Currently at MITH in a Romantic Circles Gallery meeting, listening to Matt discuss his Virtual Lightbox application and applet, created in collaboration with MITH programmer and systems administrator Amit Kumar. What is the Virtual Lightbox?

The Virtual Lightbox is a software tool for comparing images online. Comparison, what John Unsworth calls a “scholarly primitive,” is a basic and probably intuitive operation that is nonetheless not well supported–for images anyway–by conventional Web browser technology; that is, users have no ability to move, juxtapose, or otherwise reposition images beyond the configuration in which they are delivered by a static page layout. As rich image collections continue to come online, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that end-users lack the tools to exploit such resources to their full potential. The Lightbox is one attempt to meet this need.

While the application version requires you to download the software and install it on your computer, you can go play with an online version, if you like. You can also install the applet version on your own site and load it up with your own images.

Other interesting UMD-developed tools for organizing and manipulating images come from the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, including PhotoMesa
and PhotoFinder, both of which are available for download.

Blogging to you from the campus of the University of Maryland, where the WiFi is everywhere, and the campus food co-op has good, affordable, vegetarian food. From Kansas City to Atlanta, the flight was fine. From Atlanta to Baltimore, the flight was bumpy enough to induce the first bout of airsickness I’ve had in almost two decades.

The Atlanta airport is what the perky part of town in Blade Runner would look like, if there was one.

My flight leaves early tomorrow morning. Maryland, then England, then home. I’ll be gone more than two weeks. I have a hundred worries, mostly about England. Did I pack enough clothes? Will I be able to find my way from the airport to where I’m staying? Will the plug adapters work right in England? Am I taking enough money with me? Will my ATM card work? Will they accept my credit card that’s so overused my signature is worn off of the back? Will I know what I’m doing once I’m in the archives? Will the place I’m staying really have a room available for me when I get there? Will I get over the jet lag quickly enough?

Where did I put my passport?

At least I speak the language.

Maybe you’ve already seen the story of the 15-year-old kid in Quebec who videotaped himself practicing his light saber moves only to see the video get digitized and placed on the web without his knowledge. Even the New York Times has picked it up.

This story is proving to be a pretty resilient meme. I went to Blogdex and
found
five
separate
blog
“tracks” on the subject.

We’ve come a long way since the Mahir days of 1999 when the popularity of something on the web was enough to merit a story. As reported in the Wired.com and NYTimes articles, the story regarding “the Star Wars Kid” is not that so many people watched his video in such a short period of time, but rather that there developed a self-consciousness of the act of watching the kid’s video. Out of sympathy, guilt, or just the pleasure of watching someone swing a pretend light-saber with such unfettered joy, people are donating money to a PayPal account, originally to buy the young would-be jedi an iPod, but now that the amount raised is over $3,000, there’s talk of buying him a Powerbook.

You can get the original clip, and the “remix” with special effects and a soundtrack here.

My computing skill, that is. After almost a year away from this kind of work, today I spent several hours reacquainting myself with PHP and Postgresql, and I managed to put in some quality time with regular expressions, too.

I’m working with a number of other people on a visual culture project for Romantic Circles, and while I’d like to provide more detail concerning this project, reading this article has given me pause. The article is ostensibly about dating, but it’s really about the risks of blogging. I don’t mean to imply anything mysterious about the RC project, just don’t want to jinx things.

When there is a site that’s ready for prime time, though, I’ll announce it here.

It might be a little while, so … maybe browse around on the web while you wait.