Categories
From the Web

How to Simplify Flickr Photo Attribution – From the Chronicle of Higher Education

Using snappy images is a good way to boost the popularity of your social media posts. Not only do people respond more quickly, and often more positively, to images, most social media platforms privilege images, meaning that they take up more space or remain on the top of the feed longer. So we make use of Flickr commons images regularly. This quick tip from ProfHacker introduces a bookmarklet that autogenerates the attribution text you need to correctly cite a Flickr commons image. — Social Mediums

Categories
From the Web

Culling Your Social Media Past – From the Chronicle of Higher Education

The past few blog posts have been articles that encourage us to think about the ways we purposefully (and unpurposefully) may shape our social media landscape. This article, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, flips the focus from what we see to what others see. 

One of the jobs that we have as Social Mediums is consulting with faculty and students in our programs to construct social media plans. Social Media has become ubiquitous enough that it seems organic, but it is generally purposefully driven (even if it’s not always obvious what our purpose is). Through the process of professionalization or even just the usual processes of time, our social media persona that we want to project may change. Certainly there are calls now for the current U.S. president to consider his social media strategy even if he won’t change who he is. It’s not always a case of “authenticity” but of “appropriate.”

So we share this article on taking care of your social media feed. We think of it a bit like caring for a garden. Sometimes pruning helps keep the paths and ways clear so that people can better enjoy the view. — Social Mediums

Categories
From the Web

Introducing the New Yorker Poetry Bot – From The New Yorker

Following up on our recent post from The New York Times about apps that infiltrate your social media feeds to get your out of your “bubble,” this new app from the New Yorker steps into your social feed to insert poetry. 

It seems interesting that while the name for these technologies, Social Media, implies social interaction, increasingly tools such as the apps we’re discussing this week and last are decidedly antisocial. They’re lines of code that have little to do with our friends or our social sphere. These algorithmic incursions, like Netflix’s suggestions which embody their own biases, are thought to be neutral (although to be fair, this poetry bot uses poetry collected by The New Yorker‘s Poetry Editor, so it’s not an algorithm in the same way as Amazon’s suggestions are). 

It is interesting to think about how we cultivate our social media “feeds” and what each of them represent as we engage, sometimes socially, with these lines of communication, often on our own, alone. — Social Mediums

Categories
From the Web

How to Escape Your Political Bubble for a Clearer View – from The New York Times

While we often think of social media as a tool to reach out to others and build communities, there has been increasing discussion in the U.S. about how our digital communities also isolate us.

In this piece from The New York Times, the author describes a number of apps and tools that transform your usual social media tools so that you can view the world from inside the bubble inhabited by a person with a vastly different political view point than you. –Social Mediums

Categories
Tutorial

How to Use Adobe Acrobat Pro Remotely

Adobe Acrobat Pro is an invaluable program for any graduate student.  The ability to merge multiple PDFs into one, make the text in a PDF “recognizable” so you can copy/paste it to another doc, or sign a document digitally are just a few of the useful tools that Adobe Pro provides.

You probably know that Adobe Pro is installed on all of the Graduate Center computers, but did you know that you can access Adobe Pro edition remotely from any computer in the world?   Furthermore, you can link your DropBox, Sharepoint, Box, or OneDrive account to the remote Adobe Acrobat Pro program to easily work with your PDFs saved in the cloud.  This blogpost will provide some basic instructions for accessing Adobe Pro remotely and linking it to your online storage system.