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Digital text-mining tools can help researchers understand document collections that are prohibitively large for a close-reading. Our collection of runaway slave advertisements from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi totals over 2,500 individual ads! Not only would it be extremely time consuming to read this entire collection, the consistently short, boilerplate format of runaway ads can make it difficult to really distinguish between them. The ads from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi start to all look practically indistinguishable, making it difficult for close-reading alone to recognize pattern breaks between the states, without the assistance of computational data. This is where Voyant comes in. We hoped that the "distant-reading" capabilities of Voyant would be able to pick up on larger word usage trends that are not immediately apparent when reading with the human eye.

"We build software that shapes our cities. More specifically, (1) we create micro-institutions in physical space, (2) we design social processes that allow others to replicate and evolve those micro-institutions, and (3) we write software that enables those social processes. We use this process to create more robust, decentralized, human-scale systems in our cities. We are particularly focused on reinventing our current systems for learning, agriculture, and transportation."

I could have written this (absent email arguments). "I could have written that yesterday. I've learned a ton more about programming and databases; I've spent time getting the basics of computer science; and it's all to just keep doing the same damn things over and over again, and then forgetting I did them, and repeating them. Like a version of Groundhog Day about making Groundhog Day. "

" he starts with a rapid-fire primer on heady concepts like the Internet of Things, the mobile revolution, cloud computing, digital disruption, and the perpetual increase of processing power. ("It's exponential, folks. It's just growing and growing.") The upshot: If you don't at least try to think digitally, the digital economy will disrupt you. It will drain your town of young people and leave your business in the dust. Then he switches gears and tries to stiffen their spines with confidence. Start a website, he'll say. Get on social media. See if the place where you live can finally get a high-speed broadband connection-a baseline point of entry into modern economic and civic life."

The thumbnail came out too small to read on my computer. This is an excerpt from a white paper about technology in health profession education that speaks to the need for faculty development opportunities in the effective use of educational technologies. Thank you ALT lab and OLE for your work to meet this need!

Merging human and machine.

"Users of Social Networking sites frequently discuss events which will occur in the near future. By annotating Named Entities and resolving temporal expressions (for example "next Friday"), we are able to automatically extract a calendar of popular events occurring in the near future from Twitter. "

USA Today, "The place where the video game was invented more than 50 years ago now wants to teach teachers, entrepreneurs and students how to design games for learning - and it is hoping that the end result will be a new kind of tech tool for the classroom." The VCU ALT Lab now has an area for the exploration of games as a means of learning. The MIT online courses might be a good springboard for conversation and experiments in the ALTLab.

Educause Review, Oct. 13,2014 - discussion of gaming in education. Controversy, benefits, real-world examples, imagining CONNECTIONS, etc.

"The Nifty Assignments session at the annual SIGCSE meeting is all about gathering and distributing great assignment ideas and their materials. For each assignment, the web pages linked below describe the assignment and provides materials -- handouts, starter code, and so on."