In The Plex

12 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

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I’m currently reading journalist/historian Steven Levy’s In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (Simon & Schuster, April 2011). At the half-way point through the book (Google is at the stage of throwing billion-dollar data centers around the planet), I can say it’s is wonderfully precise on the ancient history of the company. I’ve taught lessons on the history of Google to undergraduates numerous times, so a lot of the events and personalities are familiar — but it’s great to now have a book that’s so authoritative. I’d previously read and enjoyed Levy’s Crypto: How the [Cryptography] Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (2002), and his new book is just as nearly structured, well researched, and elegantly written. Highly recommended.

How to build a search engine – forthcoming online course at Stanford

05 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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Want to take an online course at Stanford on “how to build a search engine”? You’ll soon be able to…

Take the “Introduction to AI” course, for example. […] 160,000 students signed up, from more than 190 countries, with a median age of around 30. But the really staggering thing is that about 23,000 of them stayed the course and finished it. A friend of mine, Seb Schmoller, took it and reports that it was worthwhile but pretty tough going. The project has been so successful that Professor Thrun has set up a spin-off company which plans to enrol 500,000 students on its first two courses: “Building a search engine” and “Programming a robotic car”.

Elegant typography for Web journal articles

04 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, New media journal articles

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Three really interesting developments in fine Web typography, which may interest ejournal editors concerned with presenting elegant HTML articles online…

* Typesetter.js is a javascript bundle able to parse a Web page on the fly, and embed numerous typographic qualities that are usually only associated with print.

* Lettering.js offers “complete down-to-the-letter control” for making appealing magazine-style layouts.

* Arctext.js puts curvy text on your webpage.

Google Web Fonts service

31 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

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Google Web Fonts, a new Google service. It offers a snippet of code that styles your website with a font. The font streams in over the Web, so your website’s text looks to the same to all visitors. Although, judging by my experience of using a similar system with WordPress.com, it will slow down page loading. An especially nice choice for historians to experiment with might be Old Standard TT font…

  [ Hat-tip: Beautiful Web Type ]

Summly

31 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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Summly is an interesting phone app that passed me by in the Christmas rush. It claims to use advanced algorithms to usefully summarise Web texts. Apparently it works best with journalistic press articles, although is still easily confused by dates. The 16 year-old British inventor reportedly has backing from Hong Kong billionaire investor Li Ka Shing.

Altmetrics

30 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by in How to improve academic search, Spotted in the news

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Altmetrics: a manifesto…

“scholarship’s three main filters for importance are failing … new forms [now] reflect and transmit [additional forms of] scholarly impact: that dog-eared (but uncited) article that used to live on a shelf now lives in Mendeley, CiteULike, or Zotero — where we can see and count it. That hallway conversation about a recent finding has moved to blogs and social networks — now, we can listen in. The local genomics dataset has moved to an online repository — now, we can track it. This diverse group of activities forms a composite trace of impact far richer than any available before. We call the elements of this trace altmetrics.”

While some of these claims may be true of science and medical, the research suggests the humanities are rather lacking in engagement with new technologies and blogs / social media — beyond standard Web use, sharing Powerpoint slides and using services like Google Docs.