Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 82 of 147)

BarCampRDU full up! Organizers needed

We have 150 folks signed up for BarCampRDU (way to go Fred!) — OpenNMS’s Tarus Balog is number 150 (oops one person dropped so Tarus is 149 — YOU can be lucky 150! Go sign up NOW!).

Fred has sent out a call for Organizers (5) and Volunteers (10) on the BarCampRDUBlog. If you are already signed up for BarCamp, read the Call and join the Organizers and/or Volunteers or even consider being a speaker by adding that to the Wiki.

BarCampRDU

UNC/ibiblio project boosts access to personal stories of history

UNC project boosts access to personal stories of history

CHAPEL HILL – The individual stories of more than 500 Southerners, describing their personal experiences of history, will be heard around the world, thanks to a federal grant to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The $505,232 award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services will allow UNC to post the recorded interviews, which are among more than 3,700 collected by UNC’s Southern Oral History Program, to the University Library’s historical Web site “Documenting the American South” (http://docsouth.unc.edu).

Instead of having to travel to UNC’s Wilson Library to hear the tapes, interested parties will be able to listen online upon completion in 2008 of the three-year project, “Oral Histories of the American South.” The project was one of 10 that the institute funded last year, chosen from among 55 applications.

“We’re going to be able to convey to people the power of the voices that are in this collection, and that is something that has always been difficult for oral history collections,” said Dr. Jacquelyn Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill professor of history at UNC and director of the Southern Oral History Program, which began in 1973.

The project also will enable further development of new information technology pioneered by the University Library. The tool synchronizes the voice of each storyteller with a scrolling transcript. Posting sound on the Web is not new; pairing it with text in this manner is.

“Everyone (in the digitization field) is trying to do this,” said Natalia (pronounced “na-TASH-ah) Smith, principal investigator for the project, UNC digitization librarian and the chief architect of “Documenting the American South.” “No one else has finished a project, to our knowledge.”

The grant’s third focus will be establishing new curricula for K-12 students that are based on the interviews online – the focus of project collaborator Dr. Cheryl Mason Bolick, an assistant professor in the UNC School of Education.

Having the recorded voices and transcripts online will be a boon because:

* Instead of listening to an entire tape or reading all of a paper transcript to determine whether an interview explores certain topics, researchers will be able to search transcripts – and the entire database of stories – by keywords;

* If listeners can’t understand a speaker’s words, they can read the transcript to find out what was said;

* Conversely, a user who is reading a transcript will be able to mouse-click on a portion of it to hear accompanying audio, thereby gaining a better understanding by hearing the expression in the speaker’s voice;

* Users who lack sufficient time to listen to an entire interview – they average an hour and a half in length – will be able to mouse-click on parts of the transcript to hear audio for that section; and

* Internet keyword searches may bring the interviews to the attention of new audiences.

ibiblio at UNC, a free public library of digital material on the Internet, provides server space for “Documenting the American South” and will add the oral history project, said Paul Jones, ibiblio director and a clinical associate professor in two UNC schools: Information and Library Science, and Journalism and Mass Communication.

When the oral history project’s technical advances are complete, Jones said, other organizations will be able to use the software, modify and/or improve it.

Making the interviews searchable on the Internet will aid scholars in using the stories to write history texts and analyses, said Dr. Joseph Mosnier, associate director of the Southern Oral History Program.

“They will investigate oral history as a primary source in their scholarship much more routinely,” he said. “They will use simple, copy-and-paste keyboard strokes to capture text, full citations and audio segments for incorporation in their scholarly products, greatly increasing their overall research productivity. Taken together, these innovations represent a true revolution for the field of academic oral history, and historical scholarship more generally.”

Plenty of the stories are told by ordinary people, instead of the officials and leaders quoted in many history texts.

“These people’s voices give us immediacy,” said Dr. Harry Watson, UNC history professor and director of the Center for the Study of the American South, of which the oral history program is a part. “They tell us what really happened to real people, not just textbook data.”

Bolick believes the personal stories will bring history to life for K-12 students, who also may write stories or poems about them in language arts lessons.

“This is going to be a great resource for teachers,” she said. Bolick will align the new curricula she creates with state requirements, then post them on the classroom page of “Documenting the American South” as well as the School of Education’s LEARN-North Carolina Web site of teaching resources. She also will share them with teachers during her summer workshops on how to use “Documenting the American South” in their classrooms.

A pilot project of 21 interviews, funded by the library, is available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/. These Southern Oral History Program interviews, including many of Hurricane Floyd victims’ stories of loss and survival, share the theme “Environmental Transformations in North Carolina, 1985-2000.” They comprise the ninth collection within “Documenting the American South.” The collection will expand gradually as the full oral history project goes online.

The project also will address race and civil rights, women, Southern politics, the Southern economy from textiles to high-tech and Charlotte as a geographic region of interest. Scholarly advisers, who are choosing which interviews will be included, are Hall, Mosnier, Watson and Dr. William Ferris, history professor and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South.

“Documenting the American South” has grown steadily since it began in 1996. Two of the collections were funded by the communications company Ameritech through the Library of Congress; two by the State Library of North Carolina; one by the National Endowment for the Humanities; one by the University Library and the Office of the Chancellor at UNC; and three, including the oral history project, by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Photo note: To download a photo from “Oral Histories of the American South,” visit http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/display_images/interview_inside.html.

Note: For more about the Southern Oral History Program, visit www.sohp.org. For a list of “Documenting the American South” collections, visit http://docsouth.unc.edu/browse/; for more about the grant, visit http://www.imls.gov/news/2005/092005d.shtm

Contacts: Smith can be reached (919) 962-9590 or nsmithATemail.unc.edu; Hall, at (919) 962-8076 or jhallATemail.unc.edu; Mosnier, at 962-5931 or mosnierATunc.edu; Jones, at (919) 962-7600 or jonesATunc.edu; Bolick, at cbolickATunc.edu

I hear what you hear!

In less than 24 hours, I’ve learned about two different ambient audio sampling and matching projects that I had never heard of. They sound a little like magic but audio fingerprints even, or especially, very small ones are very information rich and unique in many ways. So samplers beware.

The first is immi.com or Integrated Media Measurement Inc a market research firm that gives you a cell phone, if you are one of their “panelists” The phone then takes small random audio samples of the ambient audio in the phone’s reach, packs it into a fingerprint and sends it up to a database to be matched. Their How It Works section explains the process from panel selection to data analysis. Their reported panelist retention is as amazing as their technologies.

Now TechCrunch reports that Google Research is working in the same area. The Google Research papers are more about fingerprint creation and matching (the real magic here as audio is so wonderfully compressable if you don’t mind loss and if you are after a finerprint loss is fine).

A bit from TechCrunch here:

Google Research team members Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja along with Michael Fink of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Center for Neural Computation were given the best paper award for their report on the system at the the Euro ITV (interactive television) conference last week. (“Social- and Interactive-Television Applications Based on Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification” 10 pg PDF, see also the Google Research blog post on the paper.)

But unlike IMMI.com, Google is sampling from “your home computer” instead of a special cell phone and it’s unclear how the matched information will be used, that is there are a lot of suggestions that don’t make sense to me.

Net Neutrality UPDATE from Google

Our CEO Eric Schmidt believes this situation is so important that he has written an open letter to Google users asking them to speak out on this issue. We urge all of you to read his letter and call your representative in Congress at 202-224-3121. For more information on the issue, and more ways to make your voice be heard, visit It’sOurNet.org.

Update: For those following this debate closely, the key House vote is happening Thursday night or Friday morning on the Markey-Boucher-Eshoo-Inslee Amendment, which would add meaningful net neutrality provisions to H.R. 5252, the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement (COPE) Act. We believe anything less that this amendment would be a loss for freedom and innovation on the Internet.

BarCampRDU invite

Fred has posted an invite to BarCampRDU to be circulated as widely as possible:

Dear Brilliant Geek/Author/Businessperson/Coder/Hacker/Artist/Musician/Guru,

You’re invited to BarCampRDU!

A BarCamp is an free, open-source unconference, where folks gather to learn, teach and geek out. What’s an unconference? Unconferences are like a regular conference, except that anyone can lead a session. As a result, a wide range of interests and skill levels are represented – making for an fun and unconventional teaching and learning experience.

BarCampRDU will be held on Saturday, July 22, 2006 at the Raleigh, NC headquarters of Red Hat, located on the NC State Centennial Campus. BarCampRDU is free to attend, but we’re limited to the first 150 folks who sign up. To sign up to attend, add your name to the BarCampRDU wiki. The conference is already almost 1/3 full of a lot of names you’ll recognize!

As BarCamp is a free event, we’ll need sponsors to cover the costs of feeding, hydrating and caffeinating the campers. If you or your company would like to sponsor BarCamp, contact Fred Stutzman at fred@metalab.unc.edu or leave your contact info on the wiki. Sponsors are absolutely crucial for making this event a success, so please consider sponsorship.

Thanks for thinking about attending BarCampRDU. It is going to be a great event, and we look forward to seeing you there.

Thanks,
Brilliant Geek/Author/Businessperson/Coder/Hacker/Artist/Musician/Guru

Reading and being sick

I’m stuck at home with so many books I wish I had time to read and several that I’ve started but not finished. Everytime, I’m home sick I think I’ll at least get some of those books read. I can’t do much else. But a slight fever or whatever fatigue this flu and other diseases give me make it impossible to read anything more challenging than a newspaper article or a New Yorker review (at best) or anime (Hikaru No Go). It’s not fair.

Ugh!

Sally caught something in Iowa. I held it off for a week, but now it’s getting me down. Ugh!! Bring on the vitamin C.

Lyceum – Smallwood Press Release

The news is going out on the Smallwood gift to ibiblio and the Lyceum project. I actually said/wrote some of what I’m quoted as saying. Thanks to Kelly and Wanda and especially to the Smallwood folks and to the Lyceum developers — here at ibiblio that’s JJB, Fred and Jameson.

Lyceum—innovative software for blogging

By KELLY MURPHY and WANDA MONROE
UNC School of Information and Library Science

Chapel Hill – Great news for those who create or wish to create two or many thousands of blogs (Web logs) with just one installation! Staff and students of ibiblio, located in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, are developing innovative blogging software that allows individual communication exchange as well as large and varied group communication.
A powerful Web publishing system, Lyceum builds on WordPress software and allows for ease of use while maintaining high performance and security.
Lyceum, the multi-blog WordPress derivative, may accommodate installations with two or 200,000 blogs. It is ideal for corporate intranets or universities that need secure, manageable, and high performance blogging services for thousands of users. It expands on the familiar features, interface and tools of WordPress for users and administrators.
“As the Internet has grown and evolved, it has become a place of collaboration, a forum for discussion and a medium used to exchange information at the click of a button,” said Paul Jones, director of ibiblio. “This growth is exemplified by the open source software, blogs and other communication tools being used every day on the Web. What better way to expand on enhancing these opportunities to share ideas and thoughts than to offer software to make it easy to create and install blogs?”
The emerging generation of Web tools is often described as Web 2.0. According to the O’Reilly Network, which spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazine, and conferences, the concept of Web 2.0 emerged during a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Web 2.0 is an emerging generation of Web tools and one of its components is “social software.” Among this new software are blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting and videoblogs.
A gift of $25,000 was awarded to SILS to create a fellowship in open source. The fellowship will be used to continue the development of the Lyceum blogging system, which is open source. The funding provided by the Frances C. and William P. Smallwood Foundation, a grant-making foundation that promotes technology and education, will assist in refining the program and making it available to users around the world.
“The visionary gift from the Smallwood Foundation will allow us to take the next steps in innovation with Lyceum, that is to move the project from an early test state to software that can be widely used by a vibrant contributing community,” said Jones.
The $25,000 gift counts toward the university’s Carolina First Campaign goal of $2 billion. Carolina First is a comprehensive, multi-year, private fund-raising campaign to support Carolina’s vision of becoming the nation’s leading public university.
Home to one of the largest “collections of collections” on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To access the collections of ibiblio, visit the Web site at: www.ibiblio.org
To test the Lyceum software, visit the “Lyceum Demo Installation” site at: http://demo.lyceum.ibiblio.org

Mugshot testers?

Want to be a Mugshot tester?
I have a few invites that I will share under some not too onerous conditions:

  1. You should be someone I actually know.
  2. You should join the ibiblio group so we can be in touch.
  3. You should be able to use the client — that means for now that you are running Windows XP or Linux Fedora (this makes me sad).
  4. You should then actually use Mugshot for a while.
  5. You should let me know what you think of it and how we might make use of Mugshot here at ibiblio.

That’s it. Drop me a note if interested. Supplies are limited.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 The Real Paul Jones

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑