narrative – Parerga und Paralipomena http://www.michelepasin.org/blog At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded - Wittgenstein Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:23:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.11 13825966 Python links (and more) 7/2/11 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2011/02/03/python-links-and-more-7211/ Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:23:21 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=1075 This post contains just a collection of various interesting things I ran into in the last couple of weeks… they’re organized into three categories: pythonic links, events and conferences, and new online tools. Hope you’ll find something of interest!

Pythonic stuff:

  • Epidoc
    Epydoc is a handy tool for generating API documentation for Python modules, based on their docstrings. For an example of epydoc’s output, see the API documentation for epydoc itself (html, pdf).
  • PyEnchant
    PyEnchant is a spellchecking library for Python, based on the excellent Enchant library.
  • Dexml
    The dexml module takes the mapping between XML tags and Python objects and lets you capture that as cleanly as possible. Loosely inspired by Django’s ORM, you write simple class definitions to define the expected structure of your XML document.
  • SpecGen
    SpecGen v5, ontology specification generator tool. It’s written in Python using Redland RDF library and licensed under the MIT license.
  • PyCloud
    Leverage the power of the cloud with only 3 lines of python code. Run long processes on the cloud directly from your shell!
  • commandlinefu.com
    This is not really pythonic – but nonetheless useful to pythonists: a community-based repository of useful unix shell scripts!

    • Events and Conferences:

  • Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts Conference 2011
    University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. The DRHA 2011 conference theme this year is “Connected Communities: global or local2local?”
  • Narrative and Hypertext Workshop at the ACM Hypertext 2011 conference in Eindhoven.
  • Culture Hack Day, London, January 2011
    This event aimed at bringing cultural organisations together with software developers and creative technologists to make interesting new things.
  • History Hack Day, London, January 2011
    A bunch of hackers with a passion for history getting together and doing experimental stuff
  • Conference.archimuse.com
    The ‘online space for cultural informatics‘: lots of useful info here, about publications, jobs, people etc.
  • Agora project: Scholarly Open Access Research in European Philosophy
    Project looking at building an infrastructure for the semantic interlinking of European philosophy datasets

    • Online tools:

  • FactForge
    A web application aiming at showcasing a ‘practical approach for reasoning with the web of linked data’.
  • Semantic Overflow
    A clone of Stack Overflow (collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers) for questions ‘about semantic web techniques and technologies’.
  • Google Refine
    A tool for “working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases”.
  • Google Scribe
    A text editor with embedded autocomplete suggestions as you type
  • Books Ngram Viewer
    Tool that displays statistical information regarding the use of user-selected sentences in a corpus of books (e.g., “British English”, “English Fiction”, “French”) over the selected years

    • …

    ]]>     1075     A Random Walk through the 20th Century http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2006/07/19/a-random-walk-through-the-20th-century/ http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2006/07/19/a-random-walk-through-the-20th-century/#comments Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:35:09 +0000 http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/mikele/blog/?p=87 I wanted to post something about this since a long time ago, but never got down to it. A random walk through the 20th century is an old narrative/hypermedia system, dates back to 1996, realized by a bunch of people in MIT around the influence/direction of Glorianna Davenport.

    This hyper-portrait introduces the audience to a remarkable man whose life centered on science, government, ecucation and issues of cultural humanism. Early in his career, Jerome Wiesner developed an audio recording laboratory at the Library of Congress and travelled extensively throughout America, capturing folk music by native performers. He directed MIT’s Research Lab for Electronics during the Cold War, served as National Science Advisor to John F. Kennedy, and eventually became President of MIT. After the end of World War II, Wiesner became a prominent advocate of disarmament and was a key player in negotiating the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

    In this hyper portrait (which runs on the World Wide Web), we invite viewers to explore the Twentieth Centurey through an extensible collection of stories about and recollections by the central figure. We also invite viewers who knew JBW to share a memorable story with our growing society of audience.

     

    Screenshot from "A Random Walk through the 20th Century"

    The flash-looking navigation interface kind of catches the eye, I must say. A few things moving on the left hand side, a matrix inspired selection menu gives pretty well the idea of some machinery combining different resources into a new narrative. It’s all realized in Java and it combines video, audio and textual resources. However, apart from the technological issues (wonder what these guys think, nowadays, about ontology-based navigation) the choice of not presenting to the user the rationale of the narrative chosen can be a limitation.

    Is the sequence of resources ordered according to an explicit purpose, or what? Moreover, sometimes the resources have no caption or description, and that makes it even more difficult to contextualize them within the whole.

    The site is really worth having a look at, though!!

     

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