Google Forms Timeline is Back! Hurrah!

Maybe I haven't found the secret button on Blogger that sets off flashing lights when one of my posts receives comments. As it is, I sometimes forget to check recent posts for comments. I'm glad that I did so today. A comment from Tom at Bionic Teaching regarding my Google Forms Timeline gave me the impetus to take a second look at it. (Plus, I finally have some time to do so.)

As I wrote previously, the Google Spreadsheet was forcing dates people entered with the form into a MM/DD/YYYY format rather than the YYYY-MM-DD format that Exhibit can read. Google Docs defaults to the former display mode for dates, but you can change the output for each column, and I had done so. I expected that doing so would correct the problem. The spreadsheet was showing the correct date format, but the timeline still wasn't showing the events that people had entered. I just figured something else was wrong.

But Tom's comment led me to check the Exhibit JSON on the timeline (the orange scissors you see when you hover your mouse over the timeline). And it turned out that even though I'd changed the formatting of the dates within the spreadsheet, they were still outputting incorrectly to Exhibit. I went back into the spreadsheet and changed the column formatting for the dates to plain text. And now that I've reentered the events, everything is suddenly working.

What I think this means is that although I was telling the spreadsheet to output the dates in a certain way that it nevertheless stores dates in MM/DD/YYYY format on its backend. It will change how it displays them to you, but as far as Google is concerned the data stays the same. And it obviously stayed in this default format when going out on the feed and consequently couldn't be read by Exhibit. Changing the columns to plain text will prevent the spreadsheet from cramming my data into a format that won't work.

What this means is that you can feel free to start adding events to the timeline. Try it out. I still believe, as I wrote in my first post, that there are some real reasons to give students access to the whole spreadsheet for creating a timeline. But this certainly presents another option.

Oops.

Okay, this is a bit embarrassing. After posting both here on my blog and writing to the SIMILE listserv, it now appears that the Google Form Timeline is not functioning as it should. There have been at least three people who have used the form to add an event to the spreadsheet, but they are not being plotted on the timeline.

At first I thought that it had to do with the way the dates were formatted: the spreadsheet was forcing them into a format that Exhibit doesn't read. However, I've corrected that and I'm getting nothing, not even events that I've added subsequently added directly to the spreadsheet or via the form.

I tested this process with three different people this afternoon and didn't have any problems. Firebug isn't showing me anything wrong with the page. I'll work on hunting down what the problem might be tomorrow afternoon.

Thanks for the interest thus far.

Making Timelines Easier

So this post isn't an announcement that I have finished the documentation on rolling your own timeline. That's still a bit away. But last week, Google added a new functionality to its spreadsheets in Google Docs. You can read about it here. (Thanks go to JBJ for pointing it out to me.)

Basically, sharing a spreadsheet with other people in the past required them to sign up for a Google Docs account. In order to skirt this issue, Google has allowed you to create forms to generate the data within a spreadsheet. I've spent a little time playing around with this feature, wondering if I could get this to work with my timelines, which, as you know, are powered by Google Spreadsheets. The result is the Google Forms Timeline.

You can add an event (or 18) to the timeline by filling out the form. A link is provided on the timeline's page, but you can get there from here as well. You can see the actual spreadsheet here.

I see some decided advantages to using forms for populating the spreadsheet:

1. In the first place, students don't have to interface with the actual spreadsheet. This is good because the spreadsheet isn't easy to understand in and of itself. There's no place for instructions within it as there is within a form.
   
2. There is no chance that the students could do major damage to the spreadsheet (erasing large chunks, etc.) because they aren't allowed to touch it.
3. Students don't have to sign up for a Google docs account. I'm guessing that most of them will have a Gmail account, but there will be a few Yahoo! reactionaries among them, I'm sure. To get around this, you can either send students the link or send the form to them within an email. They can actually fill out the form from within the email, which is pretty cool. (Warning, my testing shows that this function didn't work well with Hotmail.)

There are some disadvantages, however:

1. If students make a mistake on the form, there is no way for them to correct it since they don't have access to the spreadsheet. They would have to email you, and you would have to log in and change things. This could happen repeatedly.
   
2. More importantly, by not giving them access to the spreadsheet, it feels to me as if the entire process could become less collaborative. In other words, if students aren't interacting with the entire data set, it will feel less like a wiki and, maybe, even less dynamic. They can't repeatedly make small changes to their events and watch them update in real time on the timeline.
   

In my mind, I'm not sure that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I've always really liked the wiki/collaboration idea of this project. And I like the fact that the students are interacting with the database without the intermediary step of a form. The form might be easier in the short run, but it somehow makes the exercise or assignments that might come from the timeline less intriguing to me.

Google Bombing (Just because I haven't done anything on Google for a while)

You may remember two months ago when I wrote about trying to increase my Google footprint. The goal was to push this blog up a bit higher on the Google hit list, over and above the random scatterings of Amazon and other such sites.

I managed to erase the trace of my commercial practices. But the blog still comes in only at the eighth spot on the list. I'm still being beat out by my Writing Center profile from last year (why is that still online?), a piece of creative writing from my Bakhtin seminar, the Yahoo! Pipes that I built last semester (see this post), and several threads from the SIMILE listserv (where you can see what a realtive n00b I am with writing teh HTMLz). Sure, you eventually get my blog, but it's not quite what I'd hoped for.

And that's what you get with the regular Google button. What happens if you use the we're-oh-so-quirky-and-such-an-Internet-company-that-provides
-gyms-and-Aerons-to-all-its-employees-along-with-free-lunch-and-copious
-stock-options "I'm Feeling Lucky" button? Well, you get the top hit: my Writing Center profile. And this brings us to the process of Google bombing.

Google bombing is where a group of people work together to link particular sites and words to a third site. If enough people do this, then the results of a "I'm Feeling Lucky" search become skewed. A recent and well-known example of Google bombing happened in 2003, when searching on the phrase "miserable failure" took people to the White House's biography of George W. Bush. (In an interesting, somewhat meta-commentary on this process, doing the same "miserable failure" search today points to a BBC article that discusses Google bombing and this particular example.*) There are other popular Google bombing phrases, including "french military victories" and "more evil than Satan himself" which used to take you to Microsoft's home page but now (again with the meta?!*) takes you to a 1999 CNN article that discusses the "anomaly caused by quantum fluctuations in Web space".

Enter 2008 and a fascination with all things Chuck Norris (a favorite Internet meme along with lolcats and ninjas). Try using the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button with the phrase "find chuck norris." Amuse yourselves.

Among many things I find fascinating with this process, one is how it exposes the fiction in which Google acts as an arbitrator of collective intelligence (one topic in the just-released 2008 Horizon Report, more to come soon on this). We generally assume that Google's algorithm produces an unbiased glimpse of what the web has collectively determined is most relevant to a particular search phrase. Google enjoys its current leading position as a search engine precisely because it so consistently returns results that match what you and I are looking for that we tend to naturalize the relationship between algorithm and the masses of people whose work generates it.

The reality is that manipulating the search results doesn't require anything close to a hive mind. The BBC article linked above mentions that it took perhaps as few as 32 web pages to produce the Bush Google bomb. If you know the basics of the algorithm, then, you can produce results that have the patina of collective intelligence, but are really just the work of a few individuals.

This is one of the key issues in digital literacy. How do we teach our students (and ourselves) to recognize the difference between a Google bomb and a larger, collective decision to change the structure and semantics of the web more permanently? It's much harder doing seeing the difference with Google than it is with the Wikipedia, where you can at least see who the people are that edit the articles and know how often the changes have been made. The Google bomb becomes even harder to demystify because every link to it (including this blog) reinforces it.*

This mediascape is our world and the world of our students. We've got to learn to read it properly.
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* Incidentally, Google initially had a policy of not halting Google bombs. As of 29 January 2007, however, they began to link the bomb phrases to sites that discussed the phenomenon of Google bombing, such as the BBC site above. For more information, see the Wikipedia. Or maybe type "Google bomb" and hit the button...

Department Directories 2.0

When I was going through the wonderful experience of the job market this past fall (score: 41 apps, 1 request for additional materials, 2 MLA interviews, 0 campus visits [thus far]), I spent a lot of time looking at department directories. You do this so you can get a sense of the department. You want to know how many other Americanists there are, how many people that do contemporary lit, how many people whose work you already know or should know. These are--apparently--important considerations when writing your cover letter and become even more important when you have interviews with schools. I say apparently because in practice my cover letters changed most frequently in response to the job ad. It was interesting exercise in fantasizing, however, to get a sense of who all these departments were and who my potential colleagues could be.

There seem to be two ways of creating online directories. There is the helpful version, of which Rutgers has an example. You get a page that lists people's names, but also where they received their Ph.D. and, most importantly, what their interests are. If you want to know more about a particular faculty member, you just click on his or her name and get a new page. There you get publication information, courses taught, etc. But the key here is that you can find out people's scholarly interests all on one page.

This one-page approach is what separates the helpful version from its counterpart: the we-want-you-to-click-a-lot (WWYTCAL) version. An example of this can, sadly, be found on the English department site here at Emory. Now, I can't deny that this page looks beautiful. It's certainly nicer looking than Rutgers's site. But the fact is that if I were trying to learn about Emory's faculty, I would have to open 43 separate pages (doing so is made much easier with the Snap Links add on for Firefox). I'd be sure to learn something interesting on each one, where all the same information as on Rutgers's site is present: publications, place of degree, courses taught, etc. But clicking through to each of these pages, multiplied by 26 other schools--my non-scientific data survey related to my job search indicates that 66% of departments go for the WWYTCAL version--is a LOT of pages to sift through.

Enter SIMILE (again) and its Exhibit javascript (again). Using these tools and a Google Spreadsheet (again), I've developed a dynamic department directory of the Emory graduate students. Not only can you see up front what people's interests and specialties are, but you can do a text search through the directory or use the attributes at the right to pull up what you want. Want to know all the people in the department who do 18th British lit? You've got it. Want to know who is interested in "Trauma Theory"? There you go. Want to know who does Caribbean lit and Victorian fiction? Alsjeblieft.

You'll notice that there are four different views on the page currently. The "Thumbnail" view in particular has not been polished and would look a lot better if it featured some photos of the grad students. But you get a sense of the different view options that have been built into the Exhibit code. My favorite is the "Hometowns" view, the data for which was initially provided by Shawn McCauley's post here. I like the map view because it gives a different sense of who we are as a department. If I had more time, I would go on and add a view to see where the grad students received their various degrees before coming to the Ph.D. program at Emory.

I've started work on a faculty directory for the department, but my attention is needed elsewhere in ECIT at the moment, so I'm not sure when I'll get back to that. And I'll be the first to admit that my grad student directory isn't as pretty as the one Emory currently has for its faculty. But I like to think that mine would fall into the "helpful" or perhaps even "very helpful" category.

My Google footprint

Here's a quick one to break up all that TPC monotony gumming up your RSS reader of choice. I've been thinking recently about how being on the job market subjects me to a higher possibility of being Googled. What do you get? And how do you control it?

• The current first hit on my name ("Brian Croxall") is my profile page from last year when I was a Dean's Writing Center Fellow. That's good, I suppose. Except it doesn't really take you anywhere else. Oh, and I had fun writing the profile. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I would hate to get a job interview where they ask me about my mastery of the "transdigital ukulele."
• The next few hits are from the SIMILE mailing list archives. So I guess you could see that I"ve been interested in determining the pedagogical uses of interactive timelines.
• Then you hit a piece of creative writing that I made in conjunction with a group, improvisational writing exercise that was the final activity of a class on "Bakhtin's Circles" taught by Walter Reed and Mikhail Epstein in Spring 2004. That's fun, I suppose.
• A few more hits down one finally comes across a mention of something more "academic": a newsletter from the JFK Presidential library that mentions my winning an Ernest Hemingway Research Grant to do archival research. Of course, if you follow this link, you'll see that the page no longer contains this information.
• And finally, the last hit on the page is for this blog.

Until a week ago or so when I first started thinking about this, the top hit on my name in Google was my Amazon wish list. I guess that' s nice if people want to buy me things. But it wasn't really the face I wanted to present to the world. There were a few other similar instances like that, and I've managed to remove these from the hits by changing my screen name from "real name" to a pen name.

I also decided to include my full name in my blogger profile--rather than just "Brian"--as I think this blog is at least a representation of my thoughts on subjects that I view formative for my future research and, especially, classroom practice. But thus far, it hasn't generated much of a bump up the charts.

Of course, the real solution to getting Google hits is to understand their algorithm (which I don't--especially since it's a trade secret) and to have other people link to pages that talk about you. This blog or any of the pages related to my academic work haven't generated many backlinks yet, and this is one reason that interesting things about me aren't really showing up.

Something exciting about the Internet is the chances it gives us to play with our identity. We all know that our interlocutors might be dogs. Or rather, we don't know if we know this. But sometimes we want to establish who we are online and we want to help people see relevant information about us. If you're a normal individual, it can be very difficult to work the system to the ensure that you have a real web presence and one that responds to what you'd want. Of course, there are arguments that I shouldn't have control over what people see about me. If you want that, you can ask me for my CV. A Google search, on the other hand, reveals a sort of Digg-like collective opinion of what's most important to know about "Brian Croxall."

There are, of course, two more things that I can do to try to increase my visibility. First, I can make a much more detailed and useful personal web page. And second, I can write a blog post on the subject of identity, include my identifier repeatedly and let the process take a meta-effect. Let's see how that works.

Google footprint for TLC at Emory

So this might be jumping the gun a bit, but I realized yesterday in discussing what I'm doing right now, that it would actually be very difficult to find anything on TLC at Emory if I were to do a Google search. It wouldn't be that difficult to find ECIT and the programs they offer, but you'd be hard pressed to see much about TLC. The best bit that we have is a little blurb that I did last year following the first iteration (scroll down for it). Depending on your search terms, this page comes up within the top five or so of hits on Google. But that's not ideal.

Obviously if TLC becomes more of a GSAS initiative it will get a bigger presence on the web. But something that ECIT should be consciously thinking about is how we can let others know what we're doing here.

Make Them Yourself: Google Maps

Now I swear I'm not the ECIT Woodruff Fellow in Applied Googletechtonics or anything like that. If I was, perhaps my stipend would be a bit larger.

Be this as it may, I have another G-related observation. In addition to planning the upcoming Emory Horizons event, I have also been experimenting with making my own Google Map. Why would you want to do this? Well in my case, I figured it would be an easy way to represent my job search. I can get a general idea of where the jobs are at and refer to it when I have to make those tough choices between Tufts, Rutgers, and Westminster. This is also an easy way to share this information with my family and, eventually, to start thinking geospatially about my future.

This is actually really easy to do. All you have to do is to be logged in to a Google account, and go to their maps page. Click on the "My Maps" tab partway down the page, and you can start adding place markers, drawing lines, and/or shapes on your map. You can then get a URL or the code to embed the map. Of course, you can make the map public or private. Or as KML for use in Google Earth.

More and more, I think that geospatial information is going to become more and more a part of everything we do. And this is an easy way to get a start mapping your own experiences.


View Larger Map

Getting Photos into Google Earth

I was playing around very quickly yesterday with my Picasa Web albums and noticed a new feature. But wait, let's back up. Picasa is Google's photo editing software. In the grand Google tradition, it was the product of a company that Google bought out a few years ago. I've been using Picasa for over two years and I've found it's a very nice tool for keeping all of my photos and movies organized on the computer. When you have children, you quickly realize that you need a tool for organizing almost as much as you need one for editing.

The editing tools in Picasa are nothing special. Basic color fixing, basic cropping, some special effects. Red eye removal. I've found, however, that they are more often than not all that I need for touching things up. The biggest bonus, in my opinion, is that Picasa saves a copy of all the changes I make to a photo and makes it possible for me to always return to the original image if I want to. That way my experimenting with the image doesn't ruin it permanently. Of course, there are other tools out there that do this: Microsoft has Office Picture Manager, Adobe has Photoshop Elements, and I could go on. But an advantage of Picasa is that it is free. And that's something we like in both the Croxall household and in ECIT. (It is also a very good tool for doing progressive backups of your photos, which helps you keep second copies off your hard drive and get secondary backups off site to your parents in Utah.)

Another thing that I really love about Picasa is how it integrates with Gmail. You can bundle photos to send out to people straight from the photo software. Again, you can do that with many other programs, but what was essential for me was that Picasa automatically resized the photos for me when I mailed them out. Since we have an 8 MP Canon camera and we didn't have broadband at home until about six months ago, this meant that sending photos could be a real pain. Picasa took care of all that for us. This isn't so much of a problem on our end anymore, but it is still nice to use the software to prevent our sending out those massive, 8x bigger than your screen photos.

Okay, so we've covered Picasa as it functions on your computer. About two years ago, Google also created a web presence for Picasa that allows you to host photos online and share them with others. Of course, there are a lot of other services that allow you to do this as well: Kodak Gallery, Photobucket, and, of course, Flickr. These tools are great for sharing photos with others (because--at least with Flickr and Picasa--you get an RSS feed of people's photos and can then read them in your feed reader of choice [see previous blog post]). And of course, they allow you to tag your photos, use each photo's individual URL for hosting it in a blog or some such thing, and more.

Another new thing that at least Flickr and Picasa have included is the ability to geotag your photos. What this means is that you can identify where a particular photo album was taken and then drag and drop those photos onto a map to give an even more precise idea. You can see how this works in Flickr (photos geotagged to "Amsterdam, Noord Holland") and in Picasa (an example of photos mapped along the Strip in Vegas). I'm not as familiar with Flickr as I am with Google's tools, but I have to say that I like the latter a little better because it gives better outlines of buildings.

So this brings us to last point (which is really where I started). If you are looking at a Picasa web album that has been geotagged (like this one of photos I took during the Dragon Con parade), then you also get the option (in the right hand corner) to view the photos within Google Earth. When you click on this, you can either run it immediately in Google Earth or download the kml file. And suddenly you have your photos plugged into Google Earth for you. Magic!

Now of course, you can insert photos directly into Google Earth without too much trouble. But if you are already using Picasa Web, this will save you some time. Even if you aren't using it, however, this might be an easier way for people to get photos into Google Earth than having to deal with the coding that is otherwise required.

Google Trends (more on my beloved Google)

More on Google tools. This time it's all about Google Trends. You can use this application to track searches (done through Google) and news reference volume for any topic. You can change the length of time you're looking at, the regions where you're looking, and get all sorts of other interesting data.

For example, you can see how many people search for Emory and can correlate spikes in searches to newsworthy happenings around campus. Emory looks pretty good until you put some of our "peer" institutions into the mix. Alas.

In any case, this is an interesting tool with different applications. If you're in an English department, you could track the interest of the online community in authors or particular texts (although be wary of how you use search terms like "Lolita"; to get the right response, you need the author's name too). If you're into politics, you can watch not only the spectacular demise of Sen. Larry Craig, but also the spectacular demise of the nation's interest in the story here. Or you can see how Craig stacks up against some of those in the race for the presidency here. There's a dissertation or a short paper in here for someone who wants to analyze the predictive nature of web searches.

The search history only goes back to 2004, and one has to be careful about how you search for trends. But this is an interesting record of what seems to interest us.

P.S. If in writing about this I'm as woefully out of date as Stanley Fish opining about coffee shops, then I hope someone will please tell me to move onto fresh material.

Bloglines vs. Google Reader

I'm curious about feed aggregators. I haven't used them a whole lot except on my igoogle page. I know some of this blog's reader (you faithful few) are partial to Bloglines. I've also fiddled around with Google Reader (given my slavish devotion to the big G and a desire to keep things within one account where possible).

So I'm wondering if anyone can argue for using one service over another. Within Bloglines, can you share your feeds with others? I've discovered how to share materials in G'Reader (you can see mine here or subscribe to the feed here). But what I'd really like to do is to see the feeds that good friends, like RB or SAP, or supervisor-types, like WM or ME, peruse regularly. I'm not seeing that in the Google version at the moment.

In any case, I'm interested in getting opinions here about how you read blogs. Consider this your chance to participate in Web 2.0 and create some content yourself.

Teaching with Google Earth

I'm fascinated by Google Earth, as you may have previously noticed. I was poking around today and found a really great blog with ideas for teaching using the software. A recent discussion there examines using video and audio embedded within Google Earth to teach something like Huckleberry Finn. The blog on the whole seems aimed toward people teaching in K-12, but there's definitely something we can learn by reading other people's ideas for their classrooms.

Ways to Waste Time with Google

I don't know that any of us need to waste any more time. But just in case you do, here are two things I recently discovered that Google and its co-brands are trying to seduce us with.

First is Blogger Play: It's basically a stream of photos that have recently been uploaded to various blogs hosted by Blogger. You can read more about it here. It's fun to jsut sit back and think about what people might be saying with or about these images.

Second is Google Image Labeler: This is an interesting game-like application. Basically you are given a series of photos and asked to provide descriptive labels for them. You have 2 minutes to label as many photos as possible. The catch is that you are working simultaneously and blindly with a partner. You don't get to move on until you both match a label. The more descriptive your matched label is, the more points you get. At the end of the time, you get to see your partner's suggestions and the ones you matched with. Your score accumulates and--if you were to play long enough--you could have one of the top spots. So why is this out here? It's basically helping Google refine their image search, giving them agreed upon labels for particular images. Smart.

What I find interesting about both of these applications is the way that user-created content (uploaded photos and photos the Google Bots find across the web) becomes the object of attention in a way that differs (slightly, in the case of the first, and more so, in the case of the second) from other Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr or YouTube.