Friday March 2 is Reserach Day, the day when all the SLAISers who’ve been doing research (with faculty members or on their own) present what they’ve been doing with poster sessions or full on presentations. There’s a keynote speaker and lunch. At least a couple of ASIS&T@UBC members are presenting, and a few more are volunteering. Check out the Research Day Program and we hope to see you there!

Date: November 9th, 2010
Time: 12:30 – 1:30pm
Location: SLAIS Terrace Lab

Presenters and their “cool tools” (also available as a PDF)

Will “Firebug & Firesheep”
Firebug

• Shows html, css for each element in a web page
• Can test/see how styles were implemented to specific elements
• Look at layout (ex. pixels in padding & layout)
• Other features – will tell you what elements are causing issues if pages are having trouble loading
• Can help identify errors/messy code (it’s nice to have clean code)

Firesheep Sidejacking

• People can use cookies to steal your information
• Dealing with cookies – install it in your firefox for when using wifi networks
• Making sure you use secure wifi networks
• Should see https if the wifi is secure instead of http

Alex “Yahoo Pipes”

• Interface is confusing, but should be aware of the tool
• Can send RSS feed links to friends etc.
• Can use for sending filtered (types of) images from flickr

Meghan “cIRcle”

• UBC Digital repository
• SLAIS graduates’ work are not being heavily represented
• Contribution to cIRcle helps increase visibility, helps students, helps for future job opportunities (ex. can send employers links to works)
• Uses open source software
• Think about submitting your papers for showcasing your work
• In sending paper, student is not giving up copyright
• Just need to 1) sign form to say cIRcle can showcase it on the site, and 2) have a professor email cIRcle saying “yes this is a good paper.”

Catie “blekko”

• Search engine uses slash tags in search box
• ex. search query can be watchdog /Christian … Recipes /vegan … Recipes /vegan/ gluten-free … etc.
• If a slash tag doesn’t exist in the list of slash tags, you can add it to the user index
• The user generated libraries added to the index is makes this search engine different
• So the user searches through the site’s original list of slash tags and users’ added slash tags

Tosha “GazoPa”

• Image search engine
• Search by image (not by keywords – no words needed)
• Upload, draw, or type in URL of image to search
• For example, upload an image and get results of similar images and information on how similar retrieved results are to the searched image
• Can change view of results
• Good for finding information with an image that would be very difficult to describe using words
• Has flickr option, so you can search through license types for images (fair use or copyright)
• Can retrieve information about the subject in the image
• Advanced search with colours, shapes etc. to find other related images
• Cross-language
• If you upload your photo, it doesn’t get added to the images searched – but it does stay on their server
• You can add text to your image

Cynthia “Foxit”

• free for downloads
• PDF reader tool if you want something different from Adobe
• Can add annotations/notes to all pdf texts (not same restrictions as in Adobe)
• Text recognition is a little wonky, but still okay
• Add notes to highlighted sections of the text (icon put in the margin)
• Write comments in the margins of the text (easy to add and delete)
• All notes are visible and readible in the actual document

Alex “Mendeley”

• Mendeley is another type of reader that also allows for annotation in notes and also is good for creating bibliographies.
• Foxit is good for editing pdf when done (ex. good for signing a pdf document etc.)
• In January a PDF conference in california will be held for fixing the tool

Justin “ebook management”
Calibre

• Open source e-book management
• Tag all books, metadata
• Conversion tool – take a pdf and convert to other style of document
• Features include ability to set it up to sync through wireless to your phone from your desktop at home
• Built in e-reader (for epubs and other ebook formats)
• Possibly useful for annotation – need to explore that option

ManyBooks.Net

• didn’t want to be locked into the system from Amazon/Kindle
• Good site for finding public domain ebooks with better interface than Project Gutenberg itself
• Can browse through different categories – ex. creative commons
• Get in different formats (html etc.)
• Also check Baen who have a good good selection of older or advanced reader copies for sci-fi DRM free and for cheap.

Qinqin “Wink”

• Free download – capture screen shots for creating instructional videos etc.
• Can set it to capture many screen shots/frames over a set period of time
• Can use voice overs/audio track to accompany video
• Create video project of frames taken, edit frames, copy and paste frames, set time duration for viewing of each frame
• Set streaming medium in firefox
• File size is very small
• Can send to friends
• Compatible for Mac and PC use
• Limited features, but good for creating basic videos

Shannon “What I Learned Today”

• Blog by Nicole C. Engard (Director of Open Source Education for open source library systems)
• Talks a lot about gadgets
• Library based tech blog and other library related topics that might not be found elsewhere
• Useful for keeping track of information related issues
• For example, getting announcements about Facebook’s privacy setting changes etc.

Comments/suggestions from participants:

In posting summary notes of tools presented, tools should be hyperlinked to their live web urls.

If you’re researching anything to do with HCI or any other aspect of information communication technologies, this site should be one of your stops. http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/index.html

Funded by Microsoft Research and something called the Very Large Database Foundation (who knew?), and hosted at the University of Trier, this site indexes more than 1 million articles and conference proceedings authored by more than 12,000 individuals, cross-referencing them based on co-author, year, and venue (journal where published or event).

There is a faceted search option, for Ranganathan fans (http://dblp.l3s.de/?q=&newQuery=yes&resTableName=query_resultT0FSWN), and if you’re looking for fast, I mean very fast, results, the CompleteSearch interface will “zoom in” on all the articles indexed in the database by a particular author as you type the author’s name. (http://dblp.mpi-inf.mpg.de/dblp-mirror/index.php).

Most astonishing of all is that even though this is, ostensibly, a database, there is no there there – to quote Gertrude Stein – in that the data is not aggregated into a single database file but distributed throughout thousands of text files, with the core content — journal TOCs — hand-entered by human beings.

Yes, indeed. Every journal’s Table of Contents is hand-typed into a predetermined HTML format that can be easily parsed by programs written in C, Perl, and Java, “glued together by shell scripts” (to quote from the detailed FAQ). Just goes to show all us 2.0 Web babies that sometimes, the old fashioned approach can work very, very well.

Interesting project out of University of California at Santa Cruz: software that can (purportedly) track the accuracy of information inside Wikipedia entries. The software, developed by Luca de Alfaro, a Stanford Ph.D. who is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UCSC, monitors the trustworthiness of Wikipedia entries based on the reputations of their contributors, and modifies the display of Wikipedia articles based on realtime, calculated contributor metadata.

Quoting from Professor de Alfaro’s own statement about the project, it computes the “trust value of each word of a Wikipedia article” based on the reputation of its original author and the reputation of all its subsequent authors. If you’re curious to try it out, there’s a description and demo of the system available at the UC Santa Cruz web site, using a dump from Wikipedia created in February of 2007.