Digital Research Tools (DiRT)

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool’s features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.

I like the way the table . . . [more]

My post about Google’s new favicon got me thinking: do law firms use favicons, and if so, how good are they?

A completely unscientific survey of “quite a few” firm websites tells me that only a small minority of law firms make use of this branding opportunity — and those that do have, by and large, really weak favicons.

Herewith five that I came up with:

This is a weak one. It’s the Cassels logo, seen to the right, in miniature. But at 16 x 16 pixels, the thing just doesn’t translate well: the shape is unclear and the colours

You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, that little graphic that appears ahead of a site’s URL in a browser’s location field. (Slaw has a white ‘sl’ in a blue square, for instance.) Turns out that Google wasn’t changing for the sake of change, but in order to accommodate the various new modalities that now use browsers — PDAs, iPhones, cell phones etc. They’re in the hunt for one that will scale well and look good in various contexts.

The ones they’re testing now belong to this family:

As you might imagine, choosing a new mini-logo for . . . [more]

Following along from last month’s exchanges at the Writers’ Union, a couple of interesting speculative pieces on what technology will do to book publishing and to libraries.

The Economist has a piece this week from Book Expo America on Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry
. I liked the last line, which echoes what I said to the Writers’ Union:

Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.

But . . . [more]

A friend raises an interesting question for the Slaw community:

Imagine that you have a ten person lawyer firm (+ support staff) that needs to move to matter-centric DM. What choices would such a firm have, other than the conventional (and somewhat pricey) legal DM vendors (i.e. OpenText and Interwoven), whose work is good but doesn’t quite scale this small.

Does anyone know whether there is a matter-centric DM based on open source or web services, keeping in mind standard law firm security and confidentiality requirements. Does anyone have any novel ideas or suggestions? . . . [more]

Mindmaps can be useful tools, when hierarchical arrangements don’t get at the scope of an idea or plan. (See Mind42, MindMaps Online, Thinkature, and Free Mind for some posts about mindmaps here on Slaw.) But it can be tedious to put the players on the field. Text2Mindmap is an online application that creates an online mindmap (in Flash) from a simple text outline. You’re then free to do some modest rearranging and styling of the components — though there’s as yet no ability to move an element from one node to another, for instance. This is a . . . [more]

The wonderfully named Digital Standards Organization, i.e. Digistan:

seeks to promote customer choice, vendor competition, and overall growth in the global digital economy through the understanding, development, and adoption of free and open digital standards (“open standards”).

Open standards are specifications that are “immune to vendor capture.” Digistan has tightened up the EU definition of that key phrase, and is now promoting its adoption by (European at first) governments within a digital Hague Declaration. . . . [more]

Canadians can now rent or purchase movies online from Apple’s iTunes. We can then watch the movies at home on our computers or on the go with our iPods. The Globe and Mail article “iTunes Canada Adds Movies” points out the challenges Canadians will face in adopting to this new technology for renting and buying movies. They include:

• Movie files are much larger than music files and take up a lot of room.
• The lack of a universal digital video format that allows movies to be played on any device.

According to the article, iTunes starts off . . . [more]

Those of you who, like me, were born… less recently than others, might enjoy playing with a new interface to Google developed by Stefan Grothkopp that mimics Unix command line functionality, and which takes me back to MS-DOS, Pine, Basic and beyond.

Goosh (Google shell) starts you out with a simple command line:

Put in your search terms (I used “recission”), and you are given back:

There is a help function (type h and return) that lists the various commands this front end will accept. You can search Google’s videos, images, news, maps etc, type m to get more results, . . . [more]

As announced on Google’s blog the day before yesterday, Google Finance is now displaying real-time stock quotes.

  . . . [more]

Some time ago in his column, Joel Alleyne wrote about Law and the Semantic Web. He borrowed a definition of the semantic web that described it as “… an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily”.

For those of us just getting up to speed on the potential of this way of organizing and discovering the internet, here is a great . . . [more]

The Precedent Blog reports that four University of Ottawa law students have filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada over alleged poor privacy practices by social networking site Facebook. The students are working with The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa. On May 30th CIPPIC filed a 35-page complaint under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) against Facebook, alleging 22 separate violations of the Act.

According to the Press Release from CIPPIC:

A team of law students, some of whom are dedicated Facebook users,