Tag Archives: Software

Learn R with Twotorials

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If you want to learn methods, techniques, or technologies that are outside your usual scholarly ambit, then you often have to learn them in small sections as you find time. That’s why I was glad to learn about R Twotorials.

R, according to the R Project’s website, “is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.” It’s a programming language useful for analyzing data and creating graphics, especially if you’re using statistical methods.* It’s also the language that Matthew Jockers suggests you learn if you’re interested in digital humanities.

R Twotorials is a set of some ninety screencasts, each two minutes long, that teach you how to use R. Created by graduate student Anthony Damico, a statistical analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, the screencasts are fast-paced and entertainingly bombastic. You can get a flavor for the screencasts and a sense of how R might be useful by watching this video on how to make simple plots in R.

As Damico says in the very first video, you’ll need to watch a lot of the screencasts before you can do something useful with R: “R will not give you instant gratification.” But because the concepts are broken down into two minute segments, it’s easy to start and keep on learning.

ProfHackers have written about learning to program before: Jason wrote about how to “Become Code Literate with Codecademy“; Anastasia wrote about a new year’s resolution to learn programming and about Program or Be Programmed; Ryan wrote about learning Ruby with Hackety-Hack and Jason Heppler’s The Rubyist Historian (which I also recommend).

Are you learning a programming language (or anything else) in the odd moments of the day?

* No, I’m not qualified to compare R to SAS, SPSS, Stata, Processing, or anything else.

Update February 8: Anthony graciously wrote in to correct my error. He is a statistical analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation and an all around good guy, not a graduate student.

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by geishaboy500]

Use Amara to Crowdsource Captions on Your Entire YouTube Channel

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Amara is the relatively new name given to the service formerly known as Universal Subtitles. As I’ve written before, I’ve found this to be the most user-friendly online interface for adding captions to a web-hosted video (I even made a screencast, though some of the details are out of date).

One thing that kept me from declaring Amara the perfect online tool for captioning web-hosted videos is the somewhat involved (but admittedly still pretty easy) process of downloading the captions from the Amara server and then uploading them to, say, your YouTube account where your videos are hosted. Something as mechanical and repetitive as this ought to be automated in some way.

Well, guess what. Amara recently made a welcome announcement:

We are very proud to launch a major new Amara.org feature– free crowd subtitling for every personal YouTube user! Want to make your videos accessible to people around the world who speak a different language? Want deaf and hard of hearing users to be able to watch? Just connect your YouTube account to Amara and invite your viewers to help. Whenever subtitles get created, they will be synced directly to your YouTube channel. It takes about 10 seconds to connect your YouTube account.

In short, just create an account on Amara, link your YouTube account to your Amara account, and all of the videos in your YouTube channel will be automatically added to Amara for users to subtitle. Once subtitles for a video are finished, they will automatically be synced to your YouTube video.

I haven’t tried this out, yet, but once I do I’ll be sure to write up the experience.

How about you? What are your favorite methods for adding captions to videos? Please share in the comments.

Choose Your Own Classroom Adventure with inklewriter

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IMG_0558.jpgMost eBooks are still pretty boring as objects: text, pictures, maybe a video or interactive visualization in a more experimental work. But that landscape may be changing, thanks in part to the number of cool free tools for building interactive books. One of these platforms, inklewriter, has some great potential for use with students in the classroom or for creating interactive stories or texts.

Last week, Inkle Studios released “Future Voices,” a curated collection of stories produced with its interactive story development tool. This slick iPad app features the tech behind Frankenstein, an interactive adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel by Dave Morris. Play through any of these stories for a while and you’ll see everything from straightforward choices of action to complex moral dilemmas and experiments. You can also check out many experiments on the web, including Emily Short’s Holography–she’s also written some thoughts on inklewriter as a platform.

While Inform 7 (as discussed last week) uses a parser interface based on interpreting a broad range of user actions (get lamp, open door, look at book, etc.), Inklewriter uses an interaction model similar to ’80s Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, which recently came back into print and made the transition to eBooks. However, it goes beyond any of the simple page-shuffling models of those past books in part because it can keep track of decisions and variables from the user’s actions.

Inklewriter has a great tutorial “story” to introduce writers to the platform. The interface, shown below, is mostly free of distractions and built around creating story nodes and choices:

Click to embiggen.

Most of the complexity comes from keeping track of connections, which are identified as “loose ends” until they are linked to another story node, and adding conditions to the availability of options. Conditionals are based on if/then logic pulled from story exploration thus far–so for instance, if the player has visited their house and checked their email, they may have an option to head to a meeting that a player who ignored their email wouldn’t see. A built-in story mapping tool helps the author keep track of these conditions and connections.

Inklewriter and similar platforms like Varytale also offer the potential for mapping out interactive narratives for other settings. The above photo is from a “live” choice-based story stenciled onto the sidewalks of the Mission District in San Francisco–I can imagine planning such a story with students using one of these tools, then installing it in an appropriate setting.

Personally I’d like to try building a textbook in inklewriter, perhaps one for programming or another self-guided topic that could be paced and refocused according to user choices. Inklewriter offers a paid service to convert story files to Kindle eBooks, which can then be sold through Amazon. Anyone can publish web-based versions of their stories for free.

I’ll be trying out inklewriter in my Interactive Narrative class. Have you tried inklewriter or played through any of the stories on the platform so far? Share your experiences and ideas for using or making interactive books in the comments!

[CC BY 2.0 Lead Photo By Flickr User Enersauce, Screenshot from inklewriter]

Open Thread Wednesday: Favorite Weather Apps

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A groundhog looking out from under a porchAs I write this, we’re just a short 36 hours away from the most important weather event of the year: Groundhog Day. And while I know that everyone loves Punxsutawney Phil, I’m a personal supporter of General Beauregard Lee, who lives here in the South with me and has a much higher accuracy rate.

Bill Murray aside, the reason we’re all fascinated with Groundhog Day is twofold. First, now that the winter holidays are over and we’ve slogged through January, we all feel entitled to get to Spring as quickly as possible. Second and more to the heart of the species, weather can have a tremendous effect on us, our ability to get work done, and even our ability to get to or from work. (Fellow ProfHacker Mark Sample was recently stranded at Dulles for more than 36 hours when the January 25 storm came through.) If you want posts about your commute and how to hack it, we’ve got them.)

Fortunately, most of us don’t have to travel with groundhogs in our pockets these days to get a quick check on the weather. If you’ve got a smartphone or other Internet-capable device, you’ve got quick and easy access to a plethora of different weather. Naturally, most of these devices have a weather app already built in. But perhaps just as naturally, these stock apps tend to be rather…underwhelming. The sad nature of the iOS weather app is why Jason described using Google to get mobile weather information without an app.

While you can get weather information without the app, then, it turns out that dedicated apps can offer alerts, multiple locations, and better visuals. Perhaps it is this last reason that has led to such a proliferation of such tools. My own personal favorite is Check the Weather. It offers a beautiful and minimalistic interface and I can get hourly forecasts with a swipe in one direction and daily forecasts with a swipe in the other. If I swipe up, I get minute-by-minute precipitation predictions from the Dark Sky API for the next hour. I don’t get barometric pressure or wind speed / direction, but I find that those things aren’t really that important to me.

Jason has written for Wired‘s GeekDad about the Dark Sky app, so I know it’s one of his favorites. But what about you, ProfHacker readers? What’s your favorite weather app? What features are must-haves for you? Let us know in the comments! (And — while you’re at it — what’s your favorite predictive Sciurdiae?)

Lead image: Marmotte — Groundhog / Gilles Gonthier / CC BY 2.0

A Quick Look at Penultimate 4

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PenultimateEvernote released Penultimate 4 late last week. (Unfortunately, it’s only available for iOS 6 at the moment, though support for iOS 5 is expected in the next update. Penultimate is currently not available for Android, though they’re apparently working on that.)

Heather and Ethan have mentioned Penultimate in this space before, and we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink over Evernote itself.

There are two major features to this release of Penultimate:

  • Automatic synchronization with Evernote (to which the user must deliberately opt in; it isn’t forced) and
  • Handwriting recognition within the application itself, not just within Evernote (though this feature does require Evernote sync).

The app is free, so it’s definitely worth checking out. As I experimented with it, though, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t going to work well for me.

The automatic synchronization with Evernote works flawlessly. If you make quick freehand sketches or take short handwritten notes that you want to be searchable and backed up automatically, Penultimate may be just what you’re looking for (and you certainly can’t beat the price tag).

In my case, the problem is that I take lengthy notes that are handwritten — quite a lot of them. Handwriting recognition seems to work best (at least in my experience) with printed letters. I write longhand. My penmanship is decent, but Evernote doesn’t seem to recognize it very well. Handwriting recognition, though nice, isn’t an essential for me, so that in itself isn’t a deal-breaker. But there are two other difficulties that mean Penultimate isn’t the app for me to use on a regular basis:

  • The application doesn’t have continuous scrolling. To add a new page when the current one is full, you need to tap the lower right corner (or upper right, if you’ve moved the toolbar to the top of the page — which I’d recommend doing to avoid accidentally selecting tools you don’t want while you’re writing).
  • There’s no zoom/focus that enables you to write normally in a window at the bottom of the screen, while what you write appears in smaller form above the area where you’re actually writing (Notes Plus and Notability both have this feature; neither is free, but neither is high-priced, either). It makes writing more difficult than it needs to be, and results in filling each page very quickly.

Penultimate may not be particularly useful for me, but for other usage scenarios it may work very well. So let us know in the comments: What kinds of things do (or would) you use an application like Penultimate for? If you’ve tried it, how well did it work for you? If you’ve tried other applications, what did you think of them?

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by deburca]