One of the most useful outcomes of a course like this would be the discovery of new digital tools that can help humanists, artists, social scientists and others (who are not necessarily programmers) create interesting projects. Please use this page to suggest tools for possible inclusion on the English Department's "Toy Chest" page.

General criteria: Tools should be:

• Free or relatively cheap. (Expensive tools may be suggested if they come with a free trial period).
• Can be used online or can be downloaded for use on a personal computer. (Please notify if the tool is specific to the Windows or Mac operating systems.)

Format for description of tools:

• Name of tool. Web site URL. Description (any brief description will do, though it would be most helpful if the description were approximately like those for existing entries in the Toy Chest. Please be sure to place any quotations or excerpts from the tool Web site in quote marks.). Optional: include a screenshot.

Make Suggestions Here:

• There is an application called Cinemetrics. It's a tool that helps you measure editing patterns in moving image media (mostly film so far). It can generate graphs, which can highlight and bring out different editing patterns in films. Then, it collects all the data and graphs generated on their website, which can enable various sorts of "distance reading" techniques of the films included. Here is a short essay about it by Yuri Tsivian, and from there you can link to info on their website: http://www.cinemetrics.lv/tsivian.php . You can also find a couple Guy Maddin films that I clocked and made graphs of. -Jeff
• [From Britta Gufstason in the undergrad version of this class]:

   

  blog version of the diary of Samuel Pepys that I mentioned after class: http://www.pepysdiary.com/

   

  A series of maps of a movie, made by graphic design students:

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/densitydesign/sets/72157603732273519/

  A statistics professor commenting on "Graphs, Maps, Trees":

  http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/graphs_trees_materialism_fishing/

  (part of a series: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/archive_asc/C48)

   

   

• http://worldkit.org  This free Google Map clone software allows you to create custom maps using any JPEG image (which means imaginary/fiction-based maps are possible).  As far as I can tell, it includes many of the goodies that Google Maps offers, and even has a GeoWiki application allowing publicly editable maps.  It is a web-based application, which means no OS restrictions, but also might mean you'll have to have a server on which to host the program and a bit of willingness to tinker with XML code. -Amanda

   

• Suggestion 4
• Suggestion 5
• Etc.