Poetry meaning and folksonomy flaws

In my Electronic Texts class this semester, we have decided on a class project: a poem illustrator. The idea is simple enough: input a poem and the program will pick a flickr picture as an illustration. But how to pick the picture? You could analyze the poem, remove stop words, find the most common words, and search [...]

with a little help from my friends

This is a sort of follow up to yesterday’s post. Steve posted a nice comment, assuring me that “In the end, you’re better off developing a relaxed attitude toward the fact that you will *always* feel a bit stupid in this business.” I completely agree, and on some level I know this—at the same time, the [...]

The learning curve

I’ve been busy these last few weeks. Though I dreamed of having lots of free time to read and relax post grad school, free time has been hampered by two things: Geoff and I decided to look for a new house, and I’m having to learn a LOT for the new job. If you want [...]

Life after school

I have neglected to mention on this blog that 1) I am done with school (I will graduate in May, but no more classes), and 2) I got a new job. I am now the Digital Resources Designer at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (new job, same place.) The somewhat ironic thing is [...]

A confession (more on Librarians and programming)

I have been following the replies to my post on teaching programming in library school, and I have a confession to make before I continue: I am horribly biased. I’ve wanted to learn to program for a long time, and actually learning how to has really opened my eyes to so many possibilities. I’m now teaching myself [...]

Why every Library Science student should learn programming

The title is meant to incite a bit of discussion. I myself am not entirely convinced that every library student should be required to take a semester long course in programming, but I also think there are several very good reasons for librarians to learn programming: Information is increasingly in digital form and programming is the [...]

Embedding RSS into a webpage using PHP

Thing #6 on Nebraska Learns 2.0 is about using a feedreader to find feeds. In keeping with trying to learn something new, I decided to learn how to embed RSS into a web page for Thing #6. Turns out this is pretty easy. There is an extremely easy way to do this: You can use Feed2JS [...]

On digital projects

In the Digital Humanities, there is a lot of talk about digital projects. But what exactly is a digital project? I came to this question while browsing through some of my old sites. One that’s still online is my Frida Kahlo site. I put this back up because it is one of the most consistently hit [...]

IM & Me

Thing # 5 for Nebraska Learns 2.0 is to try instant messaging. Well, I already IM, and I have a Meebo account (even had a meebo widget at one point), so I thought I’d just ruminate about IM and texting for a while. I have recently begun using instant messaging a bit more, for a few [...]

Nebraska Learns 2.0 kick off post

Photo: learn by aaron schmidt I am participating in the Nebraska Library Commission’s Nebraska Learns 2.0 over the next few weeks. At the very least, it’ll force me to actually post on my blog! I’m going to take a slightly different approach to the 23 things, at least the ones I already know something about. My goal [...]