So here’s the map with all the UMW students’ videos as well as one from a student in NYC— also I highly recommend you check out the videos, particularly this one and this one.

A Quick How-To for the Whitman Video Locator

I told Martha Mara’s idea—which, in fact, Martha had given her—and she built the Whitman Video Locator that we are now using on the Digital Whitman blog. You can see both the embedded map and form for entering data here. And while I didn’t build it and don’t have all the details, it appears that Martha created a Google Spreadsheet with three columns: time stamp, address, and embed code, with an associated Google Form that allows users to add the address in one field and the embed code for where ever their video lives (YouTube, Blip.tv, Vimeo, etc.) in another.

After that, there is a gadget you need to add to the Spreadsheet titled “Map,” and from there you can select the appropriate range of data—which is the address and embed code columns, not the time stamp. Afer that, you click on the Gadget and publish out the map.  What’s nice is that the videos get added real time to the map when people add their address and embed code.

I hope Martha will fill in the holes if I missed anything here, because it is a truly slick use of Google Docs for quickly sharing work through a form and aggregating it instantly via a map, and all the crazier that videos of all kind embed within the map.  I love the whole thing.

There are now 68 videos of the various class members reading their selections now posted in the Looking for Whitman YouTube account, take a look. I imagine this is all fodder for a larger video project/mashup down the line. And ’cause this is my blog, and nobody blogs like the bava, here I am reading a selection from “Song of Myself” with a lot of heart, let’s face it, the kid is good. In fact, nobody reads Whitman like the bava, NOBODY!

And, in other Whitman news, the UMW’s student newspaper The Bullet has an article about the class wherein I sound like a Twitter fanboy, which I’m usually not, but I do see it as potentially crucial for fostering a distributed community beyond the blogs and syndication, or even through them. But more on that anon.

From Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue, an album of Woody Guthrie lyrics they set to music.  I’ve been listening to the song for years but never realized until last week in Camden that Whitman’s last surviving direct descendant was, in fact, some kind of niece.

“The Civil War” (8:20)

 http://media.pbs.org/asxgen/general/wind…

“Drum-Taps” (8:40)

Two episodes from a pretty cool series (online and free–the whole thing is at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/pro…) featuring our own Karen Karbiener as well as other scholars and writers including Ed Folsom, Ken Price, Alan Garganus, and Yusef Komunyakaa.