Archive forMay, 2007

Episode 07 – History Appliances

30 May, 20076 comments

Bill Turkel joins us on the podcast to discuss his fascinating work on “history appliances,” or the possibility of making history more real by creating physical environments and interfaces that truly immerse us in the past. In the news roundup we ponder whether the opening of Facebook to outside developers means possibly better integration with academic services or merely the end of its pretty interface, applaud Google’s new “universal search” for returning video and other media in addition to text, express skepticism that Google has crushed the market for online term papers, and wonder if a university might soon suffer the same fate as Estonia, which saw its computer networks swamped by “hactivists”–or the Russian government.

Sites mentioned on the podcast:
Digital History Hacks
Dave Lester’s Blog
Seashore
Phixr
Scratch
Place-based Computing

Running time: 45:26

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Categorized under Facebook, Google, programming, search

Episode 06 – Designed to Make You Think

16 May, 20073 comments

Web design guru Jeremy Boggs joins Dan, Tom, and Mills to discuss the past, present, and future of designing websites for academia, museums, and libraries. In the news roundup, we cover a number of situations where information and images have shown up at inopportune times and in inopportune places, including the case of the MySpace photo that got a student in hot water, a chart on a blog that caused a copyright furor, and the “liberation” of class-related documents that got some Harvard students in trouble.

Sites mentioned in the podcast:
Molly.com
SimpleBits
mezzoblue
meyerweb
Color Blindness Simulator

20 Usability Tips for Your Blog
Google Earth Overlays of Greensburg, Kansas
Directory of Open Access Journals

Running Time: 50:24

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Categorized under blogs, copyright, digital humanities, open access, social networking

Episode 05 – Tragedy and Technology

2 May, 2007No comments

We take a break from our normal format to spend the entirety of this episode thinking about the role of technology—its great power to forge social bonds and enable a new kind of memorialization, as well as its unfortunate ability to underscore the separation of those who remain outside social circles—in the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech. We discuss the April 16 Archive website and Omeka, the software that runs it, as well as issues related to social networking sites, online gaming, and text messaging.

Running time: 29:28.

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Categorized under archives, social networking