Audio-Transcription with Ubuntu

Saturday 12 May 2012 - Filed under Methods

I learned a few days ago that the transcription tool f4 from a german development team based at Marburg, turned from freeware to shareware. The fees are fair and manageable even with a student’s budget but they decided to discontinue the support for linux. There is one alternative to be taken into serious consideration: transcribe. Unfortunately this tool won’t work with (x)Ubuntu 12 due to some python version issues, which I will not even try to fiddle with since these kind of things give you reliably some anger management problems.

The solution – a quick & dirty one – is an article at the VLC wiki. Basically, you alter a few, easy settings in your vlc-player, create a file, copy&paste a python script and you are done. A hint: don’t forget to chmod that little script. You can now easily use VLC to transcribe all the stuff you want. The timestamp isn’t quite working that well – sometimes you need to hammer down on the hotkey a dozen times before the script decides to fire – but it’s good enough. On the contrary the forward, backward and pause hotkeys work swift and gratifying.

To further improve the transcription, use LibreOffice und it’s capabilities of AutoCorrection. Get to the AutoCorrection Options and enter new replacement commands. For example: replace “s1″ with “Speaker 1:”. Now you’re able to simple type s1, hit space and voilá there appears “Speaker 1:”. To improve the readability you may use the format option of search&replace after you’re done (click “More options” in the dialog to open). Following that way you can capitalize “Speaker 1:” or make it bold or green or something.

Anyway, this may not be as convenient as f4 but it’s working. And it’s working on Linux. And you can save the money to buy a couple of caffeinated drinks to get through the transcription.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-05-12  ::  Thomas

Worst of OSM

Thursday 10 May 2012 - Filed under News

Tumblr is great! Tumblr brings you straight awkward blogs like kim jong-il looking at things, somewhat artistic ones like If We Don’t, Remember Me or funny ones like hungover owls. Now, the OSM-Community has one these remarkable blogs, too: Worst of OSM, where strange mapping attempts are documented. It’s not that deep contentwise, but shows some really neat examples how OSM fails and therefore how human it is. And the big plus: you get the attentions of mappers who fix these things.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-05-10  ::  Thomas

Where 2012

Saturday 14 April 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

A few days old but still worth a click: GIS Lounge lists all videotaped keynotes from the Where 2012. And despite the mildly annoying autoplay embedded video, you should go there and breathe the future of geo.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-04-14  ::  Thomas

Mapart by stamen design

Tuesday 10 April 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

stamen design released a wonderful mapstyle named watercolor as well as a how-to. And it’s just plain beautiful. If you add some labels you could actually use it as a map. The rendering isn’t perfect (the example at the left illustrates this since there should be a waterbody next to the stadium) but “Wow”. I really like the look and am tempted to fetch some of the tiles and stitch them together to make a giant poster. Great work!

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-04-10  ::  Thomas

OSM Datapoints

Sunday 8 April 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

Very nice visualization of OSM-GPS Points by Steven Kay. As he mentions you see some flights and boat trips which obviously recorded tracks and the glowing center of OSM in Europe. It would be nice to see Africa, India, China and the whole world in bright colors but there’s a lot of work to do.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-04-08  ::  Thomas

API vs. Download

Monday 2 April 2012 - Filed under News

Great Podcast about sharing data. The main question is: how do you share geodata? Via an API? Via Download? Go find out.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-04-02  ::  Thomas

FOSSGIS 2012

Wednesday 21 March 2012 - Filed under News

The FOSSGIS 2012 started yesterday and is underway until tomorrow. I’ll keep this post updated as the presentations come in. #fossgis2012

Presentation about Geoportal Deutschland. To develop a dashboard for the german public geodata seems in federal germany like kamikaze. Every state will highly be sceptical about the one dashboard to rule them all. But nevertheless: WhereGroup has put in some serious work to build a nice website with lots of functionalities. Sadly my own attempts to search for some maps regarding the ‘Elbe’ were rapidly stopped by some error messages stating “this is not a valid wms map”. Strange.

Geoportal part II – this time for the DACH-region (Germany, Switzerland, Austria). Seems like the relaunch isn’t live yet but looks quite nice in the presentation. The new portal is/will be based on Drupal, GeoExt und OpenLayers. The finished product will enable Drupal developers to build quite easily a web-gis/spatial data viewer. Psst, developer preview.

And the conference laptop seems hostile to any kind of web-GIS.

And now SEO for geodata – interesting. Presentation is about the relaunch of regiofreizeit and it’s web-GIS. Ok, bottom line seems quite simple: just put your geoinformation in good old plain text on your website. Provide a link to your map and that’s it. Nonetheless, quite neat and easy visualization of POIs.

Day 2 (for me)

Volker Mische – author behind GeoCouch makes his presentation. Had the idea for GeoCouch in Australia. Tosses in a lot of names: Couchbase, CouchDB, GeoCouch, Syncpoint, TouchDB, MapQuery. Confusing, yet aiming at a noble goal: mobile geo-enabled databases for e.g. disaster relief or emergency operations. Very cool.

Next topic is GXM. – a framrwork for geo-enabled web-apps. Works with Open Layers and Sencha Touch. Lays the foundation for easy implementation of maps in HTML5 apps. 3 lines of JavaScript and off you go – looks good. Even the attributes are easily accessible. Live demo (browser switch ahead – you really use it via a mobile device). Really neat and easily templetable (does this word exist?). Check out the github repository.

Torsten Rahn and Marble – the swiss army knife for maps. Well, the title says it: a nice roundup of this really versatile programm. Plan your trip, watch a map of the mars, load in your GPS-tracks with altitude profile – no problem. Impressive. #marbleglobe

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-03-21  ::  Thomas

Open Geodata meets Open Government

Saturday 17 March 2012 - Filed under News

Together with my peers at CLIC I published a paper called Open Geodata meets Open Government – eine empirische Studie interaktiver Wertschöpfungs-modelle. Grab the PDF (it’s written in German) and let me know what you think.
It features first findings of my ongoing research outlining stakeholders, their competencies and effects of open geodata.

Have a great day!

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-03-17  ::  Thomas

Apps4Germany

Wednesday 7 March 2012 - Filed under News

So. The winners of the App4Germany-Competition have been announced. I am happy for the winners but even happier for the outcome. There are 13 Apps which are further explained on a dedicated page. Out of these 12 aren’t even conceivable without geodata – some relevancy for the exploration of open geodata.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-03-07  ::  Thomas

Doing research is believing

Wednesday 22 February 2012 - Filed under Methods + Misc

Well, first and foremost, you need to believe in your field of research. I mean, that’s really the main point: doing something that you find to be very fascinating and pursue it with emphasis. To do this on a constant level over a certain time period, you have to believe in the worth of your research (or at least in the possibilities the results will open up for you.)

But a funny thing is: using Atlas.ti makes you feel more and more like a biblical scholar since they programmed the quotation management in way that resembles the way you would quote a bible. So when I refer to a quote in my analysis I write it like this: Competency 2:23. This refers to a quote regarding competencies and is to be found in the 23rd quote of interview 2. If you do this a lot, it really gives you the feeling of quoting from the bible.

So, if I would have done an interview with the founder of OSM, I would write it like this:

Steve Coast 1:24 – “Thou shalt not use closed geodata.” Amen.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-02-22  ::  Thomas