bavatuesdays

I have been taking a little slack here at DTLT (which, by the way, will be hosting none other than Jon Udell at this year’s Faculty Academy on May 17th – wow!!) for pointing out the delicate subtleties of a slide show extension for flash called Slide Show Pro. So much so, that my new initials have been designated S.S.P. Often times, folks try and focus on what Slide Show Pro -that beautiful image presentation panacea- cannot do. Like, for a random example, interface and work with a photo gallery such as coppermine (which, happens to be where the theater and historic preservation classes we are working with here in DTLT are storing their digital images). Well, my jaded PowerPoint lovers, Web XS 24(like me) has recognized (in all our infinite wisdom) the shifting paradigms of web image communication as we know them, and coded accordingly.

In sum, comments on blogs can be a space for conversation, dialogue, and a general community of sharing and learning. But they can also be a place to pay homage to your Slide Show Pro master! So, I will be expecting at least two, if not three, comments on this blog very soon – if dignity is still a value in this forsaken land of scrap bookers!!

Basecamp has done it again recently with their free IM messaging service. Here is how they describe it:

Campfire lets you set up password-protected web-based chat rooms in just seconds. Invite a client, colleague, or vendor to chat, collaborate, and make decisions. Set up a room on your intranet for internal communications.

You can find out more here … Campfire.

Thanks for the tip Zach!

I have been been looking for resources on the relationship between Americas’ first war (the Tripolitan War from 1801-1805) in North Africa and the Haitian revolution. While I am still searching for the historical connection, I found a very interesting ‘academic’ project using a wiki and blog to open up the historical narrative of the Haitian revolution to a larger online community. The Louverture Project understands its marriage of the narrative of this important revolution for liberation with technology as follows:

One proposed feature of The Louverture Project is the development of a historical narrative to provide context for the encyclopedic collection of facts on the site. The Revolution Will Be Forgotten is a work in progress, a popular history of the events of 1791-1804 and their effects on the world at large. Readers of the online narrative will have the freedom to read the text on its own, or to explore the ideas, concepts, and facts referenced in the text in varying levels of detail. Of course, TLP will also function as a fully-searchable online resource for a wide range of Haiti-related historical material.

Though we’re starting out with a focus on the Revolutionary Period of Haitian history, it’s not easy to tell exactly when, or if, the effects of that revolution ended. Therefore, the scope of the site is bound to expand as more contributors come online. Be bold in adding to and editing the site. Let it be l’ouverture “the opening” to knowledge and understanding of a fascinating, important, and too-long ignored piece of world history.

The intersection of popular histories and social networking technologies seems to be a truly important academic and cultural development that takes the wikipedia model and focuses it upon an in-depth examination of specific moments of, in this case, history (but why not music, literature, art, biology, chemistry, etc.?). The use of the wiki, and other social networking applications, as a repository for the inscription of a public memory that is neither unilateral or complete suggests an ongoing dialogue that depends upon community involvement and a willingness to explore and engage the intellectual and cultural moments that shape our worldview. Such a project, while it is certainly exposing itself to potential “errors”, opens up the composition of cultural memories to the diverse authorship of communities. The Louverture Project envisions the possibilities of technology to expand the horizons of understanding of cultural moments, practices, etc. both within and outside of institutional models.

A post on WFMU (published back in December 2005) features a radio dial scan recorded shortly after John Lennon’s murder. This file captures the public air waves response to his death, enframing the cultural/media history of such an event in a truly amazing manner. Link. Discovered via digg.com.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times titled “How Pop Sounded before it Popped” discusses the unbelievable collection of cylinder recordings that have been digitized and made available on the web thanks to the Donald C. Davidson Library’s Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project at UCSB. While I can’t pretend to know much about American musical history, I won’t have too many more excuses not to given such an unbelievable resource as this. Enjoy this amazing collection!

Thanks Gary and Mikhail!

A couple of weeks back (March 1st, to be exact) boingboing posted about a new multi-user blogging service called Lyceum (developed by ibiblio.org).  I just got around to downloading the nightly build and reading the FAQ, and I have to say if it delivers on what it promises this could be a welcome alternative to the WordPress Multi-User nightly build nightmare.

Seems that Lyceum uses the wordpress code, design, themes, and plugins, but has redesigned the database table structure.  And while users that are not sysadmins cannot upload files or install themes and/or plugins, this multi-user blogging software promises to scale easily from 2 to 200,000+ blogs – now that is enterprise level!

You can see their demo site to try a test installation here.