Is it just us, or does it seem kind of strange to see people walking around campus, the mall, or the local park talking to their phones as if those phones were actually sentient? Even if it is a little strange, Dan, Tom, Amanda, and Mills spent some time speculating about what such “talk to me” apps might mean for museums, historic sites, and other places digital humanists care about. We also had generally nice things to say about the developer build of Windows 8 and about the recent meeting about the Digital Public Library of America. Our discussion of free content then led to a conversation about how much money is being made publishing academic journals by just a few publishing houses and why open access scholarship is so necessary to the circulation of knowledge. Our outrage about journal publishing profits burned itself out when we turned to a brief look at the newly launched (and free) Digital Humanities Now, a CHNM project. We finished with perhaps the world’s shortest conversation about Google+. Why? Give a listen and find out.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

In Public It’s Rude, In Private It’s Creepy
Why Indoor Navigation is so Hard
Building Windows 8
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview
DPLA: First Things First
Copyright Office on Mass Digitization
Economics of Open Access Publishing

Running time: 58:45
Download the .mp3

Related articles

• Historypin Adds an Android App to View Old Map Imagery as You Walk (freetech4teachers.com)
• Let Historypin be your guide (google-latlong.blogspot.com)

No related posts.

In this episode of Digital Campus, Tom, Mills, and Amanda (sans Dan) touch briefly on the passing of Steve Jobs and discuss Apple’s announcement of iOS5, the release of the Kindle Fire and other new Kindle products, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Project Directors meeting, and one university’s brief ban on social media sites. We also agree that “Nickerson” probably isn’t the best name for a razor company.

Links:

• Jobs, Apple co-founder and visionary, is dead, New York Times
• Apple releases iOS5, CNET News
• Amazon unveils $199 Android Kindle Fire tablet, $99 e-ink Kindle Touch, Ars Technica
• The Promise of Digital Humanities, Inside Higher Ed
• Back in Blackout, Inside Higher Ed

Running time: 41:35
Download the .mp3

Remember when Joshua Koffman was posting pictures of the guy who had this stolen Macbook? That was oddly fascinating, even if it was peaking in on a pretty mundane day-to-day. Brian House, who works at The New York Times R&D lab, did something similar sentiment but different approach.

His friend's iPhone was stolen and later returned for a ransom by the thief, five days later. House used the location data stored on the phone, combined with Google Streets View, and stitched everything together into the video below:

House comments:

It’s a bit like if Google was driving the getaway car, starting downtown where the phone was stolen, and traveling over the city until it’s finally given back. Of course, we’re leaving out the pauses when he wasnt moving, and the temporal displacement of Street View images make this a kind of a weird frankendata — while the video retains some relationship to the truth of the human interaction behind it, it remains a kind of data fiction.

Unfortunately, there's no super happy ending with the perp getting caught, but at least she got her phone back.

[Data Reenactmant via @jakeporway]

A few months ago there was a lot of hoopla around the iPhone and the recording of your location. Crowdflow wants to take advantage of this opportunity to build an open database of location traces that people can use for research. Using their existing data so far, from 880 phones, Michael Kreil of Crowdflow mapped people moving around in Europe (in Germany for the most part). The results are beautiful.

The movements have a lovely firefly aesthetic as people, or I guess phones, move about the area. City centers of course glow brighter, and areas pulsate as night time comes and then becomes bright again in the morning.

Watch the animation play out in the videos below. The two are the same data, but with different color schemes. Increase size and resolutions for maximum effect. All it needs is some music for ultimate sexy.

[Crowdflow via @infosthetics]

Researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden have found that the iPhone records cell tower access, and hence your location, in an easy-to-read file that is transferred as you switch devices. And they do this whether you like it or not.

The more fundamental problem is that Apple are collecting this information at all. Cell-phone providers collect similar data almost inevitably as part of their operations, but it’s kept behind their firewall. It normally requires a court order to gain access to it, whereas this is available to anyone who can get their hands on your phone or computer.

Allan and Warden provide an open-source application, iPhone Tracker, that maps that data. The good news is that the data doesn't seem go to be anywhere other than your own backups and devices. Privacy concerns aside, this kind of makes me wish I had an iPhone; although I suspect my map would be painfully boring.

[iPhone Tracker via Marco]

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Dan Cohen, Digital History at AHA 2011
Mark Sample, Digtital Humanities at MLA 2011
Pannapacker at MLA: Digital Humanities Triumphant?
Steve Ramsay, On Building
Android at CES: strong growth as platform jumps to new devices
iPad 2 Rumor Roundup
6 Top Smartphone Apps to Improve Teaching
14-year old developer takes top spot in App Store
Lua programming language
Google App Inventor for Android

Running time: 48:04
Download the .mp3

Smart GWT 2.4 has been released and, as expected, they are jumping on the HTML5 and iOS/Touch bandwagon. The fact that the touch support doesn’t require code changes for existing apps is most welcome. Also, the mention of the upcoming Smart GWT Mobile with “pixel perfect iOS look and feel” sounds intriguing. Many have tried, few have succeeded.

From the release announcement:

• GWT 2.1.1 Compatible
• Smart GWT QuickStart Guide
• Touch & Mobile support : Support for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices with no code changes required.
• Offline support : The Offline subsystem provides features for storing and retrieving values in persistent browser storage. It is also seamlessly integrated into the normal DataSource request/response cycle. With a single property DataSource.useOfflineStorage you can enable automatic offline caching of recently fetched data so that if a user goes offline they still have access to last data they viewed.
• User Defined data highlighting allows users to highlight important or unusual data values in a ListGrid or TreeGrid based on dynamic user defined rules instead of hard coding such logic for background and foreground cell colors within code. A Highlight Editor allows end users to fully configure such highlight rules to customize their view of the data.
• Advanced Hover components allows any UI component to be added as a hover, such as a grid, chart or even a layout combining several components when hovering over a ListGrid or TreeGrid row.
• Simplicity theme : A new ultralight skin that is easily customizable and virtually image free. This can be viewed by selecting the “Simplicity” theme from the dropdown in the Showcase explorer.
• IE Performance improvements : Performance improvements have been made across the board but some IE specific performance enhancements have been made and users can expect a significant improvement in responsiveness in IE.
• 24 hour Calendar support : The Calendar component now supports 24 hour time formatting.

In its youth, which seems only now to be ending, film-making and film-editing required an immense amount of expensive and specialized hardware and a hefty range of fine technical skills. Today, suggested Dave Hopkins and Jim Grassi at the October 27 Lunch 'n Learn, even teenagers with affordable hand-held devices can shoot, edit, and even distribute films for the mass market.

Be sure to run through their slides which contain a range of clips that tell the story through film. There you can watch Francis Ford Coppola predicting in the 1970s that children would someday be able to make movies of quality. There too you can watch Gus van Sant, a master film editor splicing tapes. Imagine the cumbersome task, when every scene and every noise involves a separate reel of 35 mm film stock. There are still editors who persist with such handiwork, manipulating bins of reels, but the immense power of new software, notably Final Cut Pro, has compelled most filmmakers to make the transition to digital. Films are now shot, edited, and delivered digitally. The films never touch tape.

And watch the simple film made by a father of his young son after a trip to the Dentist. Meant to be shared with grandparents and close friends, 70 million through YouTube have now viewed the amusing clip. An 8^th grader named Brook Peters made a documentary about 9/11 that was so good that it is up for consideration at Tribecca. The point is, of course, that anyone with a camera, an idea, and some talent can now reach a very large audience. The barriers to entry have been drastically reduced.

Such technologies always trickle downward, suggests Hopkins. Quality no longer costs $15K. He showed a remarkable piece of footage taken with an iPhone. Without having to rely on tape, there's also an immediacy with the film. There's no longer a need to wait for post-production. Efforts, good and bad, can be sent instantly to YouTube.

New light panels are not only less expensive, he adds, but they also do not overheat and no filters are required for indoor shots.

Expect to see more use of the smaller technologies. The final episode of House this season was filmed on a very small camera, making possible footage in very closed spaces.

Hopkins and Grassi suggest that, as a result of the new technologies, a new breed of producer has evolved, a videographer "preditor," a one-person film shoot, from idea, to the writing, the shooting, the editing, and even the distribution.

Software certainly plays an important role in making the technology so accessible. With Apple iLife, users can easily locate related clips and produce compelling movie trailers.

In the future, they suggest that we can look forward to better compression to compensate for larger hard drives, more video on walls, sidewalks, streets, and 4-D TVs that will fill all the senses.

View the presentation: direct-download video (.mp4), streaming video (Flash)
An audio podcast of the presentation is also available.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
ProfHacker
Letter from UC to faculty [.pdf]
Nature Publishing Group responds, via Ars Technica

Running time: 57:41
Download the .mp3

For reunions last year, OIT created a special web site tailored for the small mobile devices that are now proliferating in the marketplace, cell phones with web browsers, iPhones, Blackberries, and the like. The experiment proved to be quite successful. To accelerate the development of such services, OIT signed an agreement in December that will give the University access to Blackboard Mobile, an environment that will permit users to access public information about the University in a format especially suited to such mobile platforms.

The result will soon be a Princeton-specific application, m.Princeton, for leading brands of smart phones.

Mobile Central was founded by a group of Stanford students who developed the core products offered by Mobile Central by rising to the challenge of a course assignment in a Stanford computer science class - the task: to deliver real mobile solutions for the Stanford campus community.

iStanford now permits users to search the campus directory and campus map, view athletics and course information, and a variety of other campus services. The students later formed the company TerriblyClever Design in 2007, and developed several more mobile suites for other colleges and universities.

During the past year, several universities, notably Stanford, Duke, and MIT, have used these same services to permit mobile users to access campus maps, directories of people and places, bus schedules and campus tours, event calendars, announcements and news, as well as images and videos.

Princeton is now building a full suite of such mobile applications for the benefit of the entire campus, as well as visitors, parents, and prospective students. OIT has assembled a team with representatives from several departments to complete the first phase of the work in time for reunions this coming May. The first phase will include a campus map, a campus directory, athletics schedules, course information, news, and the public events calendar.

During the first phase, Princeton will also assemble support for Reunions, from events and campus maps through directories and local restaurant menus.

The second phase will be ready in time for the fall. It will deliver real time shuttle information, access to the library catalog, an image gallery, additional video content, building maps (library floor plans, for example), as well as an online Orange Key tour.. Additional changes will be made as needed and will be delivered as updates to the existing application.

At the April 28 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Janet Temos ‘82 *01 and Ryan Irwin ‘10 of Blackboard Mobile Central discussed the details about the coming Princeton mobile apps. They noted that the apps will be delivered in formats that support the Blackberry Storm, Curve, and Bold, the iPhone, the iPod touch, and eventually the iPad. The apps will also work on any smart phone that can support a web browser. The application will be free, but users will need to download the application that suits their brand of phone.

The Apple applications will be available for download via iTunes. Blackberry applications will be available from the Blackberry app store. Blackboard Mobile Central and Princeton will host the web-based version.

Check back soon at www.princeton.edu/princetonmobile.

Janet Temos was trained as an architectural historian, and received degrees in art history from Williams College (MA 1992), and Princeton University (PhD 2001). She began working with the Educational Technologies Center (ETC), in 1993, and became a full-time member of the staff in 2000. She is now director of ETC, and continues to work with faculty who wish to use computer technology in their teaching. Current projects include courses on film, archaeology, medieval manuscripts, African languages taught in the US, and a collaborative project with the Princeton University Art Museum to develop an on-line repository of digital images of objects in the museum’s East Asian collection.

The podcast and presentation are available.

At the February 24 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Dixon explored the range of apps being developed for these new platforms. Beyond rude sound effects and popping bubbles, developers are leveraging both the intelligence of handsets and the power of back-end cloud computing to provide new kinds of timely services.

He began by demonstrating how easy it is to search and locate apps at Apple’s App Store from the device or computer, and to synchronize the iPhone with one’s collection of music on iTunes. The App Store listings include screen shots, user ratings, and easy access to dedicated web pages about each app. Many of the popular apps are games and silly diversions. Based on your apps, the Genus feature also will recommend other apps that you are likely to enjoy.

In comparison, the Motorola Droid from Verizon is based on the Google Android platform. The Android Market also has lots of games and other apps, some free and some for fee. It’s easy to find popular apps including Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, and Google Earth, and the listings kindly show the apps that you have already installed. Unlike Apple, Google does not manually review apps for inclusion in its app market. Users have the primary role in ranking, rating, and tagging apps. And Google automatically notifies users about updates to their apps.

Dixon also demonstrated the Microsoft Zune wireless player, which has a nice interface that automatically organizes your apps, recent updates, and your music and personal information. The new Microsoft Phone platform, due at the end of this year, will discard the old Windows Mobile interface for this Zune style. Microsoft Phone also goes beyond individual apps to feature “hubs” for games, people, photos, and music that combine relevant information. No longer would you have a need to go to a variety of separate apps like mail, Flikr, and Facebook. All of the relevant data will be in a single place.

Says Dixon, these devices combine three really interesting and powerful characteristics. First, they are impressive little computers with a decent processor, gigabytes of memory, and a readable screen. Second, they have sensors in them aware of their orientation and their GPS position. Some also have built in cameras and microphones. And they are connected to the cloud. As a result, we can begin to rethink how to do things.

Then there are location-based services that now go beyond displaying maps and finding a near-by Starbucks to reporting the lowest local prices for gas, and providing the pulse of the neighborhood from real-time Twitter feeds.

And new “augmented reality” services can use the smartphone’s camera to provide information on what’s around you — to look up a product bar code, or an interesting building or painting, or to identify the buildings that you see in front of you. Point at a record album and get all of the product information. Soon you can point at a person and view their Facebook page.

It’s an amazing new world, placing the power of cloud computing in your back pocket, all at a store near you.

Douglas Dixon is an independent technology consultant, author, and speaker specializing in digital media. A graduate of Brown University, and previously a product manager and software developer at Intel and Sarnoff, he is the author of four books, has published hundreds of feature articles over the past decade, has presented over a hundred seminars and talks, and provides expert witness services. Doug makes his articles and technical references freely available on his Manifest Technology blog and website.

The podcast is available.

With Enhanced Editions, we’ve built audio into the reading experience. You can listen to your own iTunes collection, of course, but we’ve also built in the possibility of a dedicated soundtrack – something Nick Cave took full advantage of in our edition of Bunny Munro, composing exclusive sound pieces for each and every chapter of the book.

The really big audio feature of Enhanced Editions, however, is this: ebooks that include a full audiobook synchronise the reading with the text, so you can switch instantly and perfectly from the text to the audio and back again.

Imagine you’re reading on the bus. It’s your stop, and rather than stop reading, you tap over to the audiobook and immediately the audiobook picks up from the same point, the dulcet tones of Nick Cave or Barack Obama continuing the story from where you left off. The text keeps scrolling, and when you’re done listening, you can switch back to the text without losing your place.

Enhanced Editions is the first ebook reader to include full audiobook syncing, and we’re very proud of it. We hope you like it too.