If you like concept mapping as much as I do, you’ll be pleased with the progress that’s been made on the Flash FreeMind Browser. This allows very smart and snappy web-based interaction with mind-maps created by the open-source Freemind tool. Of course, it’s essential to use this for it’s intended purpose — conceptual mapping and exploration — rather than for unnecessarily elaborate website design.
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Vara Software is the developer of the remarkable and powerful Wirecast webcasting application that has found its way into my regular workflow and has been the subject of several reviews, including the centerpiece of my Everyday Software article on how we webcast our online workshops. Unlike Wirecast, Videocue (Mac only) is not an every day tool for me. Videocue is a slick combination of recording software and a desktop teleprompter. This would be an ideal system for anyone who likes to work from a script, whose workflow is so tight for time that they have to, or has other people write material for them to deliver. Your face (or other images, slides, or video that you can weave in) appears in a window right next to the slowly scrolling text of your speech. You have control over size and pacing of the prompt, as well as a wide range of video and audio settings. Plus, it has an utterly intuitive transition and titles management system. I only wish I used scripts more often, that’s how much I like this software. It would be perfect for video podcasting. Every now and then, I need to do some serious statistical analysis or some complex modeling prior to development of a new tool. In those cases, I often turn to The R Project for Statistical Computing (cross platform). This is by no means a point and click application. Rather, it is a sophisticated environment for implementing statistical techniques. It has the added benefits of being open source and massively extensible. The range of free add-on packages available has proven very useful to me, since it includes versions of Bayesian tools and genetic algorithms that have interested me recently. In one of my larger research projects this last year, I had the chance to put a tool called Webstractor (Mac only) to the test. Webstractor is an elegant assistant to web based research. It collects web clippings which you can then edit, keeping the reference URL, but removing all the extraneous navigation, branding, and advertising content. You can search your material, reorganize it, annotate it, save it to PDF, and give it a table of contents. It’s ideal for keeping highly directed research in one place and readying it for analysis and publication. I lot of the research work that I do involves text, sometimes very large quantities of text. Sometimes, it’s critical to be able to mark up that text in ways that reflect my research questions. That’s when I need a tool like TAMS Analyzer (Mac and GNUstep). TAMS (Text Analysis Mark-up System) is an open source application for analyzing themes in documents. It is particularly useful in media analysis and similar sociological investigations. If you are ever in the position of wanting to genuinely understand trends in your field, you would want to give TAMS Analyzer to a trained group of volunteers (or graduate students) and use it to build a coded understanding of the documents (or web sites) that mediate your communities of practice. |
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