Monthly Archives: December 2011

Digitization Services

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Over the last several months I have been looking for and comparing digitization services for audio, film, and for images (slides and more). I have been doing this as part of the ongoing work at the Language and Culture Archive to preserve the linguistic and cultural heritage of the people groups SIL International has encountered and served. I have not come to any hard and fast conclusions on “what is the best service provider”. This is partially because we are still looking at various out sourcing options and looking at multiple mediums is time consuming. Then there is also the issue of looking for archival standards and the creation of corporate policy for the digitization of these materials. I am presenting several names here as the results of several searches for digitization services providers.

Last month I was passed a short film on the BBC highlighting one of these providers. The short is well worth the watch because it highlights the reason and madness behind some of the work of digitization.

Profesional Services

Several of the companies which have come to the top of the list.

Doing it on our own

Another option the Archive has been looking at is to determine if the the quantity of the work is cost prohibitive to have professional done. Meaning that, we would be better served by buying the equipment and doing the work in house. So in the process I have also been looking at people’s experience with various kinds of equipment and technology used in scanning.

I have been reading a lot of user stories like Dave Dyer’s reflection on Slide Transfer and MacIntouch Reader Reports from 26 April 2006 on Slide Digitization.

Drupal – The conversion….

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I have been a WordPress fan since 2005. I have run several sites using WordPress simultaneously since then. Running WordPress is dead easy. I can wrap my head around it. This past January, a colleague was ecstatic about the release of Drupal 7. I was a bit less ecstatic. (More the I'm glad you are excited, kind of guy.) Then I saw the new admin interface and my interest piqued. So I downloaded a few modules and bam! I saw the power. Amazing. Totally a reckless learning curve but still something beautiful.
Drupal Learning Curve Text
My story was much the same as Kevin Dees. [1] Kevin Dees. 9 November 2011. Is WordPress an Anti-Pattern?. http://kevindees.cc/2011/11/is-wordpress-an-anti-pattern . [Accessed: 27 November 2011] [Link] This fall I went to Drupal Camp Austin and was able to wrap my head around a few more things. (Mostly things which showed me there was still a lot to learn.) So from time to time you will see that I will post some things I am learning about Drupal.

Drush for WordPress

While I was at Austin I kept hearing about Drush. Then when I got back home I resized that I needed to download a lot of modules to work on a particular web site. I could do this several times or I could learn to use Drush with Drush Make. Drush is a command line shell and scripting interface for Drupal. Once I found the power of it I started looking for something similar in WordPress. I don't think there is anything exactly like Drush but there are two projects [2] Leo Nelson. 24 October 2011. Drush for WordPress. http://www.leonelson.com/2011/10/24/drush-for-wordpress . [Accessed: 27 November 2011] [Link] worth checking out check out:

  1. WP-CLI or WordPress Command Line
  2. WPshell

However it does not seem that there is a Drush Make for WordPress. Although there has been some thought about how to make Drush Make "cross-platform" and work with other CMSes like WordPress. Wouldn't it be nice if WordPress developers got handed a tool from the Drupal community....

References

References
↑1 Kevin Dees. 9 November 2011. Is WordPress an Anti-Pattern?. http://kevindees.cc/2011/11/is-wordpress-an-anti-pattern . [Accessed: 27 November 2011] [Link]
↑2 Leo Nelson. 24 October 2011. Drush for WordPress. http://www.leonelson.com/2011/10/24/drush-for-wordpress . [Accessed: 27 November 2011] [Link]

Family for Christmas

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This Christmas Becky and I spent some time with family. All of my brothers and sisters were there and so were my mother's two daughter-in-laws.

We had lots of fun together. We went and saw Sherlock Holmes 2 together.

After watching Sherlock 2

All the Patersons After watching Sherlock 2

The Five Boys

The Five Boys

After which we went out to eat.

Jed stroking his Chin

Jon Stroking his Chin

It was good to see my brothers and sisters talking, laughing and smiling.

Jeremiah Smiling

Moriah and her Scarf

Moriah and her Scarf

We did a lot of game playing...

Playing Mario Cart.

One of the interesting stories about this Christmas was that my bother Joe, sold his Xbox to buy our sister Monica a Wii. Monica really wanted a Wii. Jed, didn't know that Joe sold his Xbox and bought Joe some Games for the Xbox. It reminded me of the story of "The Gift of the Magi". [1] William Sydney Porter (O. Henry). The Gift Of The Magi http://www.online-literature.com/donne/1014/ [Link]

Playing Mario Cart

Hugh and Jed Playing Axis and Allies

Hugh and Jed Playing Axis and Allies

Playing Munchkins

Playing Munchkins

Playing Carcassonne

Playing Carcassonne

There were a lot of interesting interactions over our time together.
We learned that all of us like to play the game but we each play it differently. Some:

  • Play the game to win.
  • Play the game for fun.
  • Play the game to keep certain others from winning.
  • Play the game for the game's sake.

There was lots of silliness.

Over Lip

Over Lip

Jed Modeling his new hat and gloves.

Jed Modeling his new hat and gloves.

Hugh and Becky

Hugh and Becky

And we saw Jeremiah smile.

Jeremiah actually did smile

Jeremiah actually did smile

Sleeping...

Sleeping... There seem to be a lot of pictures of Jeremiah doing this...

References

References
↑1 William Sydney Porter (O. Henry). The Gift Of The Magi http://www.online-literature.com/donne/1014/ [Link]

Importing Facebook Status

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I have a thing for wanting to know what I have said all in one place… But I would like to be able to see it by location of the comment. So I have thought about bringing my FaceBook comments into my WordPress install. The problem has been that if I bring them in as a post I have to not send them back to FaceBook (Like I do with all my other posts). So I now import them as a custom post type. But my current theme does not support custom post types out of the box. Too bad for K2 (It seems that as a theme K2 is not keeping up with WordPress.). To do this I looked FeedWordPress as recommended here.

hResume for Academics

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For a couple of months I have been looking into options for presenting academics' CVs on the web in semantic xHtml. Of the options out there hResume rises to the surface. There are several reasons for this:
  1. Popularity of hResume in presenting CV's and Resumes.
  2. Microformats are about the interoperability of data through semantic markup - Academics generally want people to cite them, and resume publishers usually hope to have resume users and readers.
  3. Semantic markup of content allows for the semantic styling of content.
The largest challenge in implementing academic CVs in hResueme versus business resumes in hResume format is citations from publications and presentations along with that is the semantic markup of citations with standards like COinS (though COinS might not be true Semantic Markup). However, there are other challenges too. For instance how to categorize the sections of a CV. I work mostly with linguists and with the CV sections that linguists use. Therefore, I may be missing some crucial section of a CV as used by another academic discipline.CVs like resumes are unique to each individual so these categories are an abstraction and not all sections will be in every CV. These abstractions are included the following chart along with a mapping of how these sections are (in my opinion) best expressed in the hResume microformat. hResume builds on other microformats, like hCalendar and hCard. So I have also mapped the elements of an hResume back to the building block microformat (per this list on microformat's website). These dependency formats are also presented. In the last column I have presented some remarks specific to that section.
Sections of a Linguist's CVSections in hResumeinclusion in hResumeBuilding blockMicroformat statusOutstanding issue or question
Contact infoContact infoObligatorymust use hCard; should use <address> + hCardhCard is a Recommendationhow does the adr and the geo relate to the contact info or hCard?
Personal Info
Not designatedWhat would fit into this section which would not fit into the Contact info section? (married status) But that might be able to be expressed through XFN, unless the spouse is unnamed.
Photo
Not designatedShould hmedia be used for this photo?
SummarySummaryOptionalNone - No building block indicated.None
EducationEducationOptionalOne or more hcalendar events with the class name 'education', with an embedded hCard indicating the name of school, address of school etc.hCalendar is a Recommendation
Education Abroad (Could be considered a sub-category of "Education")Education One or more hcalendar events with the class name 'education', with an embedded hCard indicating the name of school, address of school etc.hCalendar is a Recommendation
Research interests
Not designated.One could argue that this might be related to "skills", or marked with the rel-tag format.
Positions Held
ExperienceOptionalOne or more hcalendar events with the class name 'experience', with an embedded hCard indicating the job title, name of company, address of company etc.hCalendar and hCardThe [hResume] draft should describe a way to handle a series of assignments at various employers within the context of one job working for a contracting, consulting, or temporary firm/agency. per mfreeman (2009)
Field Work
ExperienceOptionalOne or more hcalendar events with the class name 'experience', with an embedded hCard indicating the job title, name of company, address of company etc.hCalendar and hCard, (my recommendation is to also consider using hGeo)Field Work often has a Geo-Location and a language involved so I am not sure if it shouldn't also be marked up with hGeo and some rel-tag to the language.
Language Proficiency
SkillsOptionalrel-tagrel-tag is a Recommendation Often skills have an indication of the level of attainment - hResume does not have this. per ntoll (2007)
Computer Skills
SkillsOptionalrel-tagrel-tag is a Recommendation
Teaching Experience
ExperienceOptionalhCalendar and hCardEmbedding hCard for job title leads to ambiguities. per TobyInk (2010)
Awards & Honors
Not DesignatedSupport for Awards and for Service sections are not currently implemented. per jeffmcneill (2007)
Grants Received
Not DesignatedThis might be considered simular to Awards and Honors. But in most CVs I have seen it is given its own section level.
Publications
publicationsOptionalA lot of work has gone into description or a hCite type of format. But nothing has evolved yet. To this end I have resolved myself to using CoinS. Although the official recomendation is to use the <cite> tag.
Peer Reviewed
publicationsOptional
Articles (PR)
publicationsOptional
Chapters (PR)
publicationsOptional
Books (PR)
publicationsOptional
Monographs (PR)
publicationsOptional
Edited Volumes (PR)publicationsOptional
Not Peer ReviewedpublicationsOptional
Articles (NPR)
publicationsOptional
Chapters (NPR)
publicationsOptional
Books (NPR)
publicationsOptional
Papers (NPR)
publicationsOptional
Presentations
Not DesignatedGenerally these are cited like a publication but put in their own section.
Invited Talks
Not DesignatedGenerally these are cited like a publication but put in their own section.
Dissertations and Thesis supervised.Not designated (but possibly like publications)Generally these should be treated like publications.
Professional Associations
AffiliationsOptionalThe class name affiliation along with an hcard of the organization. hCard is a Recommendation
Professional ContactsNot DesignatedhCard and XFN should be used.hCard is a Recommendation
XFN is a Recommendation		I am not clear on how XFN can be used in this context. But it seems that this is the sort of thing that XFN was created for. There is also still the same objection as mentioned by TobyInk (2010) because there is no way to tell who the primary hCard on the page referes to.
[table-info field “abbreviations_used” not found in table “11” /]

Widget Area in WordPress Admin

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I run a website, wycliffe.me, for redirecting traffic (URL redirector). But I need it to have a CRM sort of component to it. So I added some custom fields to the Posts using Just Custom Fields. (I am using Posts, but I could just as well use a custom post type Custom Post Type UI.) But now I want a summary of some of those fields in a special panel on the back-end. So I have collected some links to read and start hacking.
First I need to create an options page in the admin area: http://buildinternet.com/2010/01/create-custom-option-panels-with-wordpress-2-9/.
Next I need a way to collect the data. So I look for a plugin which can search my database and return fields…. sorta like views for Drupal. And wala there is such a plugin: Query Wrangler. (Query Posts might be another option, but I did not try it.) However, this plugin is not powerful enough. I can not search all the fields created by my other plugins, only my custom fields and content types. More power would be ideal.

Next I need to be able to see the widget in my admin area… so I need to widgetize my options panel. Here is where the Reading is a little fuzzy, ’cause I am not sure if many people do this. (Possibly indicating that there is a better way.)
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-create-new-widget-area?replies=5
http://www.webfroze.com/wordpress/creating-multiple-dynamic-widget-areas-in-wordpress/
http://www.themelab.com/2008/04/18/see-how-easy-it-is-to-widgetize-wordpress-themes/
http://wpengineer.com/307/add-wordpress-dashboard-widgets/
http://wpmu.org/how-to-widgetize-a-page-post-header-or-any-other-template-in-wordpress/

Comment on Open Source development at NASA

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A comment on: http://open.nasa.gov/blog/2011/09/08/open-source-development-at-nasa/

I am all for OpenData and Open.NASA. But how does NASA being a government entity relate to how it “licenses” it’s data and software? What I mean is that, shouldn’t the things being “open sourced” be public domain, rather than licensed content? I agree that creating a license which is not widely recognized is not useful, that is the whole point behind Creative Commons. But are there cases where NASA is “over licensing” content that it shouldn’t because it is the content should be released into the public domain? Reference CC Salon in Jan 2011, Time segment 1:05:00 where Joi Ito talks about the issue. http://blip.tv/creative-commons/creative-commons-salon-mountain-view-what-does-it-mean-to-be-open-in-a-data-driven-world-4725230

What prevents, or what reasons are there for not putting NASA’s data and software, which it releases, in the public domain? Is that not more open?

Pulling text messages off of iPhones

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I had an interesting situation where I wanted to pull off some text messages from my iPhone. I started Googling around and found a few solutions for jailbroken iPhones. But being a good citizen I have not jail broken my iPhone. I did find a solution. It might be the only one… but none the less I found one.

DiskAid

DiskAid is a really nifty little program which grants access to the files and file structure on iPhones, iPod touch and iPads. Additionally, if one has a student email address they can get a free (gratis) educational license.

From a forensics perspective, the iPhone is full of data. The DiskAid guys also had a note on how to disable geo-logging.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x_KzBMMfjk

Open Scholar

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Last year I wrote about Selected Works™ & BePress because I was looking at how SIL International might best display the professional abilities of their personnel. This means putting their CV’s and past project activity in an accessible portfolio. I have also been looking at apps like Bibapp, which pulls info from DSpace. Since sil.org is looking at Drupal as a CMS I recently ran across Open Scholar, with an example by harvard.