The Salt-Box

Remember Sandy, the nifty e-mail personal assistant from Values of N? (Not just e-mail, of course: You can also send commands to Sandy via Twitter.)

If you’ve been holding off on giving the service a try because you already have a calendar, then I have good news:

Sandy now publishes an iCal feed readable by 30boxes, gCal, iCal — even the poor souls in Outlook.

And 30boxes recently unveiled a pretty, pretty iPhone interface, so pretty that it hurts less while you watch meetings clog what ordinarily is your most productive afternoon.

It’s like a web 2.0 / productivity / Mac nerdvana.

Look at this: The 1937 version of King Solomon’s Mines, with Paul Robeson as Umbopa! Streaming right to your desktop . . .

My column at Bookslut this month has a slightly misleading title: I’m not really against dream interpretation in psychoanalysis, but I do think it is widely misunderstood.  As far as I can tell, the point of interpreting dreams is not to deliver up a nugget of truth about the analysand, but rather to get them to pay attention.

That said, I do get to talk about one of my favorite pieces of Freudian kettle logic.  (Kettle logic, according to Freud, goes like this: A neighbor asks you about a pot he lent to you, and you reply: “I never borrowed that pot, it was broken when you lent it to me, and, anyways, I’ve already returned it.”)  Here’s how he discusses the role of symbols in dream interpretation:

Dreams make use of this symbolism for the disguised representation of their latent thoughts. Incidentally, many of the symbols are habitually or almost habitually employed to express the same thing. Nevertheless, the peculiar plasticity of the psychical material [in dreams] must never be forgotten. Often enough a symbol has to be interpreted in its proper meaning and not symbolically; while on other occasions a dreamer may derive from his private memories the power to employ as sexual symbols all kinds of things which are not ordinarily employed as such… This ambiguity of the symbols links up with the characteristic of dreams for admitting of “overinterpretation” — for representing in a single piece of content thoughts and wishes which are often widely divergent in their nature.

So, symbols disguise meaning, except when they all mean the same thing, or except when something that looks symbolic isn’t, or when something is a wholly personal symbol — plus, don’t forget, symbols, like dreams, themselves can be interpreted to an almost limitless extent.

As ever, read the whole thing! Coming months feature HBO’s new show In Treatment, and Jeff Warren’s book, Head Trip.

For new readers: The PsychoSlut columns are about Freud and contemporary culture.  The conceit is that I’m re-reading the Standard Edition of Freud’s works, one volume per month.  Here’s the series opener; when I did the first volume I also interviewed Mark Edmundson; and when I did volume 3, there was some bonus content from my interview the same month with Christopher Lane.

Interactive timelines can be a handy reference for students (or faculty! or researchers!) in almost any course.  Their relevance for the humanities and social sciences almost goes without saying, but one could easily imagine an interesting timeline about human development, or evolution, or the formation of galaxies, or any other topic.

In this post, I want to comment briefly on three tools for building timelines, and introduce an assignment that I’m trying in a variety of different contexts this semester.

First, here’s Eric Meyer’s CSS for “building a structured timeline out of a table.”    As you mouse over the timeline, the row changes color, and it looks like table items could be clickable.   It’s very simple–just HTML and CSS, and I think just one hack for IE–and so it’s clean, compact, and easy to fiddle with.  (Eric does miraculous things with CSS–I’ve been using his S5 (Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System) template as a lightweight Powerpoint-replacement for years.)

Second, here’s the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) timeline builder, which is still in beta, and which requires signing up for an account.   (Thanks to Heather for the tip!)  You can watch a movie about the process here.  It’s Flash-based, which offers cool slider controls and the easy ability to zoom in and out.  Also, although I’ve never used it, it appears to have a pretty straightforward interface for adding new data.  Because it’s still in beta, it only outputs text and links, but there are plans to add support for images.

These first two systems strike me as visually interesting, easy-to-use ways to showcase information for students.   They allow you to have clickable points on your timeline, which allows students to see a whole period at a glance, and then click on individual items for more information.  The zooming ability of the CHNM timeline builder, coupled with the slider at the bottom of its screen, gives students the ability to rapidly scan chunks of time before isolating on a particular area of interest.

But what if you could do all that with image support, the ability to color-code and filter events by type, and the ability to locate events on a map?  And what if that timeline could read data in a variety of formats–xml, json, and others?  And, finally, what if that timeline could update itself in realtime from, for instance, a Google spreadsheet?

Well, what you would have is the SIMILE project’s Timeline.   (Click the link for a variety of samples–their standard model is JFK’s death, which shows off the interface’s zooming capabilities very nicely.)   The Timeline is, according to the website, “a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.”  The interface looks a lot like the CHNM timeline, but it’s not Flash–it’s just CSS, javascript, and HTML.

Timeline is an excellent choice for faculty (or others) interested in allowing students to build up their own reference document.  By inviting students to collaborate as contributors to the Google spreadsheet, they can populate the timeline with information, pictures, links, and more.

This semester, I’m having students build a timeline of the Victorian Age using a Google spreadsheet and the SIMILE Timeline script.  Here’s my description of the assignment, which is about to get under way.  The assignment wouldn’t have been possible in the short run without the collaboration of the indefatigable Brian Croxall, who has also posted here about this project.  You can see the timeline here, although it won’t have much data for about another month.  What you CAN see are Brian’s detailed notes about how he set up the timeline.  (Click “View Source.”)  This assignment’s nifty because it encourages students to learn a little something about the Victorian period while allowing them to contribute to something interesting that will live beyond the semester.

I have another couple of assignments for this semester that are still in rough form (for instance, using the Timeline interface to plot the events of a novel), and will post them here as events warrant.

So, while any of these are useful tools for creating timelines and deserve some study, what sets the SIMILE project’s timeline apart for my purposes is its ready-to-hand support for crowdsourcing the creation of timelines, which makes for a far richer classroom experience.

Do you have other handy tools for representing information visually?  (Also, Brian and I would be grateful for comments on the assignment!)

As I’ve mentioned before, this semester I’m teaching a shiny new class in, more or less, humanities computing–”digital literary studies.”  Back when the course was scheduled, I asked to teach in a smart room–not just a room with a multimedia station for the instructor, but a classroom with computers for every student.

And I was scheduled for one!  This spiffy room which is almost like 2 rooms in one: one area devoted to computers, and another with movable desks and an instructor’s workstation.  During our first meeting, we had an initial part of class in the desk area, then moved to the computers, and then went back to the desks for final thoughts.  It was great!  There were some technical glitches, but, on balance, we were all pretty happy.

But.

The spiffy room is known in our department as the journalism lab, and, for many, many years, all our journalism classes  have been taught in it.  Apparently, this was news to our new(-ish) scheduling software, because there was a journalism class being taught concurrently with mine, which had been displaced.  Since I didn’t want to buck against longstanding departmental practice, I agreed to move out of the classroom.

Except that there are no other smart rooms available at that time.  Actually, that should say, “known to be available,” because there’s apparently some chance that rooms are scheduled without actually being used.  Also, it’s not clear that some of the professors are actually using the computers, in which case we might be able to work out a deal.

I pointed out that it’s suboptimal to have a “digital literary studies” course without, you know, computers,* and so they let me sign up for the campus Mac lab for the next several weeks.  And, given the situation, they even were willing to let me sign up for 2 sessions above the legal limit–so I can have 7 weeks in the room, instead of 5.  (What I’m supposed to do at semester’s end is anyone’s guess–though I think the theory is we’ll have found some alternative by then.)

Thursday night was our first night in the Mac lab, which is ok as a lab but not the best space for a 3-hour, once a week class.  Beyond that, the screen was stuck 2/3rds of the way down the wall in the front of the lab.  It’s usually controlled by the switcher in the multimedia station, but not in this room.  I went to ask the lab workers, but they couldn’t figure out how to make the screen go up or down.

I mention this because that night I was teaching, in part, about RSS feeds, and how to find them / use them.  Time and again, the link I wanted to point out was not visible to the students because of the screen’s position.  And so, this happened:

That’s me, holding up the screen with one hand, getting ready to point out an RSS feed link with the other.  The picture is courtesy of the Church-Mouse, who naturally posted it to his Facebook profile.

Here’s hoping that *something* about this situation improves! Nomadism is better in theory than in practice.

*Actually, this would probably be ok if I had known about it in advance . . . but once I’ve planned out the way the course will go, it seems hard to ask for change!

The former Romanticism on the Net (RoN) has expanded its scope, and is now RaVoN (Romanticism & Victorianism on the Net). The inaugural re-branded issue, guest edited by Jerome McGann, is now online here:

http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca/

And a graduate student at Dalhousie, Meagan Timney, has launched a potentially useful project: The Victorian Working-Class Women Poets Archive.

On a much smaller scale, over at the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) website, I (finally!) have our winter 2008 newsletter up.