Workshop Proposal: Prezi for Visualization

Prezi: Prezi is a web-based next-generation presentation tool designed as a more dynamic and interactive alternative to Powerpoint. While useful in this way, Prezi’s design in fact allows for a much broader range of applications, and its ease of use and visual flexibility make it a powerful tool. This workshop will discuss a number of different strategies for using Prezi including as a thought map, for rapid interface prototyping, for hand-crafted visualizations, and for the development of visual syllabi and other teaching tools. Participants are encouraged to come to the workshop with a project in mind and a collection of visual assets to work with.

 

Wikis: While most of us know wikis from Wikipedia, all a wiki is is an easily editable web site. This simplicity of concept makes wikis powerful tools for learning about content management, site design and digital collaboration. This workshop will use the Wikidot.com engine to explore how wikis can be applied to humanities pedagogy, research and  project development. Topics addressed will include page creation, developing site hierarchies, basic editing, multimedia, editing history and site management. All participants are encouraged to create a free account at Wikidot.comprior to the workshop.

Omeka: Omeka is a web-baseed digital collections tool developed by GMU’s renowned Center for History and New Media. Combining a platform experience akin to WordPress and a content structure similar to that used by museums, archives, and libraries, Omeka is a powerful yet simple to use tool for the management of collections of digital assets. This workshop will introduce the basic structure, interface, and design of Omeka, as well as show examples of how Omeka can be adapted and customized for a variety of projects from publicly available archives to digital exhibitions as well as its usability as a pedagogical platform. We will be using the hosted Omeka.net service, so all participants are encouraged to create a free account prior to the workshop: www.omeka.net/signup

Zotero: Zotero is a powerful open source tool for the digital collection and annotation of bibliographical source material. Deployed as either a Firefox plugin or in its new standalone form, Zotero allows you to easily scour digital metadata from standards compliant web sites and catalogs, capture web sites as sources, organize sources in folders, export bibliographic information in numerous accepted academic styles and sync your data across multiple computers through a Zotero cloud-based service. This workshop will help users set up a Zotero account, gather different types of materials from a variety of sources, and start you on the road to more efficient and better organized research materials management. Prior to the workshop, attendees should either download the Zotero plugin for Firefox (if that is his/her preferred browser) or download the Zotero Standalone client for the appropriate operating system if they are using any other browser. All Zotero downloads can be found here: www.zotero.org/support/3.0

 

Bio: Kimon Keramidas, Ph.D.
Kimon is the Assistant Director for the Digital Media Lab at Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture.