Muddy Games: Digital Arts and Humanities PhD Candidate: January 2017

Wednesday 25 January 2017

Library Catalogue

As part of a literature review, researchers need to access UCC Library Catalogue on a regular basis. Login can quickly become a repetitive task and therefore a little automation might be useful. The following works with IE, Firefox, Chrome and others. Hope it helps.

Create an HTML web page with the following text;

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
.inline {
  display: inline;
}

.link-button {
  background: none;
  border: 1pt;
  color: blue;
  text-decoration: underline;
  cursor: pointer;
  font-size: 1em;
  font-family: serif;
}

.link-button:focus {
  outline: none;
  color: red;
}
.link-button:active {
  color:red;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>

<form method="post" action="https://library.ucc.ie/patroninfo" class="inline">
  <input type="hidden" name="name" id="name" value="Joe Bloggs">
  <input type="hidden" name="code" id="code" value="123456789">
  <input type="password" name="pin" id="pin" value="my_pass"><br/>
  <button type="submit" name="submit_param" value="submit_value" class="link-button">
    Login to Research
  </button>
</form>

</body>
</html>

The form input lines highlighted below can be edited to include your login details or just type details in each time to overcome Firefox login problems, if this is your preferred browser.

<input type="hidden" name="name" id="name" value="Joe Bloggs"> Student Name
<input type="hidden" name="code" id="code" value="123456789"> Student Number
<input type="password" name="pin" id="pin" value="my_pass"> Password

When the HTML page is created you get a simple login page that brings you straight to UCC Library Catalogue.

Wednesday 11 January 2017

Evaluation of Sources: Creating a Digital Artefact

As part of the module PG6004 - Getting Started with Graduate Research and Generic Skills, an assignment was set to locate and evaluate research sources. There are various mechanisms to record sources and the relevance of those sources to one's research. Some of my colleagues opted for spreadsheets or more traditional note taking. This blog post will guide you through a digital solution and some alternatives. A key requirement is to use a document format which could produce necessary marked up text and output documents formatted correctly. This is a very simple goal but one not easily achieved with a standard word processor. LaTeX was selected as its a typesetting system used for scientific publications and can also be used for other publishing too. As part of this assignment, LaTeX was utilised to prepare the evaluation of sources deliverable. In order to evaluate sources, the first challenge was to identify valid search portals, valid sources, record locations and begin the review. This is not an exhaustive list and please add any suggestions within the comments and the blog post will be edited to include new repositories.

Search Portals

https://academic.microsoft.com
https://scholar.google.com/

Citation Formats

BibTeX

Supported by JabRef

Research Information Systems - RIS

Supported by EndNote and others

XML
MAchine-Readable Cataloging - MARC

Supported by Zotero et al

Research Associations and Digital Repositories (Technical)

Association for Computing Machinery
http://www.acm.org
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp

For this assignment, the search portals above were utilised in conjunction with research databases provided by UCC Library Catalogue. On finding a 'research paper of interest', to read, review and cite the document will, in all probability, be available via the UCC Library Catalogue (which is a portal to numerous repositories)

The next important challenge is reference management. JabRef was chosen as a lightweight reference manager and as it supports BibTeX and can be used with a LaTeX editor. TeXstudio is a LaTeX editor which requires a LaTeX distribution. The LaTeX distribution used in this introduction is MikTeX.

Toolchain installation steps (Quick Guide):

Install reference manager JabRef
Install LaTeX distribution MikTeX
Install LaTeX editor TeXstudio
Create a sample LaTeX document with TeXstudio
Read the guide on LaTeX markup at https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

This is a really useful video on getting started with TeXstudio

The source files produced by TeXstudio .tex and JabRef .bib can be stored within a version control system such as Github or BitBucket.

A LaTeX table generator was utilised to create more complex document tables and which were edited with Sublime Text 3.

Thursday 5 January 2017

State of the JavaScript Landscape: A Map for Newcomers

State of the JavaScript Landscape: A Map for Newcomers: Modern JavaScript development is in constant motion. Build tools that were popular 12 or even six months ago are no longer en vogue. In this article, Bonnie Eisenman gives JavaScript newcomers a map to get started on their JavaScript journey. For more experienced JavaScript developers, Bonnie provides an update on where the community is at and what technologies to use for new projects.