WA 2016 Week 14: Intro to #critlib chat, Reveal.js image alt tags

Weekly Whaaa…?

Intro to #critlib chat

Courtney Boudreau hosted the second intro to #critlib chat, having co-hosted one earlier with Annie Pho. Here’s a link to the Storify made by Alice Prael.

A3. It would be cool to see #critlib extend across all of LAM. Fascinating stuff is going on at museums and archives. #CritLAM?

— Ray Maxwell (@hsifnihplod) April 4, 2016

Among many other suggestions and insights throughout the chat, one by Ray Maxwell really caught my eye. He suggested #critLAM—a fantastic idea! With my visual culture background, I’d like to add “galleries” and go with #critGLAM. Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums share an awful lot of overlap in terms of the critical questions we need to ask about representation, marginalization, preservation, self-understanding, access, etc., etc., etc.

Revised my post on Reveal.js

As a result of this #critlib chat, I went back and edited my post on Reveal.js. More importantly, I also went back and added alt tags for the images in one of my most common information literacy talks.

Makerspace stuff at Trailhead in Boise

For First Thursday, our local open gallery walk thing in Boise, Trailhead had their first-ever Maker’s Showcase.

Sonic Scarf. @TrailheadBoise #boisemakers pic.twitter.com/G1KcZttuXd

— amy vecchione (@librarythinking) April 7, 2016

Unsurprisingly, the sound-makers caught my attention first. Amy Vecchione showed off her cool Sonic Scarf, which had been so well-loved by the time I experienced it that the batteries seemed to have run low, so I couldn’t hear it as well as I’d have liked.

Executive Director Raino Zoller testing out the Plosiphone, an instrument invented by Scott Schmader #makershowcase pic.twitter.com/KurLCYx7Gl

— Trailhead (@TrailheadBoise) April 7, 2016

A BSU student named Scott Schmader—the head of BSU’s Creative Technologies Association, a Maker student group—showed off his Plosiphone and let at least a few other folks test it out.

@makerbot This was my first 3D printed model of a design on which I had worked, to help teach stats #makermilestones pic.twitter.com/1rB9Xy6bSR

— Donovan Kay (@DonovanKayyy) April 8, 2016

I was perhaps most impressed by Donovan Kay’s use of 3D printing to make statistics more readily accessible to people with vision impairments. He showed off a few iterations of his attempt to make standard deviations tangible to blind students.