Mac users, try Skitch for annotating images

by: Phillip Barron - February 16th, 2011   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

Sometimes you want to show someone else what you’re looking at online. You can email her a link, post it on Facebook, or share it on Twitter. But sometimes, you need to show someone exactly what you’re seeing. Why? It might be because you see an error that someone else doesn’t see. Or, you might want to call attention to just part of a website, a program on your computer, or something else on your screen.

This is a classic case where you want to take a screenshot. Screenshots allow you to show someone else what you’re seeing. A few weeks ago over at DIY Ivory Tower, my co-blogger Adam showed Windows users how to take simple screenshots. Today, I want to show Mac users how to take screenshots and then annotate them.

OS X has a built-in screenshot program called Grab. It can handle both snapping a photo of your entire screen as well as what ever is within any frame you draw. But I find Grab’s TIF default file format annoying, since if I want to upload my screenshot to Flickr, I’ve saved my screenshot in the largest file size possible. And if I then want to annotate my screenshot, I have to open the TIF in Photoshop or Fireworks.

Skitch is a free app that allows you to take screenshots, annotate them, and share them via the web all within the workings of one program.

Suppose, for example, that I wanted to point out to all you dear readers that DIY Ivory Tower is now listed on the UC Davis blogs page. I could link you to the page – http://blogs.ucdavis.edu/ I could also take a screenshot of the page (as seen above) or even just of the portion with mention of your favorite academic tech help site (as seen below).

And now with Skitch, I can also draw an arrow and comment on any part of the image.

The result is simple image annotation without having to use a resource heavy, expensive image editing program. Skitch allows you to draw from scratch, draw on top of existing images, annotate your images, and share them through a built-in upload feature. It’s light; it does not occupy many CPU or RAM resources, so your other programs continue to run smoothly while it is open. And, the basic version is free.

The free version supports .jpg and .png as well as a proprietary .skitch format. The signup process for the free program also creates a space online for the Skitch images you want to share with the public. You could always upload your images to Flickr, PicasaWeb, or any of your other favorite online image hosting services, but Skitch’s built-in service is convenient and simple.

 
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Video Cartography Durham

by: Phillip Barron - February 13th, 2011   Filed under: digital humanities Add Comment

So instead of a small number of really impressive “monuments” such as those that survive from the disdained historical past, our century will leave, across the planet, a sprinkling of almost identical structures. It is, in a way, one vast global conceptual monument, whose parts and pieces are spread across the world’s cities and suburbs. One city, in many locations.

— David Byrne Bicycle Diaries

Video Cartography Durham is a video-based project that digitizes and preserves vintage film relating to the history of Durham, North Carolina, USA, and presents the archival footage alongside contemporary video. By organizing footage geographically and layering footage chronologically, this project makes it possible for viewers to quickly gain a sense of the history and change of Durham’s urban landscape.

Durham has a culturally rich history, beginning with its role as an early hub of the post-Civil War tobacco industry. There later developed an adjacent (eventually annexed) locale that, according to W.E.B. Du Bois, was a pertinent example of a separate and thriving residential and business community led entirely by African-Americans — the Hayti community.  Hayti’s fame and financial success led its entrepreneurs to establish some of the first national African-American-owned insurance and banking institutions. As a result, Parrish Street in downtown Durham was known for a time as Black Wall Street, prompting Booker T. Washington in 1910 to dub Durham the “City of Negro Enterprises.”

Much of this history has been lost to Urban Renewal, arson, and subsequent neglect of historic properties. Video Cartography Durham, a video-based multi-media project combining the features of an online archive and a documentary film, comprises 6 minutes and 20 seconds of point-of-view and aerial film and video of downtown Durham, North Carolina. The video is composed of scenes from 1942, 1947, 2007, and 2008. Through the repeated capturing (on film and in byte) of locations through time, we are able to navigate a changing landscape in urban Durham.

An earlier version of the film was exhibited at the Golden Belt Artist Studios for the months of September and October 2008 as part of the Triangle Cartography Convergence.  Based on the success of its exhibition, Video Cartography Durham also screened for Duke University’s History Department in March 2009.

Footage used in the video was sourced from Chapel Hill, North Carolina resident Ronald Bryant (1947 footage from 16mm film), the North Carolina State Archives (1942 aerial footage by H. Lee Waters [MPF86]), Google Maps, and Google Earth. Contemporary video footage was shot with a Sony DCR-HC28 purchased with funding provided by a grant from the Triangle Community Foundation. All video was compiled and edited in Final Cut Pro.

Genuine vital integrity does not consist in satisfaction, in attainment, in arrival. As Cervantes said long since, “The road is always better than the inn.” The very name is a disturbing one; this time calls itself “modern,” that is to say, final, definitive, in whose presence all the rest is mere preterite, humble preparation and aspiration towards this present. That faith in modern culture was a gloomy one. It meant that to-morrow was to be in all essentials similar to to-day, that progress consisted merely in advancing, for all time to be, along a road identical to the one already under our feet. Such a road is rather a kind of elastic prison which stretches on without ever setting us free.

Nowadays we no longer know what is going to happen to-morrow in our world, and this causes us a secret joy; because that very impossibility of foresight, that horizon ever open to all contingencies, constitute authentic life, the true fullness of our existence.

— José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

 
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why I chose the Sony Reader instead of a Kindle

by: Phillip Barron - February 7th, 2011   Filed under: Uncategorized 13 Comments

UPDATE: I have since sold the Reader and moved on to the Kindle. Read why.

While living in Ecuador last year, I realized the appeal of ebooks. To play on ZipCar‘s motto, ebooks are books when you want them, where ever you are.*

We’re spoiled in the US by the relative omnipresence of cheap paperbacks, whether used or new. By comparison to the US, hardbacks and paperbacks are difficult to come by in Latin America, even if you are looking for books in Spanish. Books in English are not only more rare, they are much more expensive as well. But, when I had finished reading the books I had taken with me — including Bolaño’s 898-page tome 2666 — and had a hankering to re-read Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I fired up my laptop and purchased the Kindle version. I read it on the Kindle App on my iPhone. It was my first ebook experience.

While I would have preferred not to read it on a backlit screen, after setting the page color to a paperback-esque yellow and the font to a size that would neither strain my eyes nor require me to change pages every few words, I sat back and accepted Nick Carraway’s invitation to the cloistered, vapid, monochrome parties of the 1920′s unrestrained materialism. “Turning” the pages by swiping my thumb to the left felt oddly natural, and by the time I was a few chapters in, I was simply reading, with little to no attention paid to the medium.

So after returning to the US, I considered picking up a Kindle Wireless. Several family members and friends have Kindles, and I held them, read a few pages of what ever they were reading, and played around with their features. Eventually, however, I decided to pass. I was happy to be back in the land of cheap paperbacks, and I wasn’t yet convinced that I would be able to find everything I would want to read in an ebook format.

My mind returned again and again to the convenience of carrying (not just a book, but) a library in my hand. I remembered the ease with which I called up the book I wanted to read. And so, I started looking again at Kindles. This time, however, I needed to learn more about how it all worked. And by the time I was ready to buy an ebook reader, I had talked myself out of the Kindle and into getting a Sony Reader Touch edition, the PRS-650 model. Here’s why; for me, it came down to three things.

First, and most importantly, the Sony supports more formats, including epub. epub is becoming the industry standard as well as the standard that libraries are adopting as they roll out digital lending programs, it’s one of the formats in which you can buy books through the Google eBookstore, and it does not necessarily have DRM (the digital rights management lock on books). In fact, “the official EPUB standard does not include any specifications for DRM, however, most EPUB distributors at this time are using the Adobe ADEPT DRM system.” Amazon will be forced to adopt epub at some point, and they will likely just “turn on” epub support through a firmware update. But so far, they have not. Kindle books must come from the Kindle store. Which means that most of the books you will be reading on a Kindle are books you pay for.

Specfically, epub is the format that public libraries are adopting. Many city libraries already offer patrons the option to check out ebooks, but you have to have an ereader that supports the lending formats. Kindles do not currently support book lending, so some of the more clunky iterations of ebook lending require patrons to check out library-owned Kindles on which the ebooks reside. At the end of the two week lending period, patrons are required to return the Kindle to the library. With epub books, however, libraries are able to offer ebook downloads (without requiring the patron’s presence in the library) via the patron’s library account.

And in 2012, we should see the first large-scale roll out of academic press ebook programs. “Large-scale e-book platforms organized by JSTOR, Project MUSE, Oxford University Press, and a consortium led by several midsize presses are all on the verge of going live, ” says Jennifer Howard in a January 2011 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. While JSTOR and others have not yet committed to a format, academic presses are more likely to adopt a platform that serves a greater number of ereaders (i.e. .epub) than a format that serves only one (i.e. the Kindle’s proprietary .mobi and .AZW)

So, getting an ereader with epub support was a no brainer for me.

As for the issues surrounding DRM, while necessary to ensure artists can make a living from their work, the technology of enforcement always feels a few steps behind – morally and technologically. I am more than a little irritated that I can not transfer the Kindle version of The Great Gatsby, purchased to read on my iPhone, to my Sony Reader. I have read about software scripts that crack the DRM, allowing you to strip the DRM’s lock, then reformat the azw file using Calibre. Considering that I own two paperback copies and a hardback of The Great Gatsby in addition to the ebook, I will feel no qualms transferring a “cracked’ copy to my Sony Reader once I figure out the nuances of the KindleUnSwindle. The relative ease with which you can crack the DRM on ebooks seems to be bark with no bite.**

Second, I wanted my ereader experience to preserve what’s best about the book reading experience and build on it. I think books are already based on fantastic technology. But as I said above, I also see the advantage of being able to carry a library with me – to the café, on vacation, or when I travel.

I knew that I was looking for an ereader with eInk. I spend enough hours of the day looking at backlit screens. And the touch-screen finger swipe feels natural for turning pages. I had gotten used to it on the iPhone, and I felt that it would have taken me a long time to get used to clicking a button to turn a page. Buttons are characteristic of devices, and I wanted my reading experience to remain as closely connected to turning pages as possible.

I also wanted to retain the ability to highlight passages and take notes, but I didn’t want to be distracted by the endless possibilities of what I could do with the ebook reader. On my new Reader, I’ve got highlighting and bookmarking pages down, but the Sony Reader does not have any internet connection — a blessing and a curse. I wanted something that is designed for the reading experience only, and none of my paperbacks have WIFI. But, I see, too, the advantages of being able to sync highlighted sections with something online. Something I recently noticed is that, if I buy books through Google’s bookstore, then in addition to the epub file I download, I have the option to read the books online. I would never want to read the book on my laptop, in a browser, but it’s great to have laptop access to the books when I need to search through them.

First book on my first ereader

All Things Shining, my first book on the Sony Reader

Third, aesthetics. The Sony Reader is the only ebook reader I looked at with an aluminum (rather than plastic) body. It feels more solid and more sturdy in my hand without feeling any heavier than the Kindle or others. My sense is that the Sony Reader’s body will be more durable over time. And frankly, I think the brushed aluminum body looks better than the plastic framing the Kindle, Nook, or Kobo.

So far, I’m very happy with it. The pages may “turn” a fraction of a second more slowly than the Kindle, but there is less lag-time than with the Nook or Kobo. Sony makes a smaller version of the touchscreen Reader, called the Pocket, but it felt too small in my big hands. If I had smaller hands, the Pocket would indeed have been more attractive, as I am already inclined to leave my messenger bag at home and carry only my Reader with me to work. The Pocket could slip in a jacket pocket, whereas my PRS-650 Touch Edition is a bit too large for that. Instead, I just carry it in a protective case of its own.

No doubt, hyperbole is the BEST form of argument. In the last few years, I was one of those people who said many times that I would NEVER use an ereader. I’m too much a bibliophile; I like the feel, the smell, the low-tech, off-line nature of the classic book. But, all things in moderation… ereading is an experiment for me. The eInk screen is beautiful and simple, I am getting used to the ability to carry multiple books with me, without having to carry an internet-connected device (i.e. a tool of distraction). The black and white screen, the lack of wifi, and the simple, unadorned look of the Sony Reader Touch edition all appeal to the closeted and confused luddite buried in my soul.

*I realize that the “where ever you are” is a little more complicated than I’ve presented it. Many vendors won’t sell ebooks in certain countries, measures they enforce by blocking IP addresses from those countries. Given, however, the ease with which one can set up proxy servers or VPNs to make one’s computer appear as though it is within a country that’s selling the book (or service) you want, I don’t consider this a real restriction. Like DRM, it’s bark with no bite.

** The problem with easy-to-crack DRM is piracy. Skud, someone I met at THAT Camp SF, has two great posts on ebook piracy.
http://infotrope.net/2011/02/01/ebook-discussions-flying-under-the-radar/
http://infotrope.net/2011/02/05/more-on-those-ebook-discussions/

 
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

All Things Shining, review/interview on Colbert Report

by: Phillip Barron - February 3rd, 2011   Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sean Dorrance Kelly
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

In the video above (aired last night), Colbert interviews Sean Dorrance Kelly on his new book, co-written with Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. The authors discuss literature and philosophy from Homer to Jesus, Dante to Descartes, and Nietzsche to David Foster Wallace, in their quest to find what (if anything) is sacred in our age and what might be an answer to the collective nihilism they believe permeates contemporary western culture.

The authors’ reconceptualization of god is as exciting a reason as any to read the book. Their argument rests on the suggestion that our pluralist culture would be well served by embracing the polytheistic pantheon of Homeric literature. “A god, in Homer’s terminology,” Dreyfus and Kelly write, “is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.” With this understanding, a god, similar to Camus’s conception of the absurd, is a relationship. The relationship consists in what inspires us to right action, and right action is that which the situation calls for. I find this an exciting interpretation of Homer’s gods because it helps build a bridge between the virtues shining through Homer’s heroes and the system of ethics (later called virtue ethics) developed by Aristotle. While neither Homer (nor the authors of All Things Shining) invest much in the moderation central to Aristotle’s ethics, they all emphasize what stands at the core of any non-nihilist moral theory: that ethics is premised on shared social experiences. The authors’ diagnosis of contemporary western nihilism focuses on the dangers of shouldering the responsibility of developing life’s guidelines in isolation (i.e. without any shared, social sense of what is sacred).

Lest it sound retrograde on the religion, the book comes across not as pantheistic or even polytheistic, except to suggest that everyone will hold something(s) most sacred in their lives. In the book, the authors argue that even works of art can perform the function of gods in a society, such as the function The Oresteia served in the 5th century BC. Aeschylus uses the trilogy of plays to explain how Greek society moved from Homer’s polytheism to the city-based, earth-bound justice of which late Greek culture was so proud.

The book demonstrates what I perceive to be the strength and weaknesses of philosophy: through simple premises and logical arguments, one can reach conclusions that depart wildly from a culture’s expectations. The authors begin in an uncontroversial place — that contemporary nihilism is damaging to our culture — and end up recommending Homeric polytheism as a possible cure. But the study of philosophy trains one’s mind to be open to conclusions one doesn’t expect. I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys insightful commentary on the traditional western literary canon, thoughtful reconceptualization of religion, and the role of the sacred in an atheistic culture.

 
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

120th Philosophers’ Carnival

by: Phillip Barron - January 31st, 2011   Filed under: Uncategorized 5 Comments

It’s been a month of Carnivals here at nicomachus.net. First the inaugural edition of the Digital Humanities Blog Carnival, and today the 120th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival. This is my second time hosting the Philosophers’ Carnival, and I am happy to be back, especially given the number of quality submissions.

To start things off, John Wilkins presents Phylogeny, induction, and the straight rule of homology posted at Evolving Thoughts.

Luke presents The Goal of Philosophy Should Be to Kill Itself posted at Common Sense Atheism.

Martin presents The Emperor’s Gnu Clothes posted at In Living Color.

We have six posts on the history of philosophy and philosphers:

And five posts on ethics, political, and practical philosophy:

Chris Hallquist presents a book review, Review of Gary Gutting’s What Philosophers Know, part 2 posted at The Uncredible Hallq.

Michael S. Pearl presents The Great Danger that is Creationism posted at The Kindly Ones.

In ESP and Xphi, Andrew Cullison wades into the controversy surrounding a respected academic journal’s forthcoming publication of an article concerning extra sensory perception.

We rarely see much creative writing in the Philosophers’ Carnival, but Chris Bateman reminds us that the father of philosopher wrote dialogues. In a Platonic vein, Bateman presents Pluto and Eris – a dialogue posted at Only a Game.

Matt Whitlock challenges us to think about The Claims of Fiction posted at A Rigid Designator.

And to wrap it up, there are three posts on problems posed by one of my undergraduate professors, Ed Gettier:

It should be noted that I received several more entries than made it into the Carnival. If the primary purpose of philosophy is analysis, but the primary purpose of one’s prescriptive blog post is to garner search engine traffic (as evidenced by its name, “17 ways to…”, “12 such and such you need to…”), then such a post is not a good candidate for the Philosophers’ Carnival. Please, spam posters and content farm bloggers, don’t waste our time.

Similarly, I received several posts that, for wont of classification share a familial relation with the publications in the self help section of the book store. There may be many and various wonders of the power of positive thinking, but none of the blog posts I received had much in the way of philosophical analysis to offer.

Thanks everyone, and now I turn things over to Enigmania.

 
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Digital Humanities Blog Carnival Vol. 1, Issue 1

by: Phillip Barron - January 17th, 2011   Filed under: digital humanities 6 Comments

Welcome to the January 17, 2011 edition — the inaugural edition — of the Digital Humanities Blog Carnival.

DH wordle

I’m excited to share with you eighteen blog posts from the last month, each of which carves out some corner of the digital humanities for closer examination. Whether the posts highlight interesting projects, solicit help on others, or offer critical examination of just how and why technology is affecting traditional humanities research, the posts gathered below offer a glimpse into the issues with which those who self-identify as digital humanists concern themselves.

I solicited submissions on any topic in the Digital Humanities and asked people submitting a blog post to categorize their submission as either a Criticism, Call for support, Project Highlight, or Funding Opportunity. The eighteen posts shared below represent the first three categories. I received none that could be called a Funding Opportunity. While this is disappointing, since finding diverse and consistent sources of funding is a need for everyone in the DH, it is also not surprising. I hope that in the future, however, more funding opportunities can be identified and shared via this carnival.

As scholars, the limits of our capacity for analysis are often defined by the tools we have at our disposal. As a result, innovation in the digital humanities often revolves around the digital tools we can bring to bear on our work. Perhaps the most exciting new tool released in the last month is the Google’s Ngram Viewer, a tool empowering the public to search more than 5 million volumes of text, digitized by Google. (citation)

For example, tracking the rise and fall of use of the term Nature, as opposed simply to nature, could add evidentiary support to a literary scholar trying to pinpoint beginning and end dates of British Romanticism. Distant reading is controversial and scholars who employ such techniques go to lengths to justify the value of their findings.

nature vs. Nature

Nature vs. nature

In Initial Thoughts on the Google Books Ngram Viewer and Datasets, Dan Cohen shares his reflections on how Google’s Ngram Viewer might be useful to humanities scholars.

Mike at The Aporetic offers thoughts on the (limited) value of Google’s Ngram Viewer in The Segway of Digital Searching.

And in Online collaboration in the humanities, H Niyazi offers an introductory post showcasing the use of Twitter and RSS feeds as research aids. Describing the submission, Niyazi says “an experience in an art history research query about a Botticelli painting is used as an example. The post also includes discussion of art history centric search engines.”

As a result of these posts, for the future I will add Tools as a fifth category of submission.

Criticism
Whether he intended to be provocative or not, William Pannapacker‘s guest post at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm, “Digital Humanities Triumphant?,” turned him into January’s gadfly of the Digital Humanities. Throughout the blogosphere, Pannapacker’s thoughts on the Digital Humanities’ representation at the 2011 MLA conference provoked the most responses.

Stéfan Sinclair interprets and responds to Pannapacker in Digital Humanities and Stardom.

In The (DH) Stars Come Out in LA, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum responds to Pannapacker and looks at the role of “stardom” in this nascent field of study.

In Navigating DH for Cultural Heritage Professionals, Sheila A. Brennan also responds to Pannapacker by offering several suggestions for how newcomers can gain a foothold in the digital humanities.

In Digital Humanities Silos and Outreach Perian Sully also meditates on Pannapacker’s post and reaches the conclusion that Twitter may be contributing to DH’s perception of academic insularity. “Stop using Twitter as the vehicle for outreach,” Sully offers.

But in defense of the ubiquitous platform for conversational brevity, H Niyazi makes the case for how Twitter enabled two scholars to collaborate long-distance on art history research. Niyazi says Giorgione, herons and a Carpaccio Knight is a “case study of Twitter based collaboration between independent researchers in the UK and Australia, which resulted in the discovery of a rare iconological marker in a Venetian Renaissance painting.”

In The Four Sons of digital curation, Dorothea Salo uses a parable to explain the need for more and better metadata standards in digital curation.

Call for Support
The post Proposal for THATCamp Project: SF Bay Area and its running commentary describe a project-based follow up to the Fall 2010 THATCamp SF Bay Area. John Fox says, “the idea is to bring to bear the many talents of our community to look at the changing fortunes of a specific SF neighborhood.”

Next up, in Digital Humanities: First, Second and Third Wave, David Berry offers a brief summary of the first two waves of the digital humanities development and a call to map out where the third wave may go (and should go).

Project Highlight
On the American Historical Association’s website, Robert B. Townsend offers in Perspectives on History an analysis of how new media is reshaping the work of historians.

In An Open, Digital Professoriat, Scott Jaschik from Inside Higher Ed weighs in on the MLA coverage and asks whether or not new media can change (or is changing) things in the humanities.

In Lorenzo Thomas, “Otis,” Al Filreis, tireless purveyor of recorded, digitized, and archived poetry readings, notes on his blog an exciting new entry on PennSound: a recording of Lorenzo Thomas reading his updated version of The Odyssey. “This is designed for today, it’s the Odyssey for attention-deficit people,” Thomas says, reassuring his audience that he is not about begin a recitation of Homer’s epic. Listen to Thomas read “Otis” on Filreis’ blog or at the PennSound website. The post appears, by chance, while I am reading the Robert Fagles’s wonderful translation of The Odyssey, and is a welcome reminder of each generation’s ability to interpret and find meaning in this classic.

With “A different perspective on digital history,” Marcin Wilkowski launches a new blog and shares his hope that digital history is a serious movement in the humanities, not merely a buzzword or fad.

In Militieregisters.nl and Velehanden.nl, Ben Brumfield highlights a project begun by Stadarchief Amsterdam to enlist the public in indexing manuscript conscription records. Brumfield writes, “I think the project takes an innovative federated approach to scanning materials from multiple archives, as well as a fascinating pay-or-wash-dishes approach to public funding.”

Last but not least, in Philosophers interviewed on radio show, yours truly has a post highlighting a digital humanities project I managed while I worked at the National Humanities Center. The Soundings Project is in its final stages of development, and this post is meant to demonstrate how humanities scholars might find their own point of entry into the vast collection of recordings.

 
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

OCR in Google Docs makes transcription simple

by: Phillip Barron - January 14th, 2011   Filed under: digital humanities 3 Comments

The other night, while running an online seminar in professional development for teachers of US history, I had a request for the text of the Nebraska folk song with which historian Louis Warren concluded his presentation, “Settling with Debt: Western Development in the Railroad Era.” All Louis had with him was a hard copy of the song’s lyrics, which were printed at the bottom of his last page of notes. He was happy to share the text, but he understandably did not want to let go of his notes. So, I snapped a photo with with my phone, focusing on the bottom portion of the page.

This morning, I opened the original image in Picasa for some simple tweaks. First, I cropped out all irrelevant, surrounding text, and then brightened the image and heightened the contrast. The result is a more white background and darker, clearer text.

Next, I uploaded the image to Google Docs. I had read that Google Docs now supports OCR (optical character recognition), and this was my first opportunity to test it. When you upload an image and want Google to attempt OCR, be sure to check the box to convert text in images and PDFs to documents (see below).

Google Docs OCR

The result, as you can see in the image below, is an image in the top portion of the page and editable text in the bottom portion.

OCR makes editing simple - Nebraska folk song

Toward the bottom of my photograph, the image bends a little. I’m not sure if this is an effect of the wide-angle lens on my phone or perhaps I did not lay the sheet of paper down flat on a table. Nonetheless, the angled lines of the image cause the OCR process not to accurately recognize the points at which one line ends and another begins.

OCR makes editing simple - Nebraska folk song

I went back to the image in Picasa, straightened it, then uploaded it once again to Google Docs. The straightened image produced better results.

To finish it up, all I needed to do was clean up some odd spacing in the text (see image below).

While this folk song presents a simple set of text, an amount that surely would not have been a burden to retype, this sample demonstrated to me the value of an accurate OCR process. I’m happy to have this tool in my belt when I need to take on a larger, longer transcription project.

OCR makes editing simple - Nebraska folk song

Hurrah for Lane County, the land of the free,
The home of the grasshopper, bedbug and flea,
I’ll holler its praises, and sing of its fame,
While starving to death on a government claim.

My clothes are all ragged, my language is rough,
My bread is case-hardened, both solid and tough,
The dough is scattered all over the room,
And the floor would get scared at the sight of a broom

How happy I am on my government claim,
I’ve nothing to lose, I’ve nothing to gain
I’ve nothing to eat and I’ve nothing to wear,
And nothing from nothing is honest and fair.

- traditional folk song, Nebraska

 
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

hosting the Philosophers’ Carnival, January 31

by: Phillip Barron - January 9th, 2011   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

I’m busy hosting blog Carnivals this month.

Socrates, always in a confrontational mindset

It’s been widely publicized already that on Monday, January 17th, this website hosts the inaugural episode of a new Digital Humanities Blog Carnival (submission deadline January 15th, see here for more details). What hasn’t yet been publicized is that on January 31st, I also play host to the Philosophers’ Carnival. It has been a while since I last hosted an episode, since May 2007 to be exact. And in that time, the Philosophers’ Carnival has really taken off as a platform for discussing some of the more emergent issues in the world of academic philosophy.

Submission deadline for the January 31st Carnival is the Friday before (January 28th) at 5:00pm PST. Use the BlogCarnival’s submission page or the form below.

I welcome submissions on any topic of academic philosophy, but please, no self-help prescriptions.

Your Name (required)

Your Email Address (required)

Your Twitter handle (optional)

Title of submission:

URL of submission (i.e. permalink URL of the particular blog post to be considered for the Carnival):

URL of the blog:

Does your submission fall into one of these categories?

Any additional comments on your submission:

To help me prevent spam, enter the text below as you see it:

 
Tags: , , , , ,

Philosophers interviewed on radio show

by: Phillip Barron - January 9th, 2011   Filed under: digital humanities 2 Comments

Long before Philosophy Talk hit the Internet, even before the popular WHHY radio talk program Fresh Air with Terry Gross hit the airwaves, there was Soundings. Soundings was a popular weekly radio talk show, produced from 1980 to 1997. Recorded and produced at the National Humanities Center, Soundings host Wayne Pond interviewed many of the Center’s fellows as well as a bevy of politicians, artists, and writers who passed through the Center’s doors during the show’s 17-year run. While production closed down just before the advent of the multi-media Internet, the evergreen content of the discussions is the sort of thing that is perfect for digital archiving.

With a varied guest list that includes such luminaries as Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty as well as hundreds of scholars who are not household names, the Soundings episodes are a collective document of American intellectual life in the latter part of the 20th century. I had the honor of working on the team that undertook digitally preserving the Soundings archive — transferring recordings from vinyl and tape to digital format — while I worked at the National Humanities Center. And in the course of sifting through the 862 episodes and thousands of interviewees, I was most excited to find an interview with Gregory Vlastos. If you don’t know him, Vlastos is the man largely responsible for renewal in interest in ancient Greek philosophy because of his application of analytic techniques to the dialogues of Plato. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher is one of the best books written on Socrates, Plato, and the problems introduced by the literary nature of our existing record of Socrates’ contributions to the field of philosophy. In a 1981 interview, you can listen to Vlastos discussing the life of Socrates (see below).

There are many more radio interviews with professional philosophers hosted by The Soundings Project, the website re-broadcasting the recordings via streaming or downloadable mp3s. Browse the list of episodes tagged Philosophy, most of which include interviews with professional philosophers who spent some time at the National Humanities Center between 1980 and 1997 and agreed to be interviewed by Wayne Pond, and enjoy the philosophical debate or discussion brought back to the public.

“Vlastos: Socrates in his Time” March 8, 1981

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

 
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

2264 miles in 2 minutes

by: Phillip Barron - January 3rd, 2011   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment


Most of us travel during the holiday season. Maybe it’s the stillness of winter that urges us to move ourselves around, since there isn’t much going on around us in the natural world. My friend Eric Shanks, a talented videographer, made this beautiful meditation on motion based on his holiday travels.

Thanks Eric for sharing with all of us some of the beauty we might otherwise miss in all our hurrying from here to there.

 
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,