Miscellaneous – Page 2 – The Distant Librarian

Under the Influence: Long Overdue: The Creative Boom of Library Marketing

Jan 31, 2022

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by

in Discovery, Miscellaneous, Social Networks

One of the most well-written podcasts (oh, and I guess it's a radio show too) out there is Terry O'Reilly's Under The Influence. Terry tells stories of how marketing works (and sometimes doesn't), and it's always an entertaining and fascinating half-hour. His most recent episode, Season 11, episode 3, is Long Overdue: The Creative Boom…

5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Races Without Coding

Jan 20, 2022

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by

Paul R. Pival

in Miscellaneous, Tutorials

One of my more popular posts from the past few years was Thoughts on building my first bar chart race with Flourish, so HT to @ResearchBuzz, who recently pointed to this post on Hongkiat: 5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Race Without Coding. They mention Flourish, but there are four more you might explore. They…

Linked data types in Excel

May 26, 2021

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by

Paul R. Pival

in Data, Linking, Miscellaneous, Random Tech Tips, Tutorials

Apparently parts of this have been around for a couple of years, but it just came on my radar last week with this blog post. Did you know that Excel can do lookups from providers like Wolfram, Bing, and Power BI on a bunch of different data types? Only available with a Live365 (and/or institutional?)…

Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta

May 21, 2021

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by

Paul R. Pival

in Data, Miscellaneous, Random Tech Tips, Service

Filed under stuff no citizen should have to do, today I went through pages archived by the Wayback Machine in order to provide a patron with historical R-Value data for COVID-19 for the Province of Alberta. This information is updated weekly (since mid-December, 2020) at https://www.alberta.ca/covid-19-alberta-data.aspx, but for some reason the Government has chosen not…

That cool picture from the cover of The Data Journalism Handbook

May 4, 2021

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by

Paul R. Pival

in Books, Miscellaneous, Random Tech Tips, Scholarship

The Data Journalism Handbook has been updated from its original 2012 edition, and is available to purchase or for free download from the publisher. When I first tweeted about this a month ago, @Gersart wondered who was responsible for the artwork on the cover. Frustratingly, there was no information about it in the publication, and…

A couple of quick updates – FOIP and Twitter Academic

Mar 3, 2021

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by

Paul R. Pival

in Miscellaneous, Scholarship, Social Networks

Just a couple of quick updates. First, in December, I posted about my initial experience with Alberta's new(?) FOIP process. And then I actually submitted that request on January 26. So the fact that I was never notified that my submission was incomplete is a strike, for sure. But on February 16 I did get…

Thoughts on fighting QAnon – How can so many people believe things that are obviously untrue?

Feb 26, 2021

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by

Paul R. Pival

in Ideas, Miscellaneous, Scholarship, Social Networks

Well that was a sobering read. A few weeks ago the following post by Barbara Fister was circulated at MPOW: Lizard People in the Library. We were supposed to have a discussion about it, but I wasn't able to make the Zoom time, so I didn't read it then. Yesterday someone pointed out that the…

Queering Zoom: students and educators say online learning must be more inclusive

Feb 25, 2021

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by

Paul R. Pival

in Miscellaneous, Social Networks, Web/Tech

Here's a good article from the University of Alberta student newspaper: Queering Zoom: students and educators say online learning must be more inclusive. A couple of points and counterpoints: While professors often include anti-harassment and inclusionary policies in their syllabus, Morris noted that they feel these are hollow statements. “[These professors that have these inclusion…

Witchcraft and OpenRefine

Jan 16, 2020

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by

Paul R. Pival

in Data, Maps, Miscellaneous

Last September I learned about a fabulous resource called Places of Residence for Accused Witches. Map of Scots women accused of witchcraft published for first time https://t.co/vOxIlv6g24 ht @ResearchBuzz Fascinating stuff! #GIS #witches #witchcraft #mapping pic.twitter.com/nOWNHiUlw4 (@ppival) September 26, 2019 At that time I didn't realize how much work had been done using OpenRefine, one…

Thoughts on building my first bar chart race with Flourish

Mar 28, 2019

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by

Paul R. Pival

in Data, Ideas, Miscellaneous, Tutorials, Web/Tech

If you're on social media you've probably seen a bunch of bar chart races pop up in the past couple of weeks. The folks at Flourish have a good post chronicling the "new" phenomenon. Even better, Flourish created a template which makes it pretty easy to build your own, so that's what I did. Here…

Category: Miscellaneous