Just Doing IT Yourself:simple recipes for the rest of us

Tony HirstDepartment of Communication and Systems

The Open University

http://blog.ouseful.in

fo

@psychemedia

tricks

From shambrarian to undeveloper…

So IT and the developers do what exactly?

If You're Not Confusedb-tal

“Your” computer

Can you install your own applications?

CollaborationCan you work on shared files with others inside and outside your institution?

Data wrangling Can you get the data you need in the form you want it?

SearchDoes the search engine on your public websites work?

VisualisationWould you like to be able to create your own interactive visualisations?

Programming Do you need to do the things (you think) developers do?

Trick 1

JUSt

ask

site:www.open.ac.uk

GetTheData.org

http://www.osqa.net/OSQA is written in Python and powered by the Django application framework. It is free software licensed under the GPL

Welcome to the institutional

undeveloper’s club… :-)

So what’s the FIRST RULE?

(All the answers are bl**din’

obvious)

The second rule of institutional

undeveloper’s club…

Every trick has its place

WHAT’s the context??

??

informationcontext {discovery

managementmanipulationpresentation

communicationcontext {individual/n-cast

synch/asynch1-way/2-waypublic or private

technologycontext {“yours” or “theirs”

online or offlineX-top or mobile

The second rule of institutional undeveloper’s

club…

Other

No trick has its place

Appropri-8 te

chnology

(ghoti and chips)

Trick 2

Write your diagrams

digraph test {

CSV [shape=box]KML [shape=box]JSON [shape=box]XML [shape=box]RDF [shape=box]HTML [shape=box]

GoogleSpreadsheet [shape=Msquare]RDFTripleStore [shape=Msquare]"[SPARQL]" [shape=diamond]"[YQL]" [shape=diamond]"[GoogleVizDataAPI]" [shape=diamond]"<GoogleGadgets>" [shape=doubleoctagon]"<GoogleVizDataCharts>" [shape=doubleoctagon]"<GoogleMaps>" [shape=doubleoctagon]"<GoogleEarth>" [shape=doubleoctagon]"<JQueryCharts_etc>" [shape=doubleoctagon]

…

…

"[SPARQL]"->RDF;"[SPARQL]"->XML;"[SPARQL]"->CSV;"[SPARQL]"->JSON;JSON-> "<JQueryCharts_etc>";CSV->"{GoogleRefine}"CSV->ScraperWikiJSON->ScraperWiki"[YQL]"->ScraperWikiScraperWiki->CSVHTML->ScraperWikiHTML->"[YQL]""[SPARQL]"->"[YQL]""{GoogleRefine}"->CSV [style=dashed]CSV->"<Gephi>" [style=dashed]"<Gephi>"->CSV [style=dashed]RDF->"[YQL]”}

Graphviz and Gephi

Gephi

The third rule of institutional

undeveloper’s club…

Common representations are your friend

Trick 3

Learn which apps take in which

formats

Learn which apps publish which

formats

IBM’sMany Eyes

Let your c

ontent flow

WriteToReply.org

JISCPress

digress.it Wordpress theme

Feed me…

- RSS- KML- CSV- etc

The fourth rule of institutional

undeveloper’s club…

Eat your own dog food

dog food by notto86

Trick 4

URLs can act as glue

KML

Wikipedia HTMLGoogleSpreadsheet=importHTML

CSV Yahoo! PipeImport CSV

KMLGoogle MapEmbedded object <embed>

http://bit.l

y/dFCKxM

Trick 5

URLs

Learn to read – and hack –

URLs

Look for your search term in the

URL of search results pages…

Try adding.xml, .json or .rdf

to the end of a/programme page

on bbc.co.uk

Trick 6

Learn some geek power words

JSON is the new XML

[insid

er knowledge]

JSON-P is magic

Try ?c

allback=myfunc

JSON-P lets you pull the feed into

any web page

Local server

3rd party server

Browser

Follow the JSON…

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataExplorer.html

http://bit.ly/fzj9yv

The fifth rule of institutional

undeveloper’s club…

Be lazy…

Trick 7

Let tools do the work for you…

DataWrangling

Google Refine

Stanford Data Wrangler

Paul Bradshaw’s

OnlineJournalismBlog

Trick 8

via Rule 3 and Rule 5

Cut and paste can get you a long way

Developers use 3rd party libraries

[insid

er knowledge]

Hack the examples

http://delicious.com/psy

chemedia/js+viz

Trick 9

Curate things yourself

Feed aggregation

Google Custom Search Engine

Trick 10

Feed content can be shaped

Search/Aggregation

filter

Trick 11

Sharing is easy

TwitterGoogle docsGist/github

openetherpaddropboxdelicious

annotate it

Trick 12

Google Apps is a mashup

environment

Google spreadsheetGoogle Apps

script

Google Visualisation API

Google Spreadsheets as a mashup environment

http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/category/google-apps/

http://bit.ly/gqAX17

Martin Hawksey's

JISC RSC MASHe blog

Collect/backup tweets in a Google Spreadsheet [Twitteralytics v2]

Linking a Google Form with data from the responses in the Spreadsheet[Event/Resource Booking]

gEVS – An idea for a Google Form/Visualization mashup for electronic voting

The best Google Spreadsheet Event Manager (w/h Sites, Contact, Calendar integration) ever, ever, ever

Convert time stamped data to timed-text (XML) subtitle format using Google Spreadsheet Script

Trick 13

Your first trick…

(Probably no time for)

QUESTIONS…?

http://blog.ouseful.in

fo

@psychemedia