What you can do in a week surrounded by people who share your ambitions!
Namely, with ILiADS experts and coaches…
Tools and tricks:
- Chrome plugin Link Klipper to grab all the links on a page into a spreadsheet (thank you Google)
- Firefox plugin Down Them All to grab the content of all the links on a page as HTML files (thank you Google)
- Command line “ren *.html *.txt” to rename them all as text files (and vice versa in other cases)
- Paste into Excel “transposing” columns and rows
- Our coach Alicia Peaker wrote a script to scrape web pages into text files and then gave us the files and the script
- Tried Ultra Edit for formatting “messy” text into columns (with help from Lisa McFall)
- Started learning OpenRefine to align “messy” text by grouping like items of differing lengths (with help from Mackenzie Brooks)
- Found the URLs to our photos in SharedShelf, which we will now be able to use in Scalar and other settings (with help from Lisa McFall).
- Hypothes.is could provide a quick start to an annotation experiment.
Conversations that change the way we work:
- Learned more about principles and practices of web design from Greg Lord (who really grasped the relation we seek between a website and our research questions, as well as the need for simple solutions that non-programmers can sustain and a library might preserve)
- Thought more deeply about web archiving, which is affecting our design strategy for visualizing “remix” on our site (with Catherine Newton)
- Learned about GIS and mapping software (Carto, MapBox, Palladio, ArcGIS) (with Lauren Tilton), thinking about differences between spatial visualization and spatial analysis.
- Thought about structured data with Taylor Arnold
- Starting generating ideas for database platforms, like Kora
Closing thought:
- “Open Access” (anyone can see it) is not the same as “Open Data” (anyone can use it)
