Technology Free-for-all

This was an exciting and stimulating session, featuring rapid-fire demos by techno-wizzes Derek Willis and Jessica Baumgart of a variety of open source technologies.

Derek Willis is a member of the web development group at the New York Times and his blog The Scoop focuses on investigative and computer-assisted reporting for news organizations. Jessica Baumgart was a news librarian and worked at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and now sources blog content for babbledog. Session attendees also piped up with their tech tips.

Derek introduced WGet which can be used to capture single files or even an entire website. This could be used by researchers who wish to archive the contents of a site they think may change or be removed from the web.

Stan Friedman of Conde Nast presented Awesome Highlighter which allows you to highlight text on a web page you want to share, making it easier and faster for the recipient to see what section of a page you wish to bring to their attention. You can add notes or change the colour of the highlighting.

There was much discussion about RSS feeds, and the need to filter content, because most people agree you never want to read everything in a feed. With Yahoo Pipes you can create a pipe using inclusion and exclusion criteria on any RSS feed. This creates a new personalized feed so that the content coming to you is more focused on what you are looking for.

Jessica presented Twitter a social networking site for use via mobile text (SMS). Blackberry content and messaging tools discussed included Viigo and Gizmo.

Many Eyes is a data visualization tool from IBM. You can insert the text of a document (a speech, court case, government report) and create word trees to analyze the content, or use other data to create pie charts, histograms and other graphics such as tag clouds.

Derek uses the open source database program SQLite for many computer-assisted reporting projects. He described it as small, fast and highly portable. You can import CSV (text) files into SQLite, and there's a Firefox add-on for working with SQLite databases. Firefox comes with SQLite built-in, which he said is indicative of how small a program it is.

Google Reader will monitor your news sites and blogs for new content, and allow you to share pages with others.

Create a timeline with Dipity This timeline sharing site allows you to build timelines manually or by grabbing an RSS feed which has date and time elements built-in.

Snag-It allows you to grab and annotate images from your desktop. There's a good video tutorial.

If you're interested in programming, but always thought it would be too difficult, check out Learn2Code a tutorial from Library of Congress librarian Dan Chudnov. He uses a language called Processing, but the programming concepts apply to almost any language.

Kate Bird is the News/Graphics Research Librarian at The Vancouver Sun & The Province.

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