Alternative Indexing Team Final Posts

Posted on by

As of 11:00 am AKDT May 4th (last day for teh graded blogging), these are all the alternative indexing-related posts**:

Capturing Facebook

Capturing Tweets

Do We Have the Technology?

National Archives – Web 2.0

NASA

Social Media – Archiving and a response

Archive-It

ThinkUp

HootSuite

Themes

LOC Twitter Archive

Capturing Social Media (Direct link to Fast Company article in this post, in case you can’t get to it)

Backupify

Album+

Hadoop World

Post on “Alternative Indexing So Far” – Compiled a half-month ago

Enjoy!

** As I’m three hours behind most of my teammates, I had to get this post up early so I could, you know, do errands on my day off. There might be (and probably will be) more alt. resources posts after I put this one up, but unfortunately, I can’t sit and wait for them, because I need to get some groceries.

[You know, I do feel quite a bit smarter after completing this course. Everyone was right when they recommended it to me, and I'm glad I signed up for it. Hooray!]

Describing Digital Photos

Posted on by

I found this article from the Library of Congress, published last October. It’s a quick read about how they are encouraging people to add (embedding) descriptions to their digital photos (like writing on the back of a 3X5). But it’s not as easy as it sounds.

I liked this article a lot. I wish there was a button on my camera to just add a description! Read it and let me know what you think. The author also did a little experiment with readers and published the results in January this year.

So Say We All

Posted on by

Chris, I loved your post on folksonomic and expert tagging. I like the idea of having an expert’s opinion on tagging images (something I wish I could do for the project, but alas) because they don’t have to fake their expertise, or quickly try to become one by reading a few books/ websites on the subject. That kind of catalog enrichment would (IMHO) really benefit our users, helping them search and discover. “Luck favors the prepared.”

Capturing Live Facebook Feeds

Posted on by

As I was submitting that last post about Twitter API, I thought, “Dang, I should have included information about other social media captures.”

I found this tutorial online on how to capture live Facebook feeds from a group using Discover Text. For using it in a community repository, we might have to create a Facebook group called Alabama Football, but, honestly, there probably already is one named that or something similar.

We could name it “Piggers all the Way”, but that’s just an idea…

And it also works for Twitter!

Capturing Tweets

Posted on by

So we know we want them as part of a community repository. But how do we get our hot, little hands on them?

Well, if we’re trying to capture tweets, we don’t seem to need to look any further than the Twitter API. What is API?, you ask (I did). According to Twitter’s FAQ:

The acronym “API” stands for “Application Programming Interface”. An API is a defined way for a program to accomplish a task, usually by retrieving or modifying data. In Twitter’s case, we provide an API method for just about every feature you can see on our website. Programmers use the Twitter API to make applications, websites, widgets, and other projects that interact with Twitter. Programs talk to the Twitter API over HTTP, the same protocol that your browser uses to visit and interact with web pages.

This website has a bunch of tutorials, but if you really want the in-depth stuff, go to the Twitter Developers. A lot of it is over my head, but someone with programming in their background could set up something in a community repository using Search API or Streaming API.

ViLDA Presentation and Screencast

Posted on by

The time has come to show you all how awesome Alaska’s Digital Archives is!

ViLDA, by the way (since I don’t think I mentioned this in the screencast and might forget to mention it in the presentation), stands for VIrtual Library and Digital Archives.

I checked the website: http://vilda.alaska.edu and discovered that they have changed the layout sometime in the last few weeks! How wonderful! *eye twitch* So my screencast will actually not be accurate :S. I don’t have the time to fix it before today’s presentation, but honestly, I don’t really want to re-record a seven minute screencast anyway.
You can still learn plenty about the Archives through my now-outdated screencast, which you can download here. If you want to see the handout for my PowerPoint, you can find it here. Yes, you are quite right; that is indeed my website from LS560. I remembered how to edit it. I feel particularly proud of myself for that.

Enjoy your learning!

P.S. If you want to see more videos about the Archives, check out the post I did earlier in the semester.

Can We Archive Social Media? Do We Have the Technology?

Posted on by

Today’s post brings us back to the Archiving Social Media website, something I brought to your attention on March 27th, 2012. It has been languishing, half-forgotten, while I worked on other projects this semester. But with my image indexing well underway, it’s time for more research on alternative resource indexing.

Today I am reading through responses to the Technology Standards area of the site. It’s not quite as long as I thought it might be. As stated on the site, this discussion area is aimed at trying to answer the following questions:

  • Which technologies should we employ to archive social media?
  • Are existing technologies adequate to the task or do we need to develop new tools? 
  • Do we need new metadata standards or can we adapt existing standards?
  • What kinds of discovery, selection, aggregation, and storage technologies will archiving social media require?
  • How realistic is it to collect and preserve items from so many different sources?

In the context of a football-oriented community repository, where most of the content would be images, we would need to find a software that can help us index both, so that all the content types could be search-able together. We wouldn’t want our patrons to have to search two different systems to find the social media responses that arise from certain images/plays during the timeline of the game. That could get rather cumbersome and irritating.

Can we adapt Dublin Core to tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos? As the contributor Jim says, “What properties are quintessentially social media?”

How do we select which social media to include and which to exclude?

See this public Google doc for more information: [click me!]

Cognitive Dissonance

Posted on by

Wow. Was today ever a day for cognitive dissonance. I fancy myself as being pretty smart, both in books and also in life experiences. Yeah. This project was a nice way of highlighting my hubris, as I discovered I know less than nothing about football while indexing my alloted images.

A brief recap of this morning:

[On the phone with my dad]: “Did you watch the 1975 Sugar Bowl? Who wore white?”
Turns out white means away in football (but not in any of the sports I ever played).
“What’s the difference between a field goal and a kickoff?”
“So who can throw the ball? Is it just the quarterback or..?”
“What does offsides even mean?!”
“Why do they just keep jumping on each other? You can’t even see the ball anymore!”

Wikipedia and this site have been really helpful so far. I am the Little Engine!

I Think I Can, I Think I Can