1. Dancing in the Datasphere
Tom Johnson
2013 Gold Rush Writer's Conference
May 3-5, 2013
tom@jtjohnson.com
@jtjohnson
FB: Tom Johnson
1
2. Who’s who and what’s up?
• Who writes
• Who has sold work?
• Use Windows or Mac?
2
Poetry
Short stories
Novels
Non-fiction books
Journalism
Blogs
3. Survival
• Dynamic Process of Life and Intellectual Life
• Data In Analysis Info Out
• Dynamic info environment
• Changing all of the above factors
• Changing how we work, publish, sell
• We know nothing (Well, possibly very little)
• Something was happening while we slept.
What was that and how do we cope?
• Constant learning, trial and error.
• Keep the good, discard the not-so-good
3
4. Morning Menu
• Finding rich research sites
• Programs to remember (and, later, return to
those sites)
• Tools to bring the always necessary "truth" to
your writing
• Social media – Facebook, Twitter, Linked
• New digital tools for writers -- note-
taking, organization, editing and proofing
• Wrap-up: Innovate the “story” presentation
4
5. Criteria for note-taking tools
• Browser-based
• Multi-platform
• Save to desktop AND Cloud
• Price
• Privacy restrictions and degree of sharing
tools [e.g. specific files, total folder, total
site/archive?
5
6. Save those notes
• OneNote -- http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/
6
7. Save those notes
• OneNote -- http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/
• Evernote - http://evernote.com/
7
8. Save those notes
• OneNote -- http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/
• Evernote - http://evernote.com/
• Google Docs -- https://drive.google.com/#my-drive
8
Links to Google Drive
(Cloud Storage)
12. Save those places
• Diigo -- https://www.diigo.com/
• Tucows.com - http://tucows.com
12
13. Save those places
• Diigo -- https://www.diigo.com/
• Tucows.com - http://tucows.com
• Livebinders -
http://www.livebinders.com/shelf/my
13
14. Adjusting to Google
• Google Advanced well hidden
• Not on Google.com
• Use:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search
• Old search: used “+” sign to get multiple
but specific words on results; “-” to negate
search term.
14
+Wisconsin +badgers -cheese
16. Getting Ready
• “Alert” tools
• Change detection -
https://www.changedetection.com/
• Google Alerts - http://www.google.com/alerts
16
Use words or
phrases in
quotes
17. Getting Ready
• “Alert” tools
• Change detection - www.changedetection.com/
• Google Alerts - www.google.com/alerts
• 10 Twitter Tools that Help You Work Smarter -
www.twitip.com/10-twitter-tools-that-help-you-work-
smarter/
• Wikipedia Live Monitor
wikipedia-irc.herokuapp.com/
17
19. Adjusting to Google
• Power Searching with Google -
www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/course/ps/course.h
tml
• Google Advanced Search
• Dates, etc. - www.google.com/advanced_search
• Google Books Ngram Viewer -
http://books.google.com/ngrams
19
21. Adjusting to Google
• Dates:
• Go to http://www.google.com/advanced_search
• Google Public Data:
http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory
21
22. Adjusting to Google: Ngram
• Power Searching with Google -
www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/course/ps/course.h
tml
• Google Advanced Search
• Dates, etc. - www.google.com/advanced_search
• Google Books Ngram Viewer -
http://books.google.com/ngrams
22
• NB: “Lots” of books
• Percent of books
Why this tool?
• Is the vocabulary of your period
correct?
• Are there more appropriate
synonyms?
• Is the topic of interest in the
period?
25. Rich history sites
• British Library Newspapers –
www.bl.uk/welcome/newspapers.html
25
26. Rich history sites
• British Library Newspapers –
www.bl.uk/welcome/newspapers.html
• The New York Times –
• The New York Times Article Archive contains
New York Times articles dating back to 1851.
• The archive is divided into two search sets:
1851–1980 and 1981–present.
26
27. Rich history sites
• British Library Newspapers –
www.bl.uk/welcome/newspapers.html
• The New York Times –
http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/*/
• The New York Times Article Archive contains New York Times
articles dating back to 1851.
• The archive is divided into two search sets: 1851–1980 and
1981–present.
• Library of Congress - http://www.loc.gov/index.html
27
30. New tools for writers
• Writing Apps
• Scrivener (Windows and Macs) --
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
Excellent pack of writing tools. Use images
• Docear http://www.filetransit.com/view.php?id=128087
• Program integrates mind mapping with writing.
• Docear let's you import PDF annotations (bookmarks, comments and
highlighted text). This way, a document's most important information can be
easily organized. If more information is required than the bookmark or
comment itself provides, Docear can open the PDF on the page the
bookmarks points to.
• Second, all information is structured in a mind map. Information
management in a mind map is much more effective and efficient than using
a simple list or social tags.
SEE VIDEO HERE -- https://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/
30
31. New tools for writers
• Writing Apps
• Scrivener (Windows and Macs) -- www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
Excellent pack of writing tools. Use images.
31
www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
33. New tools for writers
Docear - www.filetransit.com/view.php?id=128087
• Program integrates mind mapping with writing.
• Docear let's you import PDF annotations
(bookmarks, comments and highlighted text). If
more information is required than the bookmark or
comment itself provides, Docear can open the PDF
on the page the bookmarks points to.
• Second, all information is structured in a mind
map. SEE VIDEO -
www.docear.org/software/screenshots/
33
34. New tools for writers
• Dynamic maps
• Visual statistics
• Timelines
• Dynamic publishing
• Reader participation
• Fanzine
• Building characters backstory
• Voting
34
35. New tools for writers
• Dynamic maps
• Visual statistics
35
37. New tools for writers
• Dynamic maps
• Visual statistics
• Timelines
• Dynamic publishing
• PrintDigital FormsBi-directional participation
• Reader participation
• Fanzine?
• Building characters’ backstory?
• Voting on characters, storyline?
37
38. New tools for writers
• Dynamic maps
• Visual statistics
• Timelines
• Multiple “streams”
• Maintain your plot
• Tell your story
38
39. Timeline tools
• TimelineJS: http://timeline.verite.co/
• Uses Google spreadsheet as database
• WNYC Vertical Timeline: http://johnkeefe.net/the-thinking-behind-
wnycs-new-vertical-timeli
• ProPublica's TimelineSetter
Slideshow approach with a navigation bar on top; shows series of
events in the timeline. “Cards" below that can be customized to
include multiple media: photos, slideshows of photos, videos, maps,
document embeds, etc.
It can also handle multiple parallel event series on the same
timeline.
http://lenagroeger.s3.amazonaws.com/timelines/timelines.html
39
40. Faber to publish ‘Arcadia’ – a digital
novel by Iain Pears
October 11th, 2012
“Faber is set to publish Arcadia, a new novel by
Iain Pears. Involving a multi-layered story of
history and time, it is conceived and written for
digital publication and will be first released in a
purpose-built app for mobile devices built by Faber
and Iain Pears in partnership.”
40
41. Digital Story Telling
• Take advantage of digital tools as a way to
revolutionize journalism but stay true to
storytelling.
• Snow Fall, Pulitzer-Prize winning feature
package as a "new organic way of
reading"
41
46. Digital Story Telling
• Take advantage of digital tools as a way to
revolutionize journalism but stay true to
storytelling.
• Snow Fall, Pulitzer-Prize winning feature
package as a "new organic way of
reading“
• Insecurities of age through the eyes of
Google Suggest
46
47. Selling yourself AND your work
• Tools for Amateur Authors to Connect with Fans
• Video Chat
• Video chats with only one to four people at any one time.
• Set a weekly or bi-monthly schedule for video chatting.
• Social Media
• Don't use each social media site for the same exact content and
purposes.
• Don't use every social media site in existence. That's overkill.
47
48. Selling yourself AND your work
• Tools for Amateur Authors to Connect with Fans
• Question and Answer Sessions
• Ask your fans some questions too!
• Switch between live Q&A Sessions and ones that are just listed
on your website.
• Answer interesting questions with interesting response. Don't
bore your readers.
• Limit your responses to a few sentences because most answers
won't take a novel to explain.
48
49. Dancing in the Datasphere
Tom Johnson
2013 Gold Rush Writer's Conference
May 3-5, 2013
tom@jtjohnson.com
@jtjohnson
FB: Tom Johnson
49
Hinweis der Redaktion
Price: $70 stand aloneIncluded with Office 2010
To call WorkFlowy a list-making app undersells its surprising versatility. This browser-based tool allows users to create lists and sub-lists on every topic imaginable, from to-dos to groceries to research annotations. The easy-to-use tag system makes sorting entries easy, and the drag-and-drop interface allows users to modify lists with a click. Because it works through any available browser, it is readily accessible at work, at home, and via mobile devices
Called Wikipedia Live Monitor, Google engineer Thomas Steiner created the tool with the hypothesis that “if a breaking news event is important, it will be reflected on at least one language edition of Wikipedia,” and “the time between when the news broke first and the news being reflected on Wikipedia is considerably short.”[Clip]By monitoring the number of editors and edits on any given page within a short amount of time, Wikipedia Live Monitor is able to point out a number of “breaking news candidates,” which Steiner says might be more reliable than a Twitter feed.“The main motivation of using Wikipedia instead of social media is you get a lot of events in one place—almost everything relevant in a breaking news sense has a Wikipedia page,” Steiner says.
Yotify - Track job postings, sales, housing, concert tickets, a news story and more!Free Twitter Alerts by Email!If you love Twitter, you'll love TweetBeep! Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates! You can even keep track of who's tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com). Now, how cool is that?!Great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies and @mentions, finding job/networking opportunities, keeping up on your favorite hobby, and more!Project Muse - Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community. Since 1995 the MUSE journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE is the trusted source of complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies, with over 120 publishers currently participating. UPCC Book Collections on Project MUSE, launched in January 2012, offer top quality book-length scholarship, fully integrated with MUSE's scholarly journal content.
“Numbers ranging from….”Can use quotes to somewhat narrow search, e.g. “January 2012” and “October 2012”NB: The results ARE NOT about publish date, but about those “numbers” appearing on the specific page. Ergo, not precise searching.
“Numbers ranging from….”Can use quotes to somewhat narrow search, e.g. “January 2012” and “October 2012”NB: The results ARE NOT about publish date, but about those “numbers” appearing on the specific page. Ergo, not precise searching.
“Numbers ranging from….”Can use quotes to somewhat narrow search, e.g. “January 2012” and “October 2012”NB: The results ARE NOT about publish date, but about those “numbers” appearing on the specific page. Ergo, not precise searching.
Source: http://archive.org/details/tvThis service is designed to help engaged citizens better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs.The Internet Archive works to preserve the published works of human kind. Inspired by Vanderbilt University’s Television News Archive project, the Internet Archive collects and preserves television news. Like library collections of books and newspapers, this accessible archive of TV news enables anyone to reference and compare statements from this influential medium.The collection now contains 350,000 news programs collected over 3 years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C. The archive is updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired. Older materials are also being added.Use the index of searchable text and short, streamed clips to find programs to borrow on DVD-ROM or view at the Internet Archive’s library in San Francisco.
The British Library has announced that it's placed 2 million digitised and searchable newspapers pages online that date from as far back as 1800. It's free to search the archive, but to view the full-text articles it'll cost £7 for 24 hours (allowing 100 downloads) or £10 for 7 days (and 200 downloads). A couple of papers are free - the Graphic and the Penny Illustrated Paper.
The British Library has announced that it's placed 2 million digitised and searchable newspapers pages online that date from as far back as 1800. It's free to search the archive, but to view the full-text articles it'll cost £7 for 24 hours (allowing 100 downloads) or £10 for 7 days (and 200 downloads). A couple of papers are free - the Graphic and the Penny Illustrated Paper.
FANZINE:An amateur-produced magazine written for a subculture of enthusiasts devoted to a particular interest: a science fiction fanzine.What is Dynamic Publishing?Dynamic publishing is a process in which unique content assets are reused across many publications, including textual content and multimedia assets. This process makes a dynamic CMS a highly effective tool for organizations needing to reproduce identical content across multiple publications.
FANZINE:An amateur-produced magazine written for a subculture of enthusiasts devoted to a particular interest: a science fiction fanzine.What is Dynamic Publishing?Dynamic publishing is a process in which unique content assets are reused across many publications, including textual content and multimedia assets. This process makes a dynamic CMS a highly effective tool for organizations needing to reproduce identical content across multiple publications.
Writing AppsScrivener (Windows and Macs) -- http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.phpExcellent pack of writing tools. Use images Docearhttp://www.filetransit.com/view.php?id=128087Program integrates mind mapping with writing. Solution for searching, organizing and creating academic literature (assignments, theses, books, research papers). Where an office suite bundles several applications for office workers, Docear integrates several applications for researchers, i.e. academic search engine*, file manager, PDF reader*, mind mapping and note taking tool, reference manager, paper drafting, and word processor*. Most of these components are exchangeable which means, if you don't like Docear's reference manager, you can easily use another one instead.Docear has two unique features, no other tools offer. First, Docear let's you import PDF annotations (bookmarks, comments and highlighted text). This way, a document's most important information can be easily organized. If more information is required than the bookmark or comment itself provides, Docear can open the PDF on the page the bookmarks points to. Second, all information is structured in a mind map. Information management in a mind map is much more effective and efficient than using a simple list or social tags.SEE VIDEO HERE -- https://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/
Writing AppsScrivener (Windows and Macs) -- http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.phpExcellent pack of writing tools. Use images Docearhttp://www.filetransit.com/view.php?id=128087Program integrates mind mapping with writing. Solution for searching, organizing and creating academic literature (assignments, theses, books, research papers). Where an office suite bundles several applications for office workers, Docear integrates several applications for researchers, i.e. academic search engine*, file manager, PDF reader*, mind mapping and note taking tool, reference manager, paper drafting, and word processor*. Most of these components are exchangeable which means, if you don't like Docear's reference manager, you can easily use another one instead.Docear has two unique features, no other tools offer. First, Docear let's you import PDF annotations (bookmarks, comments and highlighted text). This way, a document's most important information can be easily organized. If more information is required than the bookmark or comment itself provides, Docear can open the PDF on the page the bookmarks points to. Second, all information is structured in a mind map. Information management in a mind map is much more effective and efficient than using a simple list or social tags.SEE VIDEO HERE -- https://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/
Writing AppsScrivener (Windows and Macs) -- http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.phpExcellent pack of writing tools. Use images Docearhttp://www.filetransit.com/view.php?id=128087Program integrates mind mapping with writing. Solution for searching, organizing and creating academic literature (assignments, theses, books, research papers). Where an office suite bundles several applications for office workers, Docear integrates several applications for researchers, i.e. academic search engine*, file manager, PDF reader*, mind mapping and note taking tool, reference manager, paper drafting, and word processor*. Most of these components are exchangeable which means, if you don't like Docear's reference manager, you can easily use another one instead.Docear has two unique features, no other tools offer. First, Docear let's you import PDF annotations (bookmarks, comments and highlighted text). This way, a document's most important information can be easily organized. If more information is required than the bookmark or comment itself provides, Docear can open the PDF on the page the bookmarks points to. Second, all information is structured in a mind map. Information management in a mind map is much more effective and efficient than using a simple list or social tags.SEE VIDEO HERE -- https://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/
FANZINE:An amateur-produced magazine written for a subculture of enthusiasts devoted to a particular interest: a science fiction fanzine.What is Dynamic Publishing?Dynamic publishing is a process in which unique content assets are reused across many publications, including textual content and multimedia assets. This process makes a dynamic CMS a highly effective tool for organizations needing to reproduce identical content across multiple publications.
Information visualization firm Periscopic just published a thoughtful interactive piece on gun murders in the United States, in 2010. It starts with the individuals: when they were killed, coupled with the years they potentially lost. Each arc represents a person, with lived years in orange and the difference in potential years in white. A mouseover on each arc shows more details about that person.You can then select categories and demographics, which provide comparisons between ethnicities, gun type, sex, and others. Roll over the bar in the middle for a density plot representation.
http://faberdigital.com/the-waste-landhttp://faberdigital.com/shakespeares-sonnetsThe complete Arden Shakespeare text of the Sonnets, including all annotations and critical apparatus, automatically synchronised with the readings line by line.Interviews with leading scholars including Professors Katherine Duncan-Jones, James Shapiro and Henry Woudhuysen. Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary by Don Paterson. A facsimile of the 1609 quarto showing Shakespeare's Sonnets as first published. Readers can write their own notes and share sonnets via Twitter, Facebook and email. AirPlay enabled, allowing the performances to be streamed full screen to AppleTV.
FANZINE:An amateur-produced magazine written for a subculture of enthusiasts devoted to a particular interest: a science fiction fanzine.What is Dynamic Publishing?Dynamic publishing is a process in which unique content assets are reused across many publications, including textual content and multimedia assets. This process makes a dynamic CMS a highly effective tool for organizations needing to reproduce identical content across multiple publications.
FANZINE:An amateur-produced magazine written for a subculture of enthusiasts devoted to a particular interest: a science fiction fanzine.What is Dynamic Publishing?Dynamic publishing is a process in which unique content assets are reused across many publications, including textual content and multimedia assets. This process makes a dynamic CMS a highly effective tool for organizations needing to reproduce identical content across multiple publications.
TimelineJS: http://timeline.verite.co/Uses Google spreadsheet as spreadsheet WNYC Vertical Timeline: http://johnkeefe.net/the-thinking-behind-wnycs-new-vertical-timeli ProPublica'sTimelineSetter takes a slideshow approach with a navigation bar on top to show the series of events in the timeline at a glance and "cards" below that can be customized to include multiple sources of media, including photos, slideshows of photos, videos, maps, document embeds, etc. It can also handle multiple parallel event series on the same timeline. http://lenagroeger.s3.amazonaws.com/timelines/timelines.htmlOther Examples:From NICAR 2013:http://lenagroeger.s3.amazonaws.com/timelines/timelines.htmlNYTimes 9/11 plane radio traffic:http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/nyregion/911-tapes.htmlKatrina events: http://californiawatch.org/node/6741History: presidential pardons: http://www.propublica.org/special/timeline-a-history-of-pardonsGuardian on Arab Spring: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/middle-east-protest-interactive-timelineWSJ on overlapping Arab Spring events: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703842004576162884012981142.html