Trudi Abel, in History at Duke, wondered “How do they connect? The past and the present?”

CIT provided Trudi Abel with funding and student support to create digital versions of historic maps of Durham using Google Earth. Using high quality digital copies of maps from the late 1800’s, Abel worked with CIT staff to figure out the best methods for converting, importing and placing images as overlays into Google Earth. The “georectification” of these maps presented several obstacles, requiring the team to consult with local Durham mapping and historical experts to complete the placement and positioning of these maps.

Several of the resulting digital maps have recently been added to Abel’s ongoing project – the Digital Durham website. Google Earth files can be downloaded and opened on users’ computers for exploration. Visitors to the site can also access several high resolution screen captures of the map overlays without the need to open or use Google Earth. The resulting maps can also be used in Abel’s work with Duke and local high school students – providing a basis for student research projects. Audio pieces created on iPods, geotagged photography and even short video clips can be linked directly to their historical and/or present-day locations.

“I think these maps will help users visualize an industrializing city and gain a better understanding of the process of urbanization in this New South community.”

VIew the Digital Durham page for Sanborn 1884

VIew the Digital Durham page for Sanborn 1888

Presentations

See a video excerpt from the presentation “Everybody’s Doing It: Web-based Visualizations and Mashups in the Social Sciences” which CIT consultant Shawn Miller gave at Duke’s Visualization Forum in September 2008. The full video is available from the Visualization Forum website.

Trudi Abel also presented about the project and the larger Digital Durham project at a Visualization Forum in March 2009. The video from her talk is available here.

Abel and Miller discussed future possibilities for the Digital Durham project at Duke’s Tech and New Media Tuesdays forum. The presentation is accessible on iTunesU.

Articles about the project

The Digital Durham Project: Creating Community through History, Technology, and Service Learning by Trudi Abel

Duke News article: New Map Collaboration Helps Tell Story of Durham’s History

MyNC.com article: Duke, Durham Merge Google Earth technology with historic city maps

Duke Research Blog: Seeing Through Time: Historic Maps, Google Earth, and the Transformation of Durham

Independent article: What Google Earth doesn’t show you: A small movement of alternative mapmakers seek to revolutionize our understanding of the Triangle and the world

3D modeling software allows users to create or view 3D objects or environments. There are a wide range of uses of this software, from special effects for films to illustrating books or graphic novels. In education, the software is typically used for students to view and manipulate scientific models or environments for building and manipulating models or prototypes. By building and exploring 3D models, students can gain insight into how reconstructed historical spaces might have been used, explore how spaces have changed over time, or investigate how objects or spaces are constructed.

One of the emerging tools used at Duke for engaging students in the process of creating and exploring 3D models is Google SketchUp. Available for Windows and Mac, the software is a powerful, easy to use program that allows you to create 3D objects and environments. Items can be exported in a variety of ways and even used in other programs. Google also offers an online library, 3D Warehouse, where SketchUp users can upload and share objects created in SketchUp. SketchUp is available in a free downloadable version suitable for many classroom uses and a “pro” version that adds some enhanced features for more in-depth work.

Some faculty are also using Autodesk Maya at Duke with courses. Maya is a professional level commercial software package that has been used for computer aided design and 3D work for several years. ISIS, for example, has offered courses where students can explore representations of spaces and data using Maya and the software is used for constructing spaces for use in the Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE).

Through building 3D objects, students can gain “real world” experience in a wide range of fields where 3D is used for building and prototyping. Architects and urban planners are using SketchUp and other 3d software to design buildings and structures, engineers for designing facilities and products, and historians recreate and explore spaces and structures.

If you are new to using 3D software, SketchUp is an easy way to get started. You can download the software and view some basic tutorials on Google’s website. Explore the Google 3D Warehouse to view a wide range of models and objects, developed by users of the software, that may be useful in your courses. Some that might be of interest include:

• Bridges (149 models)
• Museums (168 models)
• Frank Lloyd Wright (39 models)
• Egyptian monuments (7 models)
• Places of worship (259 models)
• Thessaloniki, Greece (22 models)

Guest post by Julie Reynolds, Duke University

Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters, but I discovered it takes slightly more than 140 characters to convince colleagues of Twitter’s value. I’ll try to make my argument for why professionals should use Twitter, and I’ll do it in just 14 tweets. Here we go.

#1) Professional use of Twitter 1 of 3: Post URLs for blogs, articles, & events that you want to make public to a larger audience

• #2) To promote publications, ex: “When Communicating with Diverse Audiences, Use Velcro to Make Science Stick http://bit.ly/4GD4fX“
• #3) To publicize students’ work, ex: “#DukeEngage interns turn dung into fuel in India http://bit.ly/c3u1a”
• #4) To publicize events, ex: “Citizen Science Training Opportunity July 19, 2009 http://bit.ly/16NYgc”

#5) Professional use of Twitter 2 of 3: Network w/folks who share interests or are using similar pedagogy/technology/research method

• #6) Networking tip: be sure your Twitter profile has a descriptive bio so people can find you, ex: http://bit.ly/Vqepp
• #7) Twitter can be like a virtual business card. Be sure your profile bio and webpage are up-to-date and informative
• #8) Join a twibe to find similarly-minded people. Visit http://twibes.com/ to search and join twibes
• #9) Add yourself to http://wefollow.com twitter directory so people can find you (I use #scientist #conservation #educator)
• #10) I posted ex of students’ use of edu software, was contacted by software maker to ask if they could showcase my students’ work!
• #11) Retweet to share info & build community, ex: “RT @saprasanna: Our DukeEngage project is on Duke News: http://tinyurl.com/nmuxkz”
• #12) Search for keywords http://search.twitter.com/ (or via Tweetdeck, my fav Twitr app) & follow people who have interesting tweets

#13) Professional use of Twitter 3 of 3: Back-channel conversation at conferences for feedback on talks & updates on things you missed

• #14) Ex: search for #NECC09 for examples of rich conversation and information resulting from back-channel conversations at a conference

You can follow this conversation on Twitter by searching for #TwitValue. For professional updates, follow Julie at http://twitter.com/JulieReynolds88.

Have you wanted to give your students easy access to a public domain book or to an excerpt of a copyrighted book available for preview at Google?

Google Books has added some enhanced features, such as improved browsing and searching and the ability to view scanned or plain text pages.  As part of the updated, they’ve added an embedding feature that lets you put a book in your web page or blog, similar to the way you can embed a movie from YouTube.

To embed a book, look for the “Link” button in the upper right corner of the page when you are browsing it at Google.  Just copy the “Embed” link and paste the HTML code into your own blog or web page.

If the book appears too large or small, try changing the numbers for “width” and “height” in the code. In many books, the table of contents in the text is hot-linked to easily browse through a book.

Looking for that perfect image for your class, but away from your computer? Now, search over 32,000 images from the Duke University Libraries’ digital collections on your iPhone, through DukeMobile, Duke’s integrated iPhone Application.

iPhone and iPod Touch users can browse and search twenty collections that range from advertisements and documentary photography to sheet music. You can save and download images to an album, and access all descriptive information.

Making digital image collections viewable on mobile devices is part of the library’s ongoing efforts to make its resources available whenever and wherever researchers need them.

DukeMobile, introduced in March 2009, currently serves about 50,000 users, providing mobile access to the campus directory, sports scores, interactive maps, event listings, the course catalog, and Duke videos on YouTube.

We recently made some substantial changes and updates to our website. The biggest change is the addition of a new section called “Resources.” Within the section, you’ll find three subsections:

• Getting Started: These are resources that anyone thinking about starting an instructional technology project can readily use. We’ve included pages for faculty new to Duke, pages for help planning projects, and a “Web 2.0 Toolkit” that describes uses of several new web-based tools for teaching and learning.
• Teaching & Learning: This section covers the ‘nuts and bolts’ of teaching and learning with technology, including recommendations and guides for managing assignments, large classes and students groups.
• Assessment: Guides and information to help you assess your students, teaching and projects.

We’d love to get feedback on these changes, and hope you find them useful.

YouTube recently released a new section of their website that brings together all of the content that’s been posted to YouTube from various universities. The address is simple: http://www.youtube.com/edu

Duke has had several YouTube channels for some time. This recent development doesn’t change the official YouTube channels – it just brings them all together in a more readily available way. For more information on adding content to the Duke YouTube channel, see OIT’s information page.

Not unlike iTunesU and YouTubeEDU, Academic Earth is attempting to provide freely available educational resources via online video. So far, they only have a handful of universities involved (Harvard, Stanford, etc), but seem to be growing. (more…)

Explore scholarly images sources and the concept of visual literacy with Art Librarian Lee Sorensen. Learn useful tips for projecting images in the classroom, creating personal visual collections and helping students use images in their research and writing. Open to all Duke faculty, graduate teaching assistants, and librarians.

Register now.

Tuesday, 17 March, 2-3pm, Bostock Library room 023

I’ve just returned from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Research in Information Technology retreat at which project leaders are sharing information about open source projects in higher education and in arts groups and museums (http://rit.mellon.org/2009-rit-sc-program-retreat).  Open source tools (i.e., no purchase or license fees) may be of increasing interest in the current economic environment. I wonder whether these specific tools might be of interest to faculty and students at Duke. Several products might be good extensions to the Duke Digital Initiative because of their emphasis on producing, managing and analyzing multimedia resources. Other projects or tools could be extensions of the library’s work, as the library becomes not only a source of content, but a source of consultation on working with that content in new ways to further research.

Sophie – http://www.sophieproject.org/

Sophie is a multimedia authoring tool: “software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment.” People who have used it, including high school students, describe Sophie as very easy to use. Sophie is currently being rewritten in Java, and with emphasis on collaboration tools. The project’s website provides illustrations of how Sophie is being used. For example, Sol Gaitan of the Dalton School in New York developed a multimedia book for her AP Spanish students so that they could explore the direct influence of particular flamenco music styles on Lorca’s poetry. Gaitan presents both the songs and the poems they inspired, and annotates the poems from pages 11 to 43; with the students expected to follow her lead by annotating the poems in the remainder of the book. Take a look: http://www.sophieproject.org/demobooks

VUE – http://vue.tufts.edu/

VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. VUE lets you look for relationships across images, define relationships, compare images, etc. As such, it is a research tool as well as a presentation tool. The VUE website has a short video (http://vue.tufts.edu/screencast/QT_hiRes.cfm) that gives an overview of its functions and how it can be used.

Zotero – http://www.zotero.org/

Zotera is free, easy-to-use Firefox extensions to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Some of us are familiar with Zotero as a citation management tool. The developers as well as other project leaders at the RIT meeting see Zotero as having additional functionality through its connections with other tools. For example, the planned redesign of the Sakai course management system may have ways for instructors to upload lists of their publications, and then, via Zotero, find other scholars with whom they might want to connect.

eComma – http://ecomma.cwrl.utexas.edu/e392k/

The eCommentary Machine web application (“eComma”) will enable groups of students, scholars, or general readers to build collaborative commentaries on a text and to search, display, and share those commentaries online.

Sakai 3- http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/DOC/Sakai+3.0

A completely re-architected version of Sakai is planned for summer of 2010. This version will move away from the cookie-cutter view of course sites and instead connect with 3^rd party tools (such as WordPress) and utilize gadgets and widgets that allow a site to look more like a Google personal homepage. The idea is to reflect the look and feel of tools that are already popular. You can see a demo of creating a Sakai 3 site here: http://www.sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-home/page/89473b2c-31dd-4261-9823-c31a79e55532

Participants at the RIT meeting also talked about people “curating their own arts experiences,” a reflection of growing expectation for web 2.0 type functionality. As an example, someone mentioned Sonic Living, (http://sonicliving.com/) which is not an open source product, but is a relevant example. It scans your hard drive, looks at your iTunes and then suggests live music in your area that matches the interests it found. It also lets you know what concerts your friends are attending. The arts and museum community is looking for ways to get information about their organizations, performances, etc. into the workflows people already have rather than expecting them to come to a website to find information about upcoming events.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a blog post highlighting the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts, an online database that links to digitized materials in various collections.

While many libraries and institutions are digitizing parts of their collections, it’s not always easy to find material in a specific subject area.  These “aggregator” sites may become more common as scholars with common interests share links to materials.

Students in a class could put together something like this as part of activities centering around research in a course, using social bookmarking tools like Google Reader or delicious.