New Course in Digital Humanities!
Inspired by my fellowship at the Scholars’ Lab last year, I am teaching a course in the History Department this coming spring called, HIST 4501 “From Vellum to Very Large Databases: Historical Sources Past, Present, and Future.” The course will examine how information about the past has been (and is being) preserved.
Historians rely on primary sources to inform and defend their arguments about the past, but digital technology is altering the form and the content of available records and, in the process, raising fundamental questions about the nature of historical analysis. I have designed the course to be “hands on,” so students will have the chance to
- examine illuminated manuscripts
- operate an early printing press
- geo-reference historical maps
as they explore familiar and unfamiliar ways of recording information and reflect on how these formats affect the study of history.
The course is for undergraduates and will meet on Wednesdays from 3:30-6:00pm. For more information, check out the course page at http://www.jeanbauer.com/vellum_to_vldb.html.
“From Vellum to Very Large Databases” is a 4501 (Major Seminar), so students will sign up via a waitlist and then be added once they have received the instructor’s permission to enroll.
Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship
Through the generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars’ Lab will host a three-track Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library in November 2009 and May 2010. This Institute will bring scholars, cultural heritage professionals, and software developers together to support and develop geospatial projects and methods in the digital humanities. The NEH’s Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program will support travel and lodging for 40 attendees as well as Institute faculty members. Dedicated funding is available for graduate students as well as faculty attendees. The Scholars’ Lab will provide $40,000 in funding for short-term scholar- and developer-in-residencies in humanities GIS to complement the Institute.
The Scholars’ Lab also will develop and host an online information clearinghouse and fund visiting fellows in an effort to promote ongoing scholarly engagement, software development, and information sharing by Institute attendees around the theme of Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.
See the Institute web site for more information — including application deadlines for each of our three “tracks,” on Stewardship, Software, and Scholarship.
Mapping the Digital Diaspora of a Dissertation Research Blog
At the onset of my field research in summer 2007, I launched a blog – YellowBuzz.org – with the intention to: 1) archive and organize my field notes in textual and audio-visual form; 2) convey my research purpose and progress to informant musicians and the public; 3) self-position as a “participant” in the scene. Since then, I have made over 160 posts, some directly linked and others tangentially related to my research findings about the activities and media of Asian American indie rock musicians. Over the past one and a half years, my field research blog has received attention from both print and online media. Evidently, this blog has constructed a community consisting of musician- and music-enthusiast-visitors with an interest in Asian American and transpacific music-culture.
This past January, I began tracking the blog traffic by using Google Analytics. This service monitors the physical location of site visitors and their interactions with the pages on the site. The geographical data are analyzed in terms of the number of visits per unit of geographical organization such as city, country/territory, sub continent region, and continent. This information is also visualized in the form of an interactive map on which users can zoom in and out of specific locales and find site visit patterns specific to cities, countries, regions, or continents in the world.
Over the last four months, I have been playing with the May Overlay function projecting geospatial patterns of the site traffic on my blog. These interactive moments have helped me imagine interesting questions such as: What is the geography of an electronic community based on the topic of “Asian American music,” the tagline of my blog? What does the geo-spatial terrain of this “digital diaspora” look like? Are there any striking patterns at each of the organizational level namely, the city, country, sub-continental region, and continent? What spatial boundaries are transcended and created in these visualizations? Or, fancifully, how does the digital geography of my blog reconfigure the more general social geography of “Asian America” online or offline?
Today marks a 4-month anniversary of this thought experiment. I decided to take some screen shots of a few of the visualizations that I’ve found more meaningful in Google Analytics. This analysis uses data from a sample of 3,061 site visits collected from January 1 to April 30, 2009. I will highlight a few interesting findings below:
1) Here’s a map of blog visits in various U.S. cities. It appears that the visitors are concentrated in central Virginia (the home of yours truly), New York City, Boulder, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Other than central Virginia and Boulder, these are areas of high concentration of Asian Americans and indie rock activities. I’m not quite sure how to explain the traffic flow from the Denver area (Boulder and Aurora, ranked sixth in this map) other than to link it to the thriving indie rock scene in Boulder and the physical location of an Asian/Japanese music blogger Shay of Sparkplugged.
2) According to this chart, 76% of the site visits have occurred within the boundaries of the United States. Next on the list are Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia, all English-speaking countries with close historical ties to American music. In the continent of Asia, countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Singapore have among the highest number of visitors to my site. I attribute this pattern to my blog posts about U.S.-based artists who have a large following in these particular countries. Specifically, Hsu-nami (of New Jersey) and Johnny Hi-Fi (SF-based) has strong ties to Taiwan; Kite Operations (New-York) to South Korea; Plus/Minus (New York) to the Philippines and Taiwan.
3) This last chart represents the sub-continental spread of the site visits. North America takes the lead (taking 80% of all visits). Northern Europe and Eastern Asia tie as second, followed by South-Eastern Asian and Western Europe. I’m not quite sure how to explain the high number of visits from Northern Europe other than to link it to the popularity of a Taiwanese metal band Chthonic in North Europe. Chthonic has a strong international presence, having worked with producers in Denmark and the U.S. including Rob Caggiano, the guitarist of Anthrax. In 2007, Chthonic toured with the OzzFest and established close ties with Taiwanese-American-led erhu rock group Hsu-nami.
So what does this all mean? YellowBuzz, a blog on “Asian American music”, has constructed a global, transnational readership. Asian America in the online digital environment exists beyond the boundaries of the United States and the Asian continent. These observations of transnational crossings work against the geography of Orientalism: a now-classical theory within postcolonial studies that refers the representational control of the non-west by western-produced discourse. The digital diaspora of YellowBuzz has tampered with the so-called east-west binary.
Now if I were serious about pursuing the research on the transnationality of Internet music journalism, I would look for a correlation between blog content and traffic patterns. This would require systematic, post-to-post observations. I would also consider mapping information regarding Internet access and user demographic with the intention to find links between the blog statistics and general Internet sociality. I would also look for statistical and mapping methods more powerful than Google Analytics.
But – to get back to my dissertation that asks: What paths do musicians and their music take as they establish routes crossing territories constructed by nation-states, corporations, international laws, etc? Unfortunately, these visualizations lack the analytical strength to provide an insight on the musicians’ perspective on the scene. They have offered a perspective on media, in particular in understanding the role of a music blog in constructing “Asian America.”
In the coming months, I will be working on a digital humanities project with Joe Gilbert at UVa’s Scholars’ Lab pursuing questions related to the musicians’ side of the story. I hope to unravel the terrain of musicians’ sociality within the transnational scene of indie rock music by mapping out their tours, social networks on (SNS), and record distribution. Meanwhile, I’m experiencing a bout of euphoria loving the fact that I have reclaimed a free market analytical tool offered by Google for my academic(-y) ethnomusicological thought experiment.
Pandora and the “genes” of music genres
Hello, it’s been a while since I blogged. You may remember me as the music Ph.D. student who was last heard from pondering the uses of Google Scholar. I’m on a new mission this semester, studying for my comprehensive exams. One of the topics I am researching and preparing an essay on is about genre in popular music. The concept may seem initially so self-evident, you may wonder what there is to write about it, per se. Oh, but there’s lots. This is because the issue of genre always involves the issue of classification, which inherently provokes debate. Take, for instance, a star performer like Beck. His music often includes acoustic guitar, and he’s covered Mississippi John Hurt. So he must be a folkie. Oh wait, but he also apes Prince on some funky jams. So maybe he’s a pop star. But he also headlines a bunch of big rock festivals, and we find his music in the “Rock” section at the record store (wait, what’s a record store?). So I guess we’ll call him a rocker.
My point being, popular music can be difficult to pin down using genre tags. You’ll find this evidenced in any number of press interviews with musicians who, when pressed by a journalist, pull out that time-worn chesnut that their sound is “unclassifiable”. Genre tags, be it pop, country, rock, hip-hop, salsa, what have you are almost like identifying pornography: I’ll know it when I see it. It’s often somewhat easier to identify what a genre isn’t than what it actually is. Fans and even so-called experts often have difficulty articulating why a particular song or artist fits in a given genre. Based on my readings for this exam topic thus far, I would argue this is because the act of classifying something is essentially making a statement about its meaning: not just semantic/musical meaning, but also meaning that’s intensely cultural, and often political.
That’s why I like musicologist Robert Walser’s definition of genre in popular music. Updating similar ideas that literary critic Tzvetan Todorov has explored, Walser argues that “Genres…come to function as horizons of expectations for readers (or listeners) and as models of composition for authors (or musicians).”[1] In other words, genres labels are modes of discourse wherein musicians, fans, and music industry workers collaborate to make meaning surrounding the music they love. And perhaps surrounding is the key word, there; one can debate about styles of music with a friend all night long, or a record store employee can create increasingly hyper-specialized bin cards for various sub-genres (Psychobilly, Krautrock, etc.). We circle around the sounds we hear through discourse about them, but ultimately, on a musical-sound level, how do we know that Beck belongs in the “rock” section? As Franco Fabbri has noted, problems with genre are “frontier” problems: “We meet with these whenever we attempt to indicate something which exists at the boundary of two or three zones of meaning.”[2] When considering genre tags, there seems to exist an inescapable gap between our need to accurately label a piece of music and the slippery semantic meanings of recorded sound, which may in any given moment resemble two, three, or even more genres.
What then, friends, does this problem have to do with digital humanities? Well, as I research and read in preparation for this exam, I can’t help but frequently think of an Internet service called Pandora that’s richly illustrative of many of these genre issues. For those who may not know, Pandora, a free website based out of Oakland, California since the early ‘00s, is a relatively new and different kind of streaming online radio station. Whereas the playlist at a streaming station such as UVa’s own WTJU is determined by in-the-studio DJs, and the “radio” playlist at a website such as last.fm is determined by a process called collaborative filtering (more on this in my next blog), Pandora is notable for its novel method of selecting songs for listeners. Here’s how it works: enter an artist or song into Pandora’s search engine, and the website will issue you a streaming series of songs by artists considered similar to the one you entered. And how is this similarity determined? Through the Music Genome Project, Pandora’s massive undertaking and claim to fame.
The Music Genome Project, whose work is carried out by roughly fifty analysts at the company’s headquarters in Oakland, is an effort to deconstruct and categorize aspects of pop songs using over 400 different “musical attributes” that the company believes comprise the spectrum of recorded sound. It’s a rigorous close-listening endeavor, specifically intended to focus on aspects like timbre, tempo, harmonic movement, and instrumentation instead of aspects like album art and whether or not the artist has appeared on TRL. This scientific (or pseudo-scientific, depending upon one’s perspective) attention to sonic detail seems—to me at least—an attempt to get beyond the established languages of pop music genres by diving into the nitty-gritty which makes genres what they are. The company builds its credibility as an almost-biologic “genome” of musical characteristics through the depth and breadth of songs it has analyzed: over half a million and counting, according to Pandora’s website. Pandora says that each of these songs is listened to for 20 to 30 minutes by a trained analyst who tags the song with Pandora-authored characteristics—everything from “meandering melodic phrasing” to “chopped and screwed production”. The company claims that theirs is the most comprehensive effort to systematically categorize music—ever.
From the perspective of an academic studying pop music genres, the Music Genome Project presents several fascinating issues. Until my next blog, I’ll briefly set aside an investigation of the company’s claim it can create a taxonomy of the “genes” of popular music. Instead, what I first find most interesting is the story of Pandora and the Music Genome Project’s origins. In a January 2006 interview with podcast program “Inside the Net”, Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren told hosts Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur that he first originated the idea of a music genome while a struggling rock musician himself. He told them his band was “facing the challenge of trying to get known,” and in so doing brainstorming about what aspects of a rock song tend to attract the most commercial attention. Additionally, Westergren shared the intriguing information that he was a film composer at the same time, working for hire to complement a director’s visuals in a given scene. He told Laporte and MacArthur that “In that capacity, one of the things that I had to do was to try and figure out the music taste of a film director.” Westergren said that this challenge was part of what got him thinking about music in terms of distinct, differentiable attributes.
It just so happens that one of my other exam topics this semester concerns film music soundtracks. Having read much of the academic literature on film music, what Westergren recounts here is fascinating—and doesn’t surprise me. The specific challenges a composer faces when working on a film—How do I balance my need to please the director with my need to express personal creativity?—is a central theme of the literature. Scholars even further back than Irwin Bazelon in 1975 have remarked that the collaboration is by nature difficult, “since the composer spends his entire life in music, working out specific musical relationships, while the director spends his time out of music, involved full-time with films—a visual medium—and only part-time with music, as it affects his film”.[3] Even if the director is a fan of music and has interesting ideas about how she wants it used, if she’s not a musician herself she may have difficulty communicating concepts to the composer which can be actualized musically.
That challenge has interesting aspects as regards musical genre. On the one hand, bridging the communication gap between composer and director can often force each out of their comfort zone, resulting in new timbres, new melodies—innovation. Many pieces composed for film are quite short, maybe less than a minute in duration, so they often don’t have space in the film to unfold into full-blown genre exercises. This process of collaboration between sound and images in many ways results in the most “hybrid” music imaginable.
From another perspective, however, film music cues are also remarkably genre-bound. Not necessarily bound by musical genres per se (classical, country, pop, rock, etc.), but bound by the generic conventions of film itself. Due to the standardized production practices of most movies, film as a medium tends to be more amenable to genre classification—and soundtracks can play a key role in that[4]. For instance, soaring strings sketching out an American traditional folk or “cowboy” song, and the audience suddenly knows we’re in a Western. A minor key piano melody and a sultry saxophone, and we know we’re watching a film noir. Given that these generic conventions of film music most certainly exist, it makes me wonder what sorts of films Westergren was scoring as part of his job. Perhaps offbeat indie-Sundance dramas which were aiming for a kind of transcendence of genre strictures?
In any case, the fact that the Music Genome Project origin story involves the world of film music tells me that musical genre was on Westergren’s mind as he brainstormed—even if he sought to rebel against the concept. Additionally, the Project’s roots in soundtrack-for-hire work demonstrate that you can never take the music business out of the music: commercial forces and the presence of an paying audience (real or imagined) inflect in some way all decisions musicians and music industry workers make. As Westergren’s rock band tailoring their sound in an attempt to “get known” reminds us, market considerations are basically always in a dialectical relationship with “creativity” as a musical genre forms—and this includes classical and avant-garde genres which claim to be above that kind of stuff.
Given the commercialized roots of the Music Genome Project, it’s a bit surprising to me that the music industry has fought Pandora as tooth-and-nail as they have. It’s common knowledge that traditional AM/FM commercial radio has been the music industry’s biggest promotional tool during the 20th century. But as traditional radio fades in influence and web radio such as Pandora ascends, the industry leaders have been notoriously less willing to jump onto the 21st-century Internet bandwagon of music promotion.
Despite the fact that Pandora streams tracks instead of allowing users to illegally download—which means, in my opinion, that record company executives should be groveling at Pandora’s feet in thanks—the major-label music industry has seemed intent upon shutting them down. Or, to be more specific, the labels’ demands (through representative organization SoundExchange) for higher royalty payments created expenses Pandora was finding impossible to sustain. Following a federal board ruling mandating increased royalty rates for web radio, in August of last year the Washington Post quoted Westergren as saying Pandora was “approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision”. On the brink of shutting down, Westergren appealed to the company’s subscribers to contact their local representatives on behalf of web radio—and the gambit seems to have worked. The ruling was reconsidered, and currently representatives from both web radio and the music industry are negotiating newer, more manageable royalty rates. Pandora seems to be approaching a delicate truce with the market forces which, to me, seem constitutive of its role as a source for promoting and discovering popular music. (In other words, what took the industry so long to accept current reality?)
In the next installment of this blog, I’ll continue my exploration of Pandora, especially the logic behind its attempt to map “genes” of music and to approach music in a mode somehow “beyond” genre.
[1] Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. p. 29.
[2] Fabbri, Franco and Iain Chambers. “What Kind of Music?”. Popular Music, Vol. 2, Theory and Method (1982), pp. 131-143.
[3] Bazelon, Irwin. Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1975.
[4] Holt, Fabian. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 4-5.
Illuminating Historical Architecture
Following up on my introduction to using 3D models to recreate archaeological sites and perform meaningful academic analysis on simulated virtual environments, I will discuss in further detail my current project concerning the recreation of the House of the Drinking Contest in Seleucia Pieria, the port city of Roman Antioch.
The house in its final phase dates to the third century A.D. and exhibited some of the most complete eastern Roman mosaics, all of which were removed from the site following the 1930’s excavations and placed in American museums (including Richmond’s very own Virginia Museum of Fine Arts). What better way to view the mosaics than to recreate the environment in which they existed? Mosaics in museums are entirely out of their original context. Many floor mosaics are now hanging on walls. Even in occasions that museums create elaborate sets to mimick the rooms from which the artwork was taken, it is impossible to recreate the entire structure or accurately recreate the lighting and allow us to view the mosaics as the original owners of the House of the Drinking Contest would have.
In my previous project of modeling the House of the Faun, one of the largest houses in Pompeii, I had a lot of information to work with. I had many photographs and artists’ reconstructions to consider. While the ceilings and roofs are gone, the walls are still more or less intact, and so are many of the wall paintings. The House of the Drinking Contest is much more of a challenge since the walls collapsed and were removed long ago, leaving at most a half a meter of brick and rubble left. There are clues, however, that let us accurately estimate the height of the walls, and hence a full reconstruction. The plan indicates that columns were about 0.9 meters in diameter. From our knowledge of classical orders and the overall dimensions of the house and rooms, we can assume the columns would not have been Corinthian or Ionic since both would have been too out of proportion with respect to the rest of the house. The reason is that Corinthian and Ionic columns have 10:1 and 9:1 height-to-diameter ratios, respectively. We can then safely assume an average-height Doric colonnade at a 5.5:1 ratio. Other clues and experimentation with natural light simulation allow us to predict plausible window locations.
(click for larger image)
Lighting simulation and computer modeling enable us to take this a step further and create timelapse animations demonstrating how light shifted throughout the hours of the day or days of the year. We then know when mosaics would have been exposed to direct sunlight or were in the shade. I found it useful to create an animation of standing in the triclinium (dining room) of the house, looking west toward the courtyard, to see if the triclinium received direct sunlight at any point of the day. So far I have found that it does on March 21st of A.D. 200, and probably throughout the spring and autumn. In fact, the room’s mosaics are illuminated quite beautifully right around dinner time.
While there is still work to do in the modeling, texturing, and animation of this particular Roman house, the use of accurate modeling techniques and lighting simulation can have a profound impact on archaeology, particularly in cultures that are solar-oriented. I attended the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference last week in Williamsburg, and while there were many demonstrations of 3D models, none of the projects focused on incorporating temporal lighting and analyzing the outcome. In nearly every case, temporal lighting is not even a consideration.
I did get a chance to informally demonstrate some of my work on the House of the Faun and the House of the Drinking Contest to some other classical archaeologists who are also involved in virtual reconstruction, but this facet of computer modeling has yet to hit the mainstream digital archaeology field, it seems. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to demonstrate it to a wider audience at CAA next year.
Hide and Seek: Blacklight’s Smart Search Functionality
Bethany wrote recently in praise of Bess Sadler’s work on Blacklight, and its recent release (as “VIRGObeta”). I’d like to offer my own (admittedly anecdotal, perhaps insignificant) praise.
Yesterday I needed to go looking in the library for Jacob Neusner’s translation of the Mishnah into English. I typed into the search box on the UVA library homepage, “Neusner Mishnah.” Seems straightforward enough, right? When I had done the same on Google Books, the book I needed was the very first search result. (Of course, Google limited my viewing of the very page of text I needed to refer to, hence the need to consult the physical book at all!) But when I searched in the legacy UVA catalog system, I received 81 results, none of which were the book I needed. Admittedly, Jacob Neusner has written a lot about the Mishnah, and I was looking for a book he did not author, but translate. Now, I knew how to modify my criteria to get the results I wanted. But should I have to? Shouldn’t the search be smart enough to help me out? Frustrated, but used to this experience, I next turned to Blacklight to try the same search. The book I needed popped up immediately, on the first page of results. Smart searching. How refreshing!
Electronic Text Analysis and the Wary Humanist
For a long list of complicated reasons, most practitioners of my discipline—political theory—tend to be suspicious of, if not altogether opposed to, the integration of computer technology into their research and teaching. While some scholars cite the superfluity of computer technology to the discipline (excepting, of course, Microsoft Word), others argue that the introduction of certain technologies might somehow actually endanger both thinking and learning (and who wouldn’t find the reduction of Plato to
Mining and Mapping Apocalyptic Texts, Part 2
As I explained in my last blog post, my dissertation will compare several statements about the final fate of humankind in Paul to similar statements in apocalyptic texts. In that post, I described how text-mining could help with the interpretation of the texts which stand at the center of my dissertation. In this post, I will discuss how geographic information systems (GIS) can help to visualize geographic re
A Kindle for Every Student?
The blogosphere has been abuzz with diverse opinions on the release of Amazon’s new Kindle 2. So far, most of the news has surrounded the controversial text-to-speech function and whether or not it violates copyright law (more on this here and here). Regardless of its legality, the speech sounds mechanical, and I don’t see this posing a threat to genuine audio books read with intonation by real people. But my interest is not in this primarily, but in reading via ebook itself. I’ll admit, when it comes to ebooks, I’m still in the undecided camp. On the one h
Day of Digital Humanities 2009
Ever wonder how folks in the Scholars’ Lab spend their day? Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the UVA Library and Joseph Gilbert, Head of the Scholars’ Lab, recently participated in the “Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities” project initiated by our friends at the University of Alberta. The “Day of DH” project encouraged scholars,
So, you’ve got a new idea for a really cool project and you’ve heard terms like database, rails, and php. But where do you start? This is a modern analog to the white paper problem that many face…where do I start? There are so many options out there, all with varying learning curves, that many potential digital humanists find it off-putting to actually start a project and/or quickly give up as it’s just too difficult a task. We’re here to help. What we’re planing to do with this series of posts is outline how the developers in the Scholar’s Lab approach development issues in the humanities and provide you with some tools and resources to get you up and running on your own project. This first post covers getting some of the resources you’ll need in place and then we’ll get into more techniques, tricks, and lessons we have learned over the years that will hopefully save you time as you start your digital project.
Choosing a Platform
The Scholar’s Lab developers have settled on Ruby on Rails for its primary web development platform. While we do use others (Cocoon for instance), Ruby (on Rails) is the primary tool we reach for when developing new projects. Is Ruby better than PHP? Is Rails better than it’s PHP ancillaries (e.g. CakePHP, symfony, codeIgniter, etc.)? There are strong feelings on both sides of this argument, but our group standardized (for the most part) on developing new applications with Rails for several reasons. The framework works on all the platforms we work with faculty on (Windows, Linux, and OS X), provides nice separation of code logic and visual display, and has nice facilities for database modeling and interactions. For the same reasons we chose to move with Rails, you my choose another framework, but once you pick one, try to stick with it.
We won’t get into the holy war of which language is the “best” for developing web applications, but since we use Rails, all of our tuturials will be based on this technology stack for its coding examples. However, many of the concepts we will cover will be implementable in just about any other language.
Installing Ruby
Getting Ruby on Rails is relatively painless on most operating systems, though you will need to open a terminal (Linux\OS X) or command prompt (Windows). You can download the latest version of the Ruby interpreter from the Ruby on Rails website, but if you’re impatient, you can grab an installer for your platform from one of the following:
- Windows: One-Click Ruby Installer (http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167)
- Mac OS X 10.4: Ships with a broken version of Ruby, but you can fix it by following this post from hivelogic (http://hivelogic.com/articles/view/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx)
- Mac OS X 10.5: Install the Developer Tools from Apple (on your XCode DVD). If you don’t have the XCode DVD, you can download it from Apple (http://developer.apple.com/mac)
After you’ve run the appropriate installer, open a terminal (OS X and Linux) or command prompt (Windows) and type
ruby -v
The terminal should then display the specific version of ruby that you are running:
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0]
Installing Ruby Gems
Ruby gems is a program that makes it easy to add functionality to your Ruby program by simply typing one line of code. This is actually how we’ll later install the rails framework, but there are literally thousands of projects that you can install through this interface. If you’re a PHP user, gem is a bit like pear and pecl utilities.
To check if you have a version of gems installed, simply open a terminal or command prompt and issue this command:
gem -v
If you’re lucky, the terminal will display a number back to you.
1.3.1
If your version doesn’t match, don’t worry. At this point we’re just verifying that it exists. If you don’t have gems installed, you’ll need to download the latest version from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126. If you are on a Windows system, you’ll want the ZIP formatted item; if you’re on OS X or Linux, choose the gzipped tarball (.tgz) version.
After you’ve extracted the package, just run the setup.rb program from the command line. If you’re running OS X (or some flavors of Linux), you may need to use sudo for your gem commands.
Note
If you’re brand new to this kind of development, this last part may not make that much sense. If you launch a new instance of the terminal or command prompt, you will use the command “cd” (change directory) to go to where you’ve expanded gems to. After you’re in the correct directory, you then run the command “ruby setup.rb”
cd Desktop/rubygems-1.3.2 sudo ruby setup.rb
Hopefully everything went well, and now when you type the “gem -v” command, you have a version reported back. To make sure you have the latest version of the software, you can run this to update the gem system.
sudo gem update --system sudo gem update
The first line will update the gem program and the second updates any installed gems. If you don’t have any installed gems, the second command will just inform you that there’s nothing to update.
Install Rails
Rails is a web framework for rapid application development (RAD). Since we have gems installed, installing the framework on your system is a breeze. From the command line/terminal just issue the command (again, sudo only if your operating system needs it):
sudo gem install rails
This may take a few minutes as it needs to download a series of dependencies (other programs the framework needs to run). When rails is finished installing you’re all ready to start developing an application.
Next Time
In the next post in this series, we’ll cover Ruby and Rails basics and expand upon those into both use-cases, code snippets, and tutorials based on “generalized” real-world examples.
