Dork Shorts
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 | Adam Solove
Would anyone else be interested in giving very short presentations on purely-technical matters as a way of introducing us to new languages and libraries? It’s always hard to find the right way to approach a new tool. A brief description and book or code reading recommendation from an expert would certainly help.
I would be reasonably qualified to discuss Ruby. Someone working on Zotero ought to present XUL+JavaScript. If we could get python, a handful of RDF libraries, and maybe some stranger languages in there, everyone might learn something.
Although the conference should certainly focus on technology in the humanities, it’s always good to broaden our horizons of what technology is available and what others are using it for.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:12 pm
If folks are interested, I could do something on SketchUp and 3D modeling in Google Earth. No quite in the same ballpark as a programming language but useful.
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:51 am
No, that would be awesome. It’s certainly a topic I’m interested in and would have no idea where to start with.
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:25 am
Do we actually have to wear dork shorts while we’re talking?
I’d be happy to give short intros to DocBook or GraphViz and how to use them as intermediate output formats.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:56 am
I could give a quick intro to Perl and/or Prolog (haven’t used Prolog much, but I should be able to come up with enough stuff to do an intro if no one else volunteers). There’s also LPC and mud programming for which I’m drafting a post.
In the Perl world, I could give a quick intro to Moose, the “new” postmodern Perl object system that I’m using as the basis for my work-related programming.
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:06 am
This has popped up in other comments, but I could talk about RDF and some of the key vocabularies/ontologies (Friend Of A Friend, Dublin Core, Semantically Interlinked Online Communities, etc.), as well as a bit about the PHP frameworks for working with RDF. (I’m also working on an ontology for describing university courses and the various kinds of resources they use (web sites, texts, hardware, etc. and would love to get feedback.)
And I’d love to hear about Python, DocBook (and TEI, anyone?) and GraphViz.
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:39 pm
If anyone’s interestd, I’d could give a brief presentation about Microformats.
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Sort of old school – but anyone interested in a SQL basics talk?
May 24th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
I am interested in learning about SketchUp and 3D modeling in Google Earth.
May 26th, 2008 at 9:58 am
I’d be happy to lead a session on Web 2.0 mashups, specifically data mashups.
May 27th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Alright, so here is the list we have so far. I’ve tried to put them in a sensible order (languages, formats, fun):
Adam on fun programming languages (ruby, python, lisp)
James on perl and prolog
Ben on DocBook and GraphViz
Patrick on rdf
Jeremy on microformats
Jeanne on SQL
Raymond on mashups
Paula on SketchUp
I think five minutes each, show off something fun and links or recommendations to where to learn more. Should be fun.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Responding to Adam’s thoughtful suggestion in a comment elsewhere, I would be glad to show the little bit that I know about Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) and about Django. I could also dig out a knotty historical GraphViz diagram to complement Ben’s presentation.