Category: Events

including conferences and workshops

Access 2012 Day 1: Ignite Talk – Social Feed Manager

To collect social media data (especially Twitter), researchers are doing this manually (possibly by proxy).

 

Some paid options to collect the data:

  • DataSift
  • Gnip
  • Topsy

Friendly, but not cheap, and more than what we need. Still need tools to collect, process, etc.

What researchers ask for:

  • specific users, keywords
  • historic time periods
  • basic values: user, date, text, counts
  • delimited files to import

We can do this free with APIs.

Built Social Feed Manager with features

  • Users by Item Count with temporal graphs
  • Details on user
  • can export to CSV files
  • hashtag queries by 10 minutes
  • search function with 1000

Free on github

  • python/django
  • user timelines, filter, sample, search
  • simple display with export for user timelines

Leaves out:

  • historical tweets
  • tweets beyond last 3200

By @dchud

More notes on the Access 2012 live blog.

Access 2012: Opening Keynote – We Were Otaku: before it was cool

Aaron Cope

Archives (and libraries), where things are frequently obsessively collecting, are just like what happens with otakus.

Curating: the act of choosing, e.g. flickr galleries

The Economics

Time is money. Stand-in that something that takes time has the greatest value, but the counter is no longer true. Can no longer say that something quickly and cheaply made has little value. e.g. maps

Collapsing Distinctions

Distinction between museums and archives (and libraries) are collapsing. Assumption that archives are the basement of museums. What’s happening is a kind of mushing. Blur in whether looking at archives or showcase, especially in digital realm.

Expectations

Efficiency of storage and retrieval at Amazon (robotic system). Allows you to get something delivered the next day. Makes possible a kind of expectation that the web has. If we can make it happen for trivial things, we’re going to want to make it happen for important things.

It’s About the Users

If people can’t get to it or see it, why are we keeping it? Why is it important? It is no doubt difficult to provide access to physical objects, but doesn’t mean we cannot. We can simply talk about our collection and why we have them. It’s about keeping open a narrative space. We are the timekeepers.

Trust. Users. Delivery. -gov.uk

There is no (final) design, there is only reckoning.

It is everyone else that is letting us do this. We are held to a higher standard. We have to trust our users even if it’s not on our terms. No uniform motive. e.g. Add a random button Cannot assume either the same level of expertise. e.g. Making objects, first class objects that are URLs.

The proxies are important to get people in the door, to see the physical objects. The proxies also provide a broader surface for discussion and conceptualization. Not everyone also has the luxury of travel.

It’s about being present on the network, and allowing things to happen.

The unit of measure of what is important has changed. e.g. foursquare as building registry.

It’s Messy

Ultimately, we need to think about how we share things with people, and allowing people to interact with them. Keeping something safe vs. canonizing.

More notes on the Access 2012 live blog.

Access 2012 Pre-Conference: Learning Python

Today’s preconference session was a great way to force me to learn a bit of Python. The very basics were somewhat of a review since I read the first couple of chapters of the recommended book and I actually already knew much of it, but for those interested in knowing, here’s what we learned.

The Book

Much of the material can be found in Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Allen B. Downey.

Another resource: Cheatsheet of common syntax and data structures

The Basics

We covered the basics including:

  • types (string, int, float)
  • arithmetic
  • concatenation
  • values, variables, expressions
  • arguments and basic functions
  • for loop

Read chapters 1-3 (and do the exercises) and you’ll cover it all.

Turtle World

Had some fun drawing with ‘Bob’ the turtle.

This is covered in chapter 4 of the book.

Conditionals and Recursion

We then covered the slightly less than basic of:

  • modulus
  • Boolean expressions
  • conditionals
  • recursions

See chapter 5 of the book.

At the End of the Day

Honestly, the session wasn’t exactly bad, but I think I would’ve learned more by being sat down and simply being told to follow the book. We didn’t have a bad instructor, but I would want to get more than just what the book tells you.

A simple example would be how to get the full list of functions in TurtleWorld for us to play around rather than just telling us the couple functions that are expected in the one or two exercises.

Overall, a good session if you’re a real beginning with absolutely no programming background, but I think that 90+% of the group would have benefited from a much faster pace session. Other than recursion, I noticed that almost all the other times, people around me were doing other things. So, good instructor and session, just too easy for many.

Register for Access Conference

I’m away this week, but felt the need to quickly post about the Access Conference. Last year, I requested the organizing committee to do something for students. In the end, they did two things: add student pricing, and allow volunteers to attend the number of hours they volunteer.

I’m happy to report that this year’s Access also has student pricing with no increase in price!

Register while there’s still space!

code4lib Cool Tool Day

So inspired by the ASIS&T Cool Tool Day, I thought it’d be neat to do one of these since there weren’t many volunteers to do lightning talks/presentations at the code4lib Toronto meetup this time around. Our attendance was a little… paltry, but we had some great presentations! Here are my notes from the session.

Presented by @waharnum

soapUI

  • working with REST based web services
  • testing automation tool for web services
  • best for building with other API
  • autogenerate stubs using WSDL
  • interface between internal systems
  • good for documenting web services, code style with examples
  • normally, mostly used for unit testing

Trello

  • virtual card based whiteboard
  • flexible for planning based
  • collaborative
  • great usability/UI
  • even has mobile apps

Mustache Templates

  • maintaining HTML email templates
  • also works as a crazy text editor for nerds

XSL Transforms plugin in Firefox

  • local reporting
  • anything XSLT with just a few security restrictions
  • e.g. SVN reporting

Presented by @adr

ShowOff

  • cross platform presentation
  • push from laptop to another computer

Sidenote: Other Presentation Tools

Presented by @ruebot

VIM Plugins

  • pathogen – linking for VIM plugins to automatically load VIM plugins
  • nerdtree – pull files quickly by displaying directory/tree

Presented by Pomax

Thimble HTML/CSS Live Web editor

  • teach anyone (kids, adults) HTML and CSS
  • use existing projects to make it fun!

FlickrFindr

  • easy inline flickr search of CC images
  • attribution in alt text

Presented by me

F.lux

  • monitor hue changer, supposedly to help people sleep better by telling your body what time of day it is

That’s it! Hope to do another one of these or lightning talks next time.