Right now I only follow a handful of bloggers who are faculty or students in American Studies programs (including related fields), and I’d like to form a list that provides a cross-section of what they’re up to. If you are an AMST blogger, have a class that’s blogging or know of one (or 10!), leave comments and contact me with URLs. I’ll be sure to share the master list.
Mac users should be aware of dashboard widgets, which are small and contained applications that are displayed on a single screen to allow you to see a lot of useful data at once. For example, Apple computers ship with built in weather, calendar, and calculator widgets — and there are other widgets for sports scores or USPS shipping data. Users can download additional widgets to customize their experience, including many in their online directory. It’s a convenient way to aggregate information in a form that’s both visual, and a keystroke away. And while widgets aren’t anything new, I wanted to share how easy it is to create them.
The video below uses developer software from Apple called Dashcode, and a Twitter account. This project was an outgrowth of my Rochester History twitter account – which is place that I occasionally write facts about Rochester History and users ‘follow’ the account. But thinking bigger, I wanted to create a Dashboard widget for people who aren’t on Twitter. It took only minutes.
Building Dashboard Widgets with Dashcode from Dave Lester on Vimeo.
My example used Twitter, but you could use a very similar process to handle many different kinds of data. It’s all based upon having an RSS feed available. So, if your library catalog outputs an RSS feed then you could easily create a widget of newly added books. Or if it doesn’t, you could use Twitter in a similar way to provide a data back-end. What’s also neat, and I didn’t show in the video, is that you can easily embed media content from a feed as well. A great application of this would be combine a widget with Omeka, which out of the box supplies an RSS feed that’s readable in all themes. A site-specific dashboard widget could pull from the Omeka items browse page and visually display the most-recently added objects to the digital archive. What’s new in the archive? Let’s take a look at our dashboard. Or a professor could build a widget of class assignments using a feed from ScholarPress Courseware. The possibilities are endless.
Do you use widgets for anything useful?
In Part One I wrote about Polar Rose, a Firefox toolbar that performs facial recognition on photos loaded in your browser. Polar Rose programmatically creates associations between individual’s faces that you could have easily overlooked, and opens new possibilities for how we organize and search digital photographs. Equally as important, Polar Rose is free, built partially on open source software, and uses crowd sourcing to seed their database of recognized faces (read Part One for an overview of other emerging tools). What’s significant to digital humanities is that it breaks from the text-based search paradigm that dictates our research process by using visual patterns to query images, rather than search text querying metatext.
When first approaching the tool, my instinct was that Polar Rose – or an abstraction of it, could be useful to digital archivists. In the age of Google Books and with increasing pressure from patrons to see digital copies of archival content, archival objects that have already been organized and described in a finding aid at the collection-level are thrown into an item-level digital archive on the web. How do I search that content? How are those objects described for me, as the researcher, to discover them? When finding aid keywords become item-level tags, how accurate are my searches going to be about the specific image that I’m viewing? That can vary. Polar Rose and its ability to recognize individuals in photos begins to describe the “ofness” of a photo, in contrast to larger categorical key words that describe the “aboutness” of a photo and may be in a finding aid. Simply put, it provides a different form of description — one that is unique at the item-level that may be useful to researchers. The fact that Polar Rose performs actions automatically could begin to free up time for archivists and augment the information used to search those digital objects.
Polar Rose isn’t only useful to digital archivists though. It’s easy to see its practical application in small collections of photos — even on a consumer-level. Local historians would likely have luck with this type of tool as well, if there were enough reoccurring faces for Polar Rose to recognize. Family photos? I’d love to have software than can automatically keep track of the faces of my extended family. Best of all, Polar Rose is built on top of some open source tools, although it’s unclear how much of it could be useful for creating a more generalized application.
The integration of visual search into archives may still be a ways off, and I’m not suggesting that Polar Rose is by any means perfect right now, but I’d be interested in what my colleagues think about visual search and its potential. Similar to how text-mining can help us get “inside” written works, visual search may be able to do the same for images, while allowing us to search based upon images themselves rather than text.
