I am equal parts excited and sad to announce that ITG’s Robin Ladouceur will be moving to a new position in the Yale Graduate School as Assistant Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences. Robin has worked in ITG for four years supporting courses, primarily in the English Department and managing our Instructional Innovation Internship program. She has recently helped advance mobile learning initiatives like our iPad loan program. Before coming to ITS, Robin worked at the Yale Center for Language Study and earned her Ph.D. at Yale in Russian Language and Literature.

Robin, thank you for your years of service and we wish you all the best on your return engagement at HGS. On a personal level we will miss you but we’ll see you around campus and, as you’ve assured us, when Peeps Fest rolls around.

Cross-posted from my project journal site

Since the close of classes in May, I’ve found more time to work on getting into the weeds with my 絵巻物 project and have made some forward motion.

One of my best discoveries has been that Adobe Photoshop CS 5.1 will execute the image tiling needed to allow zooming as happens in most of the typical large image presentations that I’ve found online. (For some scroll examples, see my post at Digital Humanities Questions and Answers.) Though I’ve only done it with my proof of concept section of the scroll, it was not a horribly intensive or time-consuming procedure. Strictly speaking, what Adobe has done is to bundle Zoomify capabilities into Photoshop. Using the steps described by Adobe’s help documentation, the output is not only the image tiles for my TIFF, Continue reading →

Celebrating Matt Regan’s birthday with some of Gloria’s famous brownies and some milkshake that should have been ice cream.

The New York Times has just issued the first in a series of articles about “Humanities 2.0: Liberal Arts Meet the Data Revolution.”

The article quotes Tom Scheinfeldt, managing director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Tom will be speaking to Yale’s Digital Humanities Working Group this Thursday. The session is open to the Yale public. Please join us!

November 18
Tom Scheinfeldt, Assistant Director of the Center for History and New Media
4:00 – 5:00 pm
Whitney Humanities Center, room 208

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Having trouble with Apple Automator? Then try Proxi, a free workflow manager that can be downloaded from the Apple website. Automator is Apple’s built in task workflow utility but Proxi is an exceptional alternative. While Automator is useful for standard repetitive tasks such as searching for folder items, moving them to another location, and editing their names, Proxi takes a slightly different approach to setting up workflows. Proxi allows users to link their tasks (similar to the ones in Automator) to “triggers” such as waking the computer from sleep, launching or closing an application/file and many more. Proxi can even recognize when the battery is low and prompt the user to close certain applications that are running. Contrary to Automator in which users must initiate their workflow and tasks, Proxi integrates workflow management into native computer processes and non-user initiated actions.

Proxi main program window

Proxi must remain open for the triggers and workflows to be recognized but once your workflow has been set up the main window can be closed and Proxi can run silently in the background. Proxi even allows you to save blueprints of your “triggers” and “tasks” so that you can open them on another computer. The program is really easy to learn to use and you will even discover neat triggers to launch reminder messages that will display on the screen.

A sample message that can be produced from one of the many "triggers." This one is displayed when adding a new folder.

Altogether Proxi is definitely an application to add to your collection of utilities. Follow the link below to download.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/productivity_tools/proxi.html

While WordPress is a highly accessible platform right out of the box, it is up to the administrators and theme designers to tweak and configure their site to ensure that it is accessible to all users, including the blind, deaf, elderly, or anyone else who might for some reason have difficulty navigating the web.

This post outlines some resources that might prove useful in creating an accessible WordPress site, particularly with regard to sight impairments.

Visually impaired computer users generally use a Screen Reader, such as JAWS, which speaks the website’s content using a synthesized voice. Screen Readers speak the content (headings, links, menus, blocks of text) according to the code, so it is up to the theme editor to keep the HTML and PHP clean and ensure that a screen reader can logically process the website’s content.

Though a bit outdated, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 provide sound coding guidelines for how to maintain an accessible website. In terms of WordPress themes, it is important to minimize use of tables and to make sure graphics and videos have descriptive alternate text.

The WordPress Accessibility Codex also outlines useful accessibility guidelines unique to the WordPress platform.

Screen Reader resources

WebAnywhere is a free online screen reader that is useful for testing pages. It’s also worth trying out just to get a sense for the challenges of navigating the web by ear.

Fangs is a Firefox extension that simulates JAWS reader. Rather than speaking the content, it outputs a text similar to how JAWS would read the page.

More useful accessibility testing resources:

• HiSoftware’s Online Content Accessibility and Quality Tester
• Evaluation, Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web Content Accessibility
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: Evaluating Websites for Accessibility
• WAVE Online Accessibility Tool Checker
  (from WordPress Accessibility Codex)

Useful WordPress Plugins

The WordPress Accessibility Widget is a very useful widget that allows users to easily change the site’s font size. The code can be easily tweaked to customize the available font sizes or add additional size options.

The WordPress Access Key Widget is another useful widget that allows the administrator to easily set up access keys for their site. With this plugin, access keys can be assigned for existing pages under “Posts” on the admin interface.

One issue with access keys is that the keyboard commands vary by web browser. For example, Mac Firefox is CTRL+access key, and Mac Safari is CTRL+ALT+access key.

You can see these plugins in action at this test site.

Other Information

The Arjuna-X theme, which lacks tables, is a highly accessible theme and might be worth testing and tweaking when building an accessible WordPress site.

Accessites.org and brucelawson.co.uk provide additional useful information and solutions for WordPress accessibility.

In this post, I will try to describe my experience with learning how to develop apps for the iPhone, and all other Apple devices using OS X for that matter.

1. What you need to know:

- Objective-C – it is a variation of the C programming language. If you have an year of experience in programming in another language, it should not be a great challenge – although, if the language you are using is not as low level as C, you will want to become familiar with pointers and memory allocation – Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephen Kochan is a good introduction to the language – you will probably still need to look up some things on the internet though.

- Cocoa API and the iPhone SDK – allow you to build the GUI. This is how the code written into Objective-C is made to respond to the touchscreen and look as nice as iPhone apps look. Depending on the project you are working on you will probably want to learn how to access the internet and how to store information in SQLite databases. Sams Teach Yourselves Cocoa Touch Programming is a somewhat good introduction to the topic. At this point, I would definitely recommend watching youtube and blog tutorials, and referring to all other resources and books that you have at your disposal.

2. How to start:

I think it all boils down to the level of complexity of the app you want to create, and the programming background that you have. For Xunzi it helped me a lot to first familiarize myself with Objective-C, and then move on to see how to manipulate the GUI to some extent. Then learn how to work with SQLite (since that is the DB system that OS X uses). Then learn how to make your app get info from the internet.

It’s safe to add youtego to the latest iteration of social networking tools. While youtego may be carving out a unique niche, the end goal is nothing new: meeting people with similar qualities over the Internet.

Much like Facebook, youtego is built upon individual user profiles. However, this is where youtego goes off in a different direction. Rather than the usual profile structure of listed biographical information, youtego wants you to be more creative. By filling in prompts such as “I can” and “I love,” you build a less conventional, more artistic snapshot of yourself. Rather than posting your extended educational background, for example, you post an interest in stargazing. Each of your profile items needs an icon, so be prepared to provide your own images. Each time you fill in your profile, you are “tagging your ego,” hence “tego.” In this sense, using youtego is supposed to be an introspective experience, prompting you to think about yourself in a qualitative manner. Youtego advertises as an exercise in “self-visualization.” The downside of this is that the profiles are limited in scope. What they gain in artistic value they lose in terms of hard facts.

Once you’ve built a profile, of course, the next step is to join the youtego online community. Someone with similar content in his or her profile will become your “TegoMate.” This part is fairly standard with only a few minor innovations.

While youtego’s approach to profile construction is certainly more unique and wholesome, it’s still about joining an online community. Yes, creating your profile may lead to some introspection, but beyond that, you can’t do very much.

The creators of lazyfeed have made it even easier for internet addicts to get their fix. Rather than checking up on multiple online news and entertainment outlets, users can take advantage of one-stop shopping at lazyfeed. By funneling the latest stories on a wide variety of subjects onto one page, the website always has something new.

Users begin by setting their preferences for information consumption. The preferences, such as “Sports,” “Politics,” or “Cooking,” each then become “tiles” on the user’s homepage. As a tile, the preference occupies a square within your lazyfeed homepage. As lazyfeed scans millions of web pages, it will post updates to the relevant tiles much like an item is added to a post-it list. It should be noted that the user comes up with his or her original preferences. I was able to type in preferences as varied as “Taxonomy” and “Barack Obama.” Lazyfeed uses these as taglines in its constant trawl through the Internet.

Updates to your tiles are always flowing in, literally allowing you to sit and watch new items arrive for you to read. If you’d like, you can click through to view the posted items on their original web pages. Sources for lazyfeed posts are wide and varied: some from major, reputable news sites like Nytimes.com, and others from small, independent blogs.

While lazyfeed does provide you with the latest on practically any topic, I found that it doesn’t supplant a conventional news website or television show. Lazyfeed caters to your personal interests. As such, Lazyfeed is the latest for those who love to procrastinate.