CIT Blog » Images

Wordle: making Tag Clouds into ‘Beautiful Word Clouds’

Shawn Miller — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:20:49 +0000

What are tag/word clouds?

Tag clouds (or ‘word clouds’) are visualizations made up of sets of words from a document, website or set of ‘tags’ (ex: bookmarks from your del.icio.us account). These word collections may use color, word size or even position to better illustrate the frequency of word use. A popular example of word clouds in action would be the recent use of word clouds to analyze presidential speeches. Here’s a screenshot of Chirag Mehta’s tool that creates a word cloud for several presidential speeches:

This cloud reveals the most 50 most frequently used words in Bush’s 2007 State of the Union Address. The standout terms are obvious. The thing that makes Mehta’s tool really interesting, is that he’s included a ’slider’ (look above the word cloud box) that can be moved to cycle through word clouds from other speeches from the past. Here’s one of Harry Truman’s State of the Union Address speeches:

How Can You Use or Create Tag/Word Clouds?

Several great tools for visualizing text and tags exist on the web. For analysing del.icio.us tags, extisp.icio.us or the tag tool at Hub Log work just fine. Another popular tool, Tag Crowd, takes things a step further than just sorting del.ico.us tags, and allows users to copy/paste text from documents or even analyse a webpage. Here’s the CIT Strategic Plan for 2008-2011 copy/pasted into Tag Crowd, then filtered down to the 50 most frequently used terms:

Not surprisingly, ‘teaching’, ‘technology’, and ‘faculty’ come up quite a bit. This works well enough, but what if I want to make this look, er…pretty? That’s where Wordle comes in. Here’s the same text from the Strategic Plan pushed through Wordle:

Now, that’s a ‘pretty’ word cloud. Wordle includes several options for enhancing the visualization: multiple font choices, color palettes, and overall layout of the text (ie: horizontal, random, vertical, etc). Wordle creations can be printed out or posted to a public gallery on the web. Here’s another version of the word cloud above, reduced to a frequency of 50 words, with a color palette applied:

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Attack of the Online Photo Editors

Shawn Miller — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:24:51 +0000

A recent blog post on LifeClever briefly sums up several new online photo editors. These are web-based applications that generally handle most average photo editing tasks that larger software packages like Adobe Photoshop would normally be used to do.

So just what are the advantages to using these tools? Here’s an example. To the left, I’ve included a picture I took in Princeton. This is actually a very large photo that I wanted to do a small bit of color correction to and shrink the overall size of the image down so that it wouldn’t bloat this blog post. Using the application Picnik (a free application mentioned in the LifeClever post, as well as recently integrated into Flickr), I not only managed to quickly pull the photo up from my desktop computer, but I quickly adjusted the color, tint and size of the picture, and, just for fun, added a stylish border to the whole thing. This took <5 minutes and then provided me options for saving the picture back to my computer, sending it to someone via email, or posting it to a variety of sources, such as Flickr, Picasa - even Facebook.

What’s not to love? Some of these applications are awash in advertisements and gimicky clutter for one thing. You’ll not only find standard photo editing options, but sometimes you’ll also find downright silly icons and ‘eye-candy’ that really only get in the way of the stronger features. You’ll also be hard-pressed to find any of these applications that work well with really high resolution imagery (not even the recently mentioned online version of Photoshop)…a task still really reserved for Photoshop itself.

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Technology changing the nature of historical research

Lynne O'Brien — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:28:46 +0000

The Boston Globe’s May 25, 2008 article, Everyone’s a Historian Now, describes how individuals’ contributions of photographs, descriptions and interpretations of historical events, including recent events, are changing the way historical research and writing are done. The article describes how non-historians are creating new types of digital archives - such as photographs and recollections of the September 11 attacks on New York, or Hurricane Katrina - and also adding information to established research sites such as the Library of Congress and National Archives. “By aggregating the grass-roots knowledge and recollections of hundreds, even thousands of people, ‘crowdsourcing,’ as it’s increasingly called, may transform a discipline that has long been defined and limited by the labors of a single historian toiling in the dusty archives,” says author Stephen Mihm, a history professor at the University of Georgia.

Mihm addresses the common criticisms of “amateur” contributions, stating that the vast increase in the volume of materials available and the tendency for individuals to correct the errors of others make the sites valuable. Long-standing historical research sites are legitimizing such contributions. For example, the September 11 Digital Archive, set up by history professor Roy Rosenzweig of George Mason University for people to post photographs, videos, documents, e-mails, and recollections of that day, was so successful that the Library of Congress made it their first digital acquisition.

Minh concludes: “So far, only a handful of professional historians have begun to exploit crowdsourcing, which remains a relatively crude tool for gathering and organizing knowledge. But as the power of crowds meets the practice of history, these online repositories represent a remarkable change not only in how historical materials are gathered and organized, but, perhaps most important, in how deeply and broadly the past can be understood.”

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Digital resources about the Civil Rights era

Lynne O'Brien — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:33 +0000

The University of Georgia has produced the Civil Rights Digital Library, with primary sources and educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives along with educator resources and contextual materials. CRDL is a partnership among librarians, technologists, archivists, educators, scholars, academic publishers, and public broadcasters. The initiative receives support through a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Another resources on the civil rights era is The Amistad Digital Resource Web site. Although it was developed to be a multimedia resource for secondary school teachers, the Amistad site contains primary resources, audio and video clips, maps, timelines and other materials which could be useful in any level course studying this time period. The Amistad Digital Resource Web site was developed by the Columbia Center for Digital Research and Scholarship with funding from the Ford Foundation.

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Flickr adds video

Randy Riddle — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:32:46 +0000

“It’s like a photo, but it moves!”

Flickr, the popular service for sharing photos, has now added video capabilities to the site. The video uploads aren’t intended to replace or duplicate YouTube - the length is limited to 90 seconds - but as a way to augment user image collections with short videos taken with their digital camera. For example, users might have a photo set devoted to an event and the video would give a short interview or footage that gives a flavor of what the event was like. Videos can also be embedded in web pages or blog posts, similar to YouTube content.

Sample videos from the Flickr beta group

Article at techcrunch on differences between FlickrVideo and YouTube

Blog post with thoughts about the service

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Online free version of Photoshop

Randy Riddle — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:41:50 +0000

One of the trends happening with software over the past couple of years has been a transition of applications that cover basic functions, like word processing, from the desktop to the web browser.

The latest entry in the online application sphere is a free online version of Photoshop, which went live as a beta today. Currently, it’s a “stripped down” version of the application that handles basic image editing tasks with JPEG images and up to 2 GB of storage. Adobe plans on adding more functionality and premium features for users who pay for a yearly subscription.

article at News.com

Photoshop Express online - http://www.photoshop.com/express

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Collaborate on video, documents, photos with text, voice or video

Andrea Novicki — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:07:11 +0000

Description from the Voicethread website:

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.

You can share and comment on video as well as pictures and documents! What a powerful collaborative tool! Watching the samples on the website is a great way to generate ideas for using this tool. You can embed the “voice thread” on your blog or webpage (even your Blackboard course site), making any site a group collaboration site.

Thanks very much to Lucy Haagen and Donna Hall for telling me about this, and Shawn Miller for remembering what it is called! Please try it and tell me what you think.

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Visual Twitter

Lenore Ramm — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:36:52 +0000

It is becoming common for users of Twitter to associate images with their “tweets”. The two services used most frequently are TwitPic and Twitxr. Images can be uploaded from a desktop machine, but the intended purpose is for people to send images from their cell phones or other mobile devices. From a phone, one can e-mail the image to the service and that generates a Twitter message, which includes a link to the image. It is also possible to look at the service’s website directly and see all of a user’s images with their associated messages.

Twitpic requires a Twitter account and the functionality is currently limited to posting through Twitter. Twitxr is a social networking site in itself, in that you can have “friends” and “follow” other users. You can also specify locations for each image and then view maps that display where all of the recent images were posted. Twitxr also allows users to send images to Facebook and Flickr, in addition to Twitter.

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Coral Reefs in the News

Andrea Novicki — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:35:33 +0000

To incorporate real-world, current issues in your course, consider using resources recently made available about the human impact on the oceans. There are engaging photos, interactive graphics and accessible articles, which could complement courses on public policy, the environment, biology, chemistry, writing and social sciences, as well as others.

The New York Times has a series of thought-provoking articles and resources about human impact on the seas:

* “Human Shadows on the Seas” reports on the first worldwide portrait of human impacts on the oceans, revealing a planet-spanning mix of depleted resources, degraded ecosystems and disruptive biological blending as species are moved around the globe by accident and intent.

* Pictures of reefs and the scientists working at them are in a slide show “Before they vanish“.

* An interactive map, “Mapping the Other 70 Percent”, allows you to display data on the human impact, shipping, invasive species, temperature, ultraviolet light and acidification.

* An article “Coral Reefs and What Ruins Them” describes recently published research results (listed below) . Comparing the popular press version with essays written by the authors and the scientific research report could be a useful educational opportunity.

PLOS Biology has an open access essay on “Shifting Baselines, Local Impacts, and Global Change on Coral Reefs” to accompany two research reports published in PLoS ONE. These research reports, “Baselines and Degradation of Coral Reefs in the Northern Line Islands” and “Microbial Ecology of Four Coral Atolls in the Northern Line Islands”, are open for online discussion and annotation. Currently, readers can access the Editor’s comments and comments by the Faculty of 1000. Discussing research papers online provides a window into the process of scientific research and showcases critical thinking.

For more information about Coral Reefs, engaging photos and other multimedia, see the Coral Reef Alliance. The resource library section has extensive links to visualizations about changing climate, videos, photographs and other educational organizations.

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Discovering Lincoln in glass plate negatives and digital images

Lynne O'Brien — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:58:14 +0000

Here’s a great story for Lincoln’s birthday. An essay by Kitty Eisele on National Public Radio this morning described photographs of Abraham Lincoln that were recently found in the Library of Congress. They had been misclassified in the past, but a researcher using the Library’s digital image collection noticed the error. The NPR essay, Uncovered Photos Offer View of Lincoln Ceremony, states that the library had received a large collection of Civil War photographs in the 1940s, with handwritten logs. Some of the writing was hard to read, and over time, the caption for these photos were misplaced. But recently, a researcher in Colorado spotted the mislabeled Lincoln photographs in the Library’s online collection.

The Library of Congress is also experimenting with putting some of its image collections on Flickr and asking the public to add descriptions to them. Try tagging some of the photographs yourself - who knows what you’ll find!

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