maps, you must first create a free google account.

There is a good deal of variety in the content you can add. You can add placemarks, lines, shapes, images and web pages to the maps you create. You can also collaborate with other users on these creations. 

I recommend this page as a starting point for help on creating maps.

Google Earth

Google Earth has many of the same features as google maps, but also has many more 3D features and much more content. It also requires installing software on your computer. If you need more advanced features (for example, importing a lot of geographical data from another source), Google Earth is also available as a commercial package.

I recommend this page as a starting point for help with Google Earth. Also, see drawing for details on Google Earth’s drawing tools.

Tips: 

• You can search and get directions, just like in Google Maps.
• Drawing lines is a little more complicated in Google Earth than in My Maps. To draw a line, open Google Earth, click Add -> Path. You can name the path. Note that you can only draw the path or edit the path while this “path properties” window is open. If you need to go back and edit the path, you must first select the path’s name on the left toolbar, and then click Edit -> Get Info.
• Many of the University of Chicago buildings are rendered in 3D (using a program called Sketchup). You can view these by checking the “3D Buildings” Layer in Google Earth while positioned above the University. 
• There is a built in flight simulator!
• Ancient Rome has been recreated in 3D in Google Earth. 

Some Additional Links:

Here are a few examples of how people have used My Maps for historical or literary purposes:

http://coolmaps.7wonders.googlepages.com/home

http://rumsey.geogarage.com/index.html

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4209/maps/kerouac_map.htm

Here are a few relevant examples of what people have done with Google Earth layers:

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/08/travels_of_odys.html

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2005/11/places_quoted_i.html

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/08/portrait_of_the.html

Good Luck!

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.