Archive for November 2007
Google planning online storage service?
An article covering everyday copyright violation. I can has C&D stick?
Google starts renewable energy cheaper than coal initiative. I Feel Eco.
Google Blogoscoped notices terrain on Google Maps.
View Amazon book reviews geographically. Whut?
Yahoo to offer structured search.
NASDAQ is launching an Internet index. It took until late 2007?!
It is a new Firefox and it is out now.
Technology Review has an interesting article on a new offering from MIT — a tool that allows users to search over 200 academic lectures by keyword. The Lecture Browser is available at http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/ .
I think this site is supposed to work in Firefox but I had no luck. I would get the “searching” window and no actual results. It worked fine in IE. Choose some keywords and a category for your search. What you’ll get is a lecture name, date, and a list of the times the searched-for keyword appears in the transcript. There’s also a timeline with play controls; click on a play icon and the lecture will show up in the RealPlayer on the right side of the screen.
As the video plays, a transcript follows along underneath. It doesn’t appear that the transcripts are perfect — I was watching a 2002 lecture from Jeff Bezos that had some really weird transcript. But I can’t find the example. Something about Bulgarians paying for their order in cats. I found it:
“i even know they had internet access in eighteen ninety five in bulgaria but they’d and this person did not pay with a credit card they paid with cats”
… so don’t trust the transcription completely. It’s accurate enough that it’s useful to follow along while watching the video, but that’s it. Watch the video.
It’s a little disorienting, jumping all over a video instead of watching it beginning to end. On the other hand it is MUCH faster — and I was able to do a depth of content exploration I wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise. Now if it would just work in Firefox…!
The University of Delaware Library Digital Collections has added three new collections to its Web site. All three of the collections relate to the Civil War, and they’re all letter collections.
The Edward A Fulton Collection contains 39 letters, mostly written between Edward Fulton and his mother. The David Lilley Letters consist of 37 letters mostly written between David Lilley and his sister over a four-year span. Finally, the Thomas Reynolds Letters were written to Louisa Seward and include letters, poems, and an invoice for medical equipment (!!)
The collections are presented in a framed page; the list of letters on the left. (There are few enough letters in each collection that this is not unwieldy.) Click a letter and it appears on the right as an scan of the original document. If you want to read a transcript (though I was surprised how easy the originals were to read) use the pull-down menu over the list of letters. Choose “Page & Text” and click Go. You’ll get a pop-up button with the transcript (it took me a few minutes to figure this out.) While browsing the original images you can zoom in, paginate, and get referring URLs.
Nice collections!
