Tips

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.

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.