Alan Levine › Comments

After a winding, months-long copyright battle, a famous vampire YouTube mashup finally won out over LionsGate Films Thursday. Its creator, Jonathan McIntosh, said YouTube offered him no explanation, simply telling him “The content has been reinstated.” The video, 2009's “Buffy vs. Edward: Twilight Remixed,” depicts Buffy, of Vampire Slaying fame, resisting the creepy advances of Twilight's Edward Cullen, eventually driving a stake through his heart. It's enormously acclaimed, having garnered a Webby nomination and more than three million views. It even led to McIntosh, who lectures on copyright law, testifying before the U.S. copyright office about the video as an example of fair use. - Alan Levine

Ruschagram is intended as a tribute to Ed Ruscha, and is in no way meant to be a criticism of him. It is in no way official endorsed or related to him. Ruschagram was developed as part of EDCMOOC from Edinburgh as a digital artefact. Modern art is seen as dystopic when compared to the more revered classical paintings. In question the ability to create something artistic using devices I wanted to look into how this could be both utopic and dystopic at the same time. - Alan Levine

"After finding a link to Uranium Ore on Amazon one day, I found myself spending way too much time clicking through many hundreds of hilarious Amazon product reviews. Ever the organizer, I thought it would be nice to collect some of the products with the most creative reviews in one place." - Alan Levine

Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to. - Alan Levine

Do you find yourself staring at other designer’s logo and immediately try to decipher what typeface they are using? If you are a designer, it is probably an inevitable habit. There are no hard and fast rules to help you determine which typeface you should land on for your logo. And due to the fact that we are showered with thousands of free fronts on the Internet, deciding on the ideal font to use can be a challenging task. - Alan Levine

A CARD GAME THAT PLAYS WITH YOUR CREATIVITY! - Alan Levine

I can’t keep my eyes off Adventure Time. The stories and animation are reason enough alone to watch the show, but I’m specifically talking about their choice of color. Why is it so captivating? How can I emulate that engaging style? Dan Toth has a pretty cool color swatch gallery from each of the episodes in Seasons one and two, but I’m looking for patterns in the colors that I can use elsewhere. I’m no expert in color, but I figured I’d take a stab at this, so I spent some time poking at the different colors in the title sequence and I found some interesting stuff. - Alan Levine

My response to this situation has been to write scholarship of the sort that would usually be presented in a journal and not publish it. In January, I started a technical report series at my lab, the Trope Tank. This Trope Report series is available in print at the lab, can be downloaded from the lab’s website, and is Creative Commons licensed to allow any sort of redistribution, commercial or non-commercial, that includes attribution and preserves the reports’ original sharability. As of this writing, there are four reports in the series, two by me and two which I authored with a visiting scholar. Affiliates of my lab proofread the reports and we have some discussion of them before they are issued, but there is no editorial or peer review process. Technical reports have never been considered publications in the sense that peer-reviewed journal articles and books are, as is discussed in more detail later. Of course, I do not represent the ones in my series as such. - Alan Levine

Next Vista For Learning provides a library of free videos made by and for teachers and students everywhere. - Alan Levine

To train new employees at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, I have developed a 2-3 day series of training modules on how to get work done in R. These modules cover everything from setting up and installing R and RStudio to creating reproducible analyses using the knitr package. There are also some experimental modules for introductions to basic computer programming, and a refresher course on statistics. I hope to improve both of these over time.  I am happy to announce that all of these materials are available online, for free. - Alan Levine

web based video recorder - Alan Levine

The Bonhamizer will take a track and re-render it as if John Bonham of Led Zepplin was the drummer. This app works by cutting songs up into beats and tatums, and aligning the beats to John Bonham's drum patterns. This is a music hack created at Music Hack Day San Francisco 2013 by Paul Lamere. It is powered by The Echo Nest. This hack was created using the same technology as the Infinite Jukebox, Infinite Gangnam Style and Bohemian Rhapsichord. - Alan Levine

Explore educational, environmental stories via a Google Earth interface or via a timeline. Neat interface - Alan Levine

Like many others, I was absolutely astounded by the meteor strike over Chelyabinsk when I woke on Friday morning. One silver lining to our self-surveilling society is that an event of this magnitude is certain to get caught on the myriad of always-on dash- and webcams. I for one could not get enough of the videos. Might it be possible to use this viral footage with Google Earth to have an initial go at mapping the meteorite’s trajectory? - Alan Levine

TimeFlow Analytical Timeline is a visualization tool for temporal data. The current release is “alpha” software—a very early version that may have bugs and glitches. - Alan Levine

The StoryCorps experience is not limited to our recording booths. We encourage everyone to conduct Do-It-Yourself interviews in your home, workplace, or community. Choose a friend, colleague, or loved one to interview, and find some recording equipment. There’s no wrong way to do it. Just listen closely, and ask the questions you’ve always wanted to ask. Here’s how: - Alan Levine

“Snowfall” has become a verb in many newsrooms after The New York Times launched its beautiful multimedia project earlier this year. Though the format was touted as the future of online storytelling by some, The Times wasn’t the first to pull of this type of format. If you’re looking for inspiration to make snow fall in your own newsroom, here are a few other examples, not all of which come from newsrooms, as I think it would be irresponsible of us to confine ourselves to the sphere of news organizations when collecting inspiration for innovative storytelling formats. - Alan Levine

Create and publish your own e-magazine by curating content from the Web or creating your own content! - Alan Levine

We're drowning in email. And the many hours we spend on it are generating ever more work for our friends and colleagues. (Here's why.) We can reverse this spiral only by mutual agreement. Hence this Charter... - Alan Levine

Right now, Luke Neff and I are adding prompts and using labels. Eventually, we want to create a page where you can search based upon subject, type of writing or Common Core standard. We also plan to add some lesson plans and maybe some student samples in the long run. Our goal is to provide a free resource that teachers can use in their classrooms or that individuals can use as inspiration for writing. - Alan Levine

The story of this nanny who has now wowed the world with her photography, and who incidentally recorded some of the most interesting marvels and peculiarities of Urban America in the second half of the twentieth century is seemingly beyond belief. - Alan Levine

A 320-gigapixel image taken from top of London's BT Tower has set the world record of the largest panoramic photo. It breaks the previous record set by a 281-gigapixel electron micrograph of a zebrafish embryo taken in 2012. The London image was shot by panorama specialists 360 Cities and is made up of 48,640 individual frames. To get an idea of just how large this photograph is, BT says if it was printed at 'normal resolution' the photo would measure measure 98 x 24 metres. - Alan Levine

a 360 gigapixel image to explore, the level of zoom is amazing - Alan Levine

an un-rehearsed talk for Scottsdale Community College TechTalks 2013, using an impov tool to talk about improv - Alan Levine

This is a place for youth and emerging adults to access info, resources and tools during tough times. Help yourself. Help each other. Share what you live and know. - Alan Levine

This lesson starts with a comparison of Web1.0 style pages with Web2.0 style pages, and then goes into details on the two main asynchronous web technologies (AJAX and JSONP). It includes information on parsing XML and JSON. - Alan Levine

All you need to be a photographer si FILTERS - Alan Levine

the custom pulp magazine cover generator - Alan Levine

Basic Composition.com is an open resource for teachers, tutors, and students of basic composition (e.g., writing, composition, basic literacy, basic writing, second-language writing, freshman composition, sophomore composition, and other lower-level English composition courses). Our mission is to meet the needs of composition teachers, tutors, and students by providing a repository of instructional materials and scholarly artifacts absolutely free of charge. - Alan Levine

The Student News Action Network (NewsAction) is a collaborative, online news service where student journalists from around the world: report upon issues of local and global significance such as poverty, the environment, human rights, and politics, and highlight actions and solutions that address such issues. Contributors bring their unique voices to the discussion, representing their regions and their cultural histories in an effort to make a positive impact on their communities and the world. - Alan Levine