The Distant Librarian

Static vs. Dynamic Tutorials: Applying Usability Principles to Evaluate Online Point-of-Need Instruction

Turner, B., Fuchs, C., & Todman, A. (2015). Static vs. Dynamic Tutorials: Applying Usability Principles to Evaluate Online Point-of-Need Instruction. Information Technology & Libraries, 34(4), 30-54. doi:10.6017/ital.v34i4.5831

This article finds "that web usability testing was a useful tutorial-testing tool while discovering that participants learned most effectively from text-and-image tutorials, since both rounds of participants completed tasks more accurately and more quickly than those who received audio/video instruction or no instruction." Helpfully, there are links to the tutorials used in the appendices of the paper, so you can unscientifically see if you agree with the findings too! 

Open Refine - not the right tool for this job (twitter archiving and geolocation)

A week or so ago I came across a series of posts from Spencer Greenhalgh in which he described how he used R to take a large group of collected tweets around the terrorist attacks in Paris in order to geolocate them on a map. The trouble is that very few users actually include geolocation information in their tweets, so Spencer had to figure out a way to grab an approximation of that information by mining each user's twitter profile page for his/her stated home location. This wouldn't indicate where the users were when they actually tweeted, but it gave him a good idea where the people usually were when they tweeted (if the profile page could be trusted), which was good enough for his experiments.

I've been playing with Open Refine of late, so thought I'd take a stab at this same experiment with that hammer. I figured out all the pieces, but was unsuccessful in the end, and I can't tell you exactly why. I got Spencer's archive of tweets, and was easily able to import it into Open Refine. The problem came when I started to pull in the user profile pages - no matter how I sliced and diced the archive I would always time out on some section or another. The full data set contains just over 6,000 lines, so I tried breaking that in half by date, into smaller pieces by client used to send the tweet, and by unique vs duplicate users. I was able to get a full scrape of the user profile pages for about 600 users, but every other group I tried would simply time out (I tried all sorts of variations on the throttle delay, from 250 - 10,000 milliseconds, but my scrape would always hang, depending on the set I was trying, either around 67% or 89%. Maybe it was a memory issue? Because it simply hung, I never got an error message to work with. If you have an idea what might've been the problem I'd LOVE to know!

The GREL expression I did eventually use to dig out the user location from those I could get was as follows:

value.parseHtml().select("span.ProfileHeaderCard-locationText")[0].toString()

That searches through the scraped profile page HTML for the CSS class around the user-stated location and just returns that bit of info, which would look like this:

<span class="ProfileHeaderCard-locationText u-dir" dir="ltr"> Atlanta, GA </span>

It did take me a while to figure this bit out, so for future reference I found this page most useful.

So now we've got a column of messy data, which I cleaned with the following expression:

replace(value,/<\/?\w+((\s+\w+(\s*=\s*(?:".*?"|'.*?'|[^'">\s]+))?)+\s*|\s*)\/?>/,'')

I found that one at https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/StrippingHTML and once run it leaves behind the nice clean string of text we're after:

Atlanta, GA

And from there it would be trivial to run that column through any number of free online mapping tools in order to generate a map of where users say they're from.

So the biggest headache was getting all the HTML from the user profile page. JSON would've been MUCH cleaner, but like Spencer I wanted to try to do this without using the Twitter API, so AFAIK I was stuck with HTML.

Fast forward to today, when I see Nick Ruest's post, A look at 14,939,154 #paris #Bataclan #parisattacks #porteouverte tweets. I was having trouble with 6,000 tweets, and Nick was churning through almost 15 million tweets with a far more appropriate tool called twarc.

twarc is a command line tool and Python library for archiving Twitter JSON data. Each tweet is represented as a JSON object that is exactly what was returned from the Twitter API. Tweets are stored as line-oriented JSON. It twarc runs in three modes: search, filter stream and hydrate. When running in each mode twarc will stop and resume activity in order to work within the Twitter API's rate limits.

I had tried to work with twarc  a few months ago, but couldn't get it running on the shared server I was on, but after seeing just what it's capable of I will get it up and running, hog frog or dog!

My takeaway from this is that while there may be many different ways to solve a problem, they're certainly not all equal. Spencer stuck with what he knew and got something usable out of it. I tried with what I knew and failed, and Nick used what he knew and kicked both our butts. Spencer, do look at twarc too! :-)

Upward and onward!

Article of interest: A Survey of Online Library Tutorials: Guiding Instructional Video Creation to Use in Flipped Classrooms

This article showed up in the most recent issue of JAL: A Survey of Online Library Tutorials: Guiding Instructional Video Creation to Use in Flipped Classrooms, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 41, Issue 6, November 2015, Pages 751-757.  It seems to be a good snapshot of the current use of screencasts in ARL and CARL libraries.

Abstract

There has been a steady increase in library literature on “flipping the classroom.” This teaching strategy requires students to review course material outside the classroom beforehand, thereby allowing more time during workshops to apply newly gained knowledge and techniques. The proliferation of literature on classroom flipping provoked an interest to determine if other academic libraries were making explicit reference on their websites to the preliminary viewing of videos in a classroom context. To ascertain the extent of this practice, and inform the development of instructional videos at McGill, the authors surveyed all Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and Association of Research Libraries (ARL) websites to document the production of instructional videos, determine the various types of videos, and take note of explicit pre-viewing instructions prior to a workshop. Of the 140 libraries examined, 107 (76%) provide instructional videos on their website. However, of this group, only 2 (2%) clearly instruct users to watch instructional videos before attending a library research workshop. A literature review documents this emerging trend and contextualizes the results.

And a nifty graphic to whet your appetite:

Fun with OpenDataSoft - Mapping Calgary City Amenities

Earlier this month I happened across a blog post from a company called OpenDataSoft (ODS) in which they described how they put together and mapped a list of over 1,600 Open Data portals around the world. I thought that was pretty cool, and did a little exploration of their web-based platform and decided to try my hand at some data enrichment and publishing. I trolled the City of Calgary Open Data website for something I thought might work well and settled upon their List of City Amenities (dog parks, EMS stations, arenas and such). While they offer all the data as a .csv file, the geographic / mapping file was completely separate, and I wanted to try to put it all together into one nifty application. 

For my purposes, the .csv provided by the city was juuuust short; it didn't include any postal codes with the addresses, so I couldn't automatically generate a map with ODS. I ended up throwing the addresses at http://geocoder.ca/ which allowed me to grab the postal codes. Then I realized that at this time, ODS only maps postal codes in France (they're based in Paris). SO I grabbed an API key from Google Maps (linked to from within ODS) and THEN I was able to generate the desired map. There were a few outliers that I had to manually correct, but here's the result. Note the filters on the left - that was added with an option with ODS, and then there's the separate map tab, which again is an enhancement over what the City provided. I did take a look at the City's .kml file in Google Earth - it wasn't very useful, or accurate, IMHO.

There are a number of share/embed options, including the ability to download / share only filtered results. Here's a map of Calgary's Outdoor Pools (we're not a big outdoor pool city, as you might imagine):

Anyhoo, do take a look at OpenDataSoft - all this was done for free, though if you're planning to work with lots of data sets you'll have to pay, I think.

How to Extract Data from Tables in PDFs with Tabula and OpenRefine

Rahul Saigal has an excellent step-by-step post on how to extract data from tables in PDFS with Tabula and OpenRefine. I've had great success with Tabula, and am really starting to get excited about OpenRefine as well, having just completed this free online course, which I highly recommend: Introduction to OpenRefine.

From the introduction to Rahul's post:

While you could manually extract data from a table in a PDF, it's far from simple. There's no reason to take that much time when there are tools to make our job simpler. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to extract table from the PDF easily with Tabula, and then clean the messy data to a more usable form with OpenRefine.

Have fun!

Screencasting iOS

A few days ago TechSmith released a new Labs tool called AppShow which is intended to allow developers to record demos of their iOS apps to include in the App Store. Just about the same time, Amit at Digital Inspiration posted how to do the same thing using QuickTime player. I finally carved out a few minutes to see how this all worked.

AppShow provides quite a few options to guide the user in creating an intro and various scenes; I found them to be overkill for what I was trying to do, but someone really trying to make something polished for the App Store might find these options useful.

First a note that you must have the latest version of OSX installed, Yosemite. Second, you can edit recordings made via either method via Camtasia Studio, or probably any other video editing software, but other than adding a quick title slide, I didn't do any other editing or processing using CS. I also chose to use a game instead of a library-specific app because I wanted to see how well the recordings did with motion and audio. The recordings were done with an iPhone5 and a mid-2009 MacBook Pro.

And finally, it took me quite some time to figure out how to export from AppShow to Camtasia Studio; couldn't find anything in the documentation or the File menu item, so here's your hint:

Here are four videos I posted to YouTube so you can compare the quality.

tl;dr Quality of all is quite good, and for quick and dirty QuickTime Player is the way to go - throw the recording into Camtasia Studio if you need to polish it up after the fact.

QuickTime (Title added via Camtasia Studio)

 

QuickTime (Direct export):

 

AppShow (Title added via Camtasia Studio)

 

AppShow (Direct export):

 

Free Web-based Tools for Information Literacy Instruction

The latest issue of Library Hi Tech News has the following article, which contains a pretty good list of free and freemium tools that may be new to you as many were to me.

Christine Palma Forbes , (2014),"Free Web-based Tools for Information Literacy Instruction", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 31 Iss 10

OS X Yosemite Makes it Easy to Screencast iOS Apps

Here's a nifty feature to look forward to in the fall - the ability to record screencasts of your iOS apps in order to incorporate them in to tutorials, etc...

Once you connect an iOS 8 device to your Mac running OS X 10.10, it will be automatically available as a video camera. You can then capture anything you’re doing on-screen directly to your Mac using QuickTime Player.

Source: iPhone in Canada

Camtasia Studio 8.4 & Camtasia for Mac 2.8 Now Available: Cross-platform Screen Recording

To be honest, I kind of assumed they already talked to each other, but I guess the ability to record on one OS and edit on another is just new today. Camtasia Studio 8.4 & Camtasia for Mac 2.8 Now Available: Cross-platform Screen Recording. 

We’ve updated our screen recording file format, so you can pass screen recordings freely between Camtasia Studio and Camtasia for Mac. Using a single file format enables you to send a recording from one platform to the other effortlessly, including all the meta data, such as cursor effects and smart focus.

We hope users see the new .trec file format from TechSmith as an indication of our commitment to the cross-platform user experience.

Five Best Desktop Microphones

I've long maintained that one very important, yet often overlooked component of good screencasting is a good microphone. My current rig is the Samson CO1U, but it didn't even make the list of Lifehacker's list of contenders for Five Best Desktop Microphones. Check 'em out, and if you're in the market, pick one up - your listeners will thank you!

Related articles

How to Choose the Best Microphone for Your PC

Who does screencasting help the most?

An interesting report on the Casting Out Nines Blog (part of the Chronicle of Higher Education Blog Network): Who does screencasting help the most? The author summarizes the results of a Winter 2011 paper in Advances in Engineering Education (PDF), and concludes that,

I think it suggests that screencasts, when done well and deployed properly, help all students – they certainly don’t hurt – and they help most thise (sic) students who need the most help. The analogies to mathematics courses are clear. In any math course there will be a large contingent of students whose backgrounds aren’t congruous with the course: students whose prior math background is weak to rusty, students from non-STEM disciplines, and so on. For those students, if they use the screencasts, then they may be likely to improve at a surprisingly fast rate. 

Not earth-shattering, but encouraging. Keep on screencasting!

Get Camtasia 2 for Mac for 50% off!

Just a quick heads-up that StackSocial is currently running a $50 Mac software bundle that includes the latest version of Camtasia, which normally sells for $99. In addition to that fine screencasting tool, you also get 8 other pieces of software you may find useful. Regardless, 50% off if you've been thinking about picking up Camtasia... Deal ends May 20th.

APLEN Training Centre

Here's a site you might want to browse through: The APLEN Training Centre.

APLEN is the Alberta Public Library Electronic Network, and the Training Centre is "a hub for libraries to share their training materials, learn from the collective experience of library staff, and discuss Alberta library training." There are quite a few guides from which to take inspiration. Offered with a Creative Commons license, this makes a good companion to the Librarian Design Share site I mentioned earlier this month...

Yay for sharing!

Google Advanced Power Searching course

Following a link from Lifehacker, I went ahead and signed up for the Advanced Power Searching course taught by Google. Guess I should go ahead and work my way through the archive of the Power Searching course that's still available online...

The Advanced course begins Jan 23, 2013 and includes the following challenges:

• Challenge 1 - Mimicking presidential voices
• Challenge 2 - Turtle fossils
• Challenge 3 - Festival challenge
• Challenge 4 - Humongous fungus
• Challenge 5 - Salman Khan
• Challenge 6 - Scrapbook enthusiast
• Challenge 7 - Mystery music
• Challenge 8 - Climate graph
• Challenge 9 - Name that notebook
• Challenge 10 - Who done it?
• Challenge 11 - Feather identification
• Challenge 12 - Where in the world?

According to my confirmation email, 

Course materials will be released in two batches:

• Challenges 1-6 and Assignment 1: Wednesday, January 23
• Challenges 7-12 and Assignment 2: Wednesday, January 30

In order to pass the course and earn your certificate, you must submit and evaluate two assignments and complete a final search challenge by the deadline of 11:59 p.m. PT on Friday, February 8, 2013.

Yay MOOCs!

ChronoZoom is like Prezi on steroids

Just ran across ChronoZoom this AM, which immediately reminded me of Prezi in the way things zoom around. It does look pretty cool, but so far appears to only contain content produced by the beta participants. While this makes sense as a beta, I really hope they open it up to contributions from a wider community.

ChronoZoom is an open source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences using the story of Big History to easily understand all this information. This project has been funded and supported by Microsoft Research Connections in collaboration with University California at Berkeley and Moscow State University.

I also don't like that you can't link to a specific piece of content, but a really good illustration of the timeline feature is if you take a peek at the World War II Tour:

You can view use the project on your iPad, which is cool. Here's a nice video introduction: