The Yonderist

All those who wander are not lost.

Formatting and Outputs

2009-07-03

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I do much of my non-scholarly writing in a text editor, but I still need to share what I do with others. Preferably pretty. I like to keep my options open on how to move out of MultiMarkdown into a styled output:

  • XSL:FO stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects. Update: The link to the W3Schools no longer works and the good people at Who Is Hosting This offer their own materials as a suitable substitute.
  • DITA is an XML architecture for designing, writing, managing, and publishing information.

There is, of course, also presentation versions, like Eric Meyer’s S5 format, which has since been extended. For a more general overview, see the Wikipedia article on S5 I’m curious about the latter, because as this sample code reveals:

<div class="slide">
 <h1>slide title</h1>
 <ul>
   <li>the first point</li>
   <li>the second point</li>
   <li>the third point</li>
 </ul>
 <div class="handout">
  ... additional material that appears
     on the handout
 </div>
</div>

The S5 format is unfortunately oriented toward the standard slide layout.

Statements for Project Bamboo Proposal

2009-07-02

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It turns out I wrote down the wrong day for the annual rice field day at LSU’s Rice Station west of Rayne, and so I am home, with my cold, working on various Project Bamboo tasks.

Value Statement

The first thing I got done was to draft a value statement for scholarly / professional / learned societies:

The central focus of the learned society remains the pursuit of reliable knowledge and its effective communication within and without the society. Cyberinfrastructures expand the communicative modalities available to learned societies and their members. However, these same infrastructures threaten some of the most venerable revenue streams, emphasizing the importance of maximizing the return on investment in the digital realm. What learned societies need are at least interoperable, if not common, infrastructures that allow members to communicate and collaborate, in a trusted fashion, with other scholars, be they mutual members of the same society or in an adjacent field. By participating in a common technological ecosystem, learned societies can leverage their investment to give their members the tools and content they need to advance their own scholarship, and thus the impact of the society itself.

This has now been posted on the Bamboo Wiki. (N.B. I believe the wiki is currently private, so that link will probably not work.)

Case Statement

The second thing I did was to add a potential new case statement to the proposal that focused on the outreach / public relations potential of Bamboo:

Bamboo’s goal of increasing the visibility and accessibility of digital tools and content to humanities scholars themselves will necessarily not only radiate out to graduate and undergraduate students who will thus be able to participate in and work with these materials and methods but it will also increase the visibility of the work of humanities scholars to an increasingly connected public who are often in search of humanities content but are often stymied in their search for trusted materials and ideas.

[You could think of this as something like Stanford’s SEE (Stanford Engineering Everywhere) program. One-upping to a definite article: the THE (The Humanities Everywhere). Maybe.]

Use Statement

I remember a conversation from graduate school where students were trying to hash out where they thought the field was going. One of our cohort finally spoke up and said, “Well, I don’t know where the field is going, but I do know where I want to take it.” Perhaps, Project Bamboo is something like that for those of us at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

We have taken a multi-level approach to our efforts:

  • At the base level, there is an enormous benefit for an university like the University of Louisiana simply to be among the founding members of anything of the scope and scale as Project Bamboo. We are the only university from the Deep South to have participated throughout the process.
  • Building from such a base, we have already, as it were, used the fact of our participation in Bamboo to leverage state funding of a “digital humanities lab.”
  • Moving from an institutional scope to one focused more clearly on the humanities, we have emphasized the inevitability of the IT revolution and the ability to be in control of one’s own destiny to which Bamboo aspires to discuss with faculty not only our involvement in the consortium but also to begin to make them aware of the possibilities contained within under the rather diffuse rubric of the “digital humanities.”
  • At the level of particular disciplines, my involvement in Project Bamboo has also helped me steer a parallel project, the design and development of a new website / communications platform for the American Folklore Society, of which I have been named editor.
  • Finally, at a personal level, there can be no doubt the enormous professional development I have enjoyed thanks to the incredibly challenging conversations we have had as a result of the mixing of humanists, technologists, and archivists / librarians. The multi-disciplinary discussions have been amazing.

The Humanities Need To Be This Good

2009-07-02

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An amazing talk by a molecular biologist:

The 1909 Color Photography of Prokudin-Gorsky

2009-07-01

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I’ve seen these photographs a half dozen times over the years, but every time I see them, I am impressed not only by the richness of the color but also by the view into late nineteenth-century life in Europe. (Obviously, Russia, but I imagine the images of peasant life reflect larger patterns.)

Fishing

And here’s the header note:

In 1909 a remarkable project was initiated by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. His mission was to record – in full and vibrant color – the vast and diverse Russian Empire

Making (Foot)Notes

2009-07-01

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As I began work on the analysis of the Scholarly Narratives deposited in the Project Bamboo planning wiki, I found I needed the occasional footnote to explain a few items that didn’t really deserve space in the text proper but still deserved to be addressed in some fashion. Such extra-textural information can customarily be contained in notes of some kind, either foot or end.

Fortunately, the variation of Markdown that I am using, MultiMarkdown by Fletcher Penney, contains note functionality.

All I have to do to embed a note into the text is to add [^1] in the body of the text and then at the end of the text add a mate [^1]: Followed by the body of the note. Simple, n’est-ce pas? The HTML it creates looks like this:

<a href="#fn:1" id="fnref:1" class="footnote">1</a>

And later:

<div class="footnotes">
<hr />

  1. [footnote text here]  ↩

</div>

Note how the MultiMarkdown script generously creates a link to return you to the spot where you were reading in the text proper. Thank you, Mr. Penney.

But all of this, it turns out, opens up a larger can of worms that has been poked at by a number of individuals with sticks that reveals that there really is no terribly good solution to the problem of notes in HTML — this despite the fact that one would think that the very links that saturate HTML texts would do the job.

Well, they do, but not quite in the same way that footnotes do the job. One of the great advantages of footnotes, one that they have over endnotes to my mind and why I have always preferred footnotes, is that the reader doesn’t really leave the space, the cognitive space if you will, within which they are operating. If a number or symbol indicating a note is available is paired with an item that piques the reader’s curiosity, all she has to do is flick her eyes to the bottom of the page. Thanks to a pretty decent spatial memory built into the human brain and to the fact that the note you’ve just read had a particular symbol paired with it, returning to the approximate spot in the text from whence the reader came is usually not so difficult a task that it breaks the reader’s sense of flow. (I do not find that endnotes accomplish this at all, by the way, and I’m sorry that my own discipline has chosen endnotes over footnotes.)

But a web page is not a page except in name. The comparable physical space is really a screen.

The compromise has been for the most part to treat the web page as a page and to place notes at its distant, and sometimes unknown (from the reader’s point of view) bottom. The convention that the Markdown script follows, in giving a link back to where you were in the text, is also a common one. The idea is to achieve via technology what the reader used to do themselves physically. I don’t find the effect to be as smooth and it is likely, at least for this reader, at least half the time to result in me losing track of where I was.

There is a really terrific description of all this by Paula Petrik in a post where she also gives some really concrete and practical advice on how to construct notes according to one’s own preferences.

Lily’s Cat Has an Index

2009-06-29

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At least that’s what she keeps saying. We don’t exactly know from where she grabbed the term, but it’s there and she’s using it to refer to something like a book. We haven’t pressed the matter yet because we’re so tickled by her rambling about the house talking about an index. Of course I am tickled by it, both because of the roles that indices play in folklore studies but also because of their role in information systems in general.

One could argue, I guess, that the folktale and motif indices were simply signs of their times, of the burgeoning of data and information that demanded in many ways that better technology be invented to process it. Perhaps, had the computer arisen earlier, we would still be driven by our typological impulses. Certainly, I am glad for the corrective of the ethnographic impulse. It’s where I’ve done most of my work in the last decade, but now with the rise of humanities computing and tools that can be actually used by mere mortals, I wonder what the future will hold not only for the field but also for myself.

And a quick reminder on what an index is:

An index is a list of words or phrases (‘headings’) and associated pointers (‘locators’) to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document. In a traditional back-of-the-book index the headings will include names of people, places and events, and concepts selected by a person as being relevant and of interest to a possible reader of the book. The pointers are typically page numbers, paragraph numbers or section numbers. In a library catalog the words are authors, titles, subject headings, etc., and the pointers are call numbers. Internet search engines, such as Google, and full text searching help provide access to information but are not as selective as an index, as they provide non-relevant links, and may miss relevant information if it is not phrased in exactly the way they expect.

Wikipedia disambiguates the above from the following:

  • Index (mathematics), for various meanings of the word in mathematics
  • Index (economics), a single number calculated from an array of prices and quantities. E.g., Price index, a typical price for some good or service, or Operating Index, a tool to compare the operating performance of a company with its peer universe
  • Index (typography), a largely obsolete punctuation mark
  • Indexing (motion), a kind of motion in many areas of mechanical engineering and machining
  • Index (finance), a list of stocks
  • Index (database), a feature in a computerized database which allows quick access to the rows in a table
  • Index (information technology), either an integer which identifies an array element, or a data structure which enables fast lookup
  • Index (search engine), for supporting information retrieval in search engines
  • Webserver directory index, a default or index web page in a directory on a web server, such as index.html
  • Subject indexing, describing the content of a document by keywords

NASA Wants Help Archiving Braun’s Notes

2009-06-29

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From the Wired article:

NASA is taking the rare step of reaching out to the public for help. The space agency is looking for the best way to analyze and electronically catalog a precious collection of notes that chronicle the early history of the human space flight program.

“We’re looking for creative ways to get it out to the public,” said project manager Jason Crusan. “We don’t always do the best with putting out large sets of data like this.”

The notes are those of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the fist director of NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and are typed with copious hand written notes in the margin. According to the official request for information, NASA needs ideas on what format to use, how to index the notes and how to create a useful database.

YAPF: Yet Another Presentation Format

2009-06-29

work

One of the things I continually harp on my graduate students about is how they make presentations. For the majority of them, their idea of a presentation comes from their days (and days and days — they are graduate students after all) spent in the classroom where they have established themselves as the kind of people who enjoy classroom lectures. And so one of their first impulses is to re-create the classroom lecture.

But that doesn’t mean they have necessarily experienced, and thus are in a position to recreate, great classroom lectures. (One doesn’t have to have encountered excellence in a genre to be an established fan of the genre — more on this perhaps another time.) The same goes for the other presentational form that grad students have likely experienced, the conference paper. While the lecture format typically assumes something like 45 minutes to make its point, the conference paper is constrained to 20 minutes, or sometimes 15 minutes. However, that does not necessarily encourage authors/presenters to get to the point. I have, no lie, witnessed individuals read from article-length or chapter-length papers, somehow believing that there ideas are so compelling that the audience is willing to withstand their speed reading and such qualifications as “I can’t go into todepth here due to lack of time.” (I don’t think I have ever seen a “stage rush” at the end of such a performance with gobs of new fans breathlessly pressing for the skipped-over idea.)

I’m not picking on just academics here, but on presenters in general. I have, while in the business world, sat through many a PowerPoint slide stack which consisted of nothing more than slide after slide of bullet points, many of which were nothing more than read off the slide by the presenter. This is the scene of revolution, or at least revolt, for more sites and speakers/authors who seek to revise or refine presentational forms. One of the first of such sites I came across was Presentation Zen, a site I have regularly recommended to grad students — a recommendation, I can tell from their presentations, that most of them have ignored. From there, I have suggested they explore not only the form but also the content of the TED talks.

The technology sphere in general has generated a number of conventions. Guy Kawasaki has his own 10/20/30 rule. And there are presentations like this one by Dick Hardt at OSCON on which even talented presenters like Lawrence Lessig have commented. (Lessig is a presentation dynamo in his own right, and his free culture talk, which speaks directly to the heart of folklore studies and the larger philological project, is well worth watching. Please also note that his book is available, in its entirety, as a free download at that link.)

And so it should come as no surprise that O’Reilly, so often at the vanguard — almost too consciously so sometimes — has come up with Yet Another Presentation Format (YAPF). It’s worth checking out Scott Berkun’s meta-presentation on the format, if only for its suggestiveness:

Thinking about Traveling

2009-06-28

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With the recent trip to Indiana behind us, we find ourselves planning the next trip. We’re not entirely sure where we’re going, but go we will (at some point). With the heat pressing down here, we can’t help but think about cooler climes and the gear we might need:

A comparison of the two Osprey bags I like:

Bag Size Price Features
Talon 22 22l 99.00 Full-fledged waist support
Helix 17l 68.95 Webbing waist support

A Desktop Rig That Worked

2009-06-27

work

For the record, I wrote 9000 words in less than a week while at the EVIADA Summer Institute, and I did it all on my MacBook, augmented. Augmented how? With one of these:

Apple keyboard

And one of these:

Apple cinema display

But, for the record, I’d settle for any decent 22″ or 24″ HD display.

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© John Laudun