Comments on: Savage Minds visits the Digital Humanities http://savageminds.org/2008/10/08/savage-minds-visits-the-digital-humanities/ Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:06:13 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Jason Baird Jackson http://savageminds.org/2008/10/08/savage-minds-visits-the-digital-humanities/comment-page-1/#comment-506228 Jason Baird Jackson Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:13:04 +0000 http://savageminds.org/?p=1350#comment-506228 Dan Cohen was here at IU recently taking the digital humanities crowd for a tour under the hood of Zotero and telling the history of its development. I was very impressed by the overall effort and am starting to put it to good use. The almost-here features that she showed us were very impressive, as was the basic concepts at work in its architecture. Thompson-Reuters's suit against George Mason University should be enough to convince Endnote users to abandon ship. Dan Cohen was here at IU recently taking the digital humanities crowd for a tour under the hood of Zotero and telling the history of its development. I was very impressed by the overall effort and am starting to put it to good use. The almost-here features that she showed us were very impressive, as was the basic concepts at work in its architecture.

Thompson-Reuters’s suit against George Mason University should be enough to convince Endnote users to abandon ship.

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]]> By: MTBradley http://savageminds.org/2008/10/08/savage-minds-visits-the-digital-humanities/comment-page-1/#comment-505938 MTBradley Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:03:10 +0000 http://savageminds.org/?p=1350#comment-505938 Yes, you're right, Zotero does integrate with CNMH's SIMILE application. At this point it is easy (but not very useful, at least to me) to display a timeline of publications/manuscripts by date. You can also hack a little to insert other sorts of data: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2523/ I guess I just prefer Scribe's more traditional interface to SIMILE's, which I find clever but confusing. I also haven't figured out how to do a range of dates with Zotero though I only tried so hard. What I really love about Scribe is its capacity for linking pieces of a chronology to a quote or quotes, each of them in turn linked to a record for their source (which, if secondary, can be linked to a record for the primary source from which it draws). You can build biographies in the same way. I imagine all of this is possible via Zotero if there is any will to make it happen. I think the new or upcoming version of ATLAS.ti is supposed to have a GoogleEarth feature like that you describe. I think it would be useful to help "spatialize" your understanding of whatever you're working on, though it was probably just thrown in as a sexy gadget. It did occur to me that I forgot to mention that Zotero has what I see as a major design flaw for Mac users (which is odd given that it apparently has and continues to be developed largely on Macs). The intended workflow presumes the ability to view PDFs in your browser, and this is impossible for Firefox on an Intel Mac. (I think you can do so if you run Firefox under Rosetta with the accompanying loss of performance.) Yes, you’re right, Zotero does integrate with CNMH’s SIMILE application. At this point it is easy (but not very useful, at least to me) to display a timeline of publications/manuscripts by date. You can also hack a little to insert other sorts of data: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2523/

I guess I just prefer Scribe’s more traditional interface to SIMILE’s, which I find clever but confusing. I also haven’t figured out how to do a range of dates with Zotero though I only tried so hard. What I really love about Scribe is its capacity for linking pieces of a chronology to a quote or quotes, each of them in turn linked to a record for their source (which, if secondary, can be linked to a record for the primary source from which it draws). You can build biographies in the same way. I imagine all of this is possible via Zotero if there is any will to make it happen.

I think the new or upcoming version of ATLAS.ti is supposed to have a GoogleEarth feature like that you describe. I think it would be useful to help “spatialize” your understanding of whatever you’re working on, though it was probably just thrown in as a sexy gadget.

It did occur to me that I forgot to mention that Zotero has what I see as a major design flaw for Mac users (which is odd given that it apparently has and continues to be developed largely on Macs). The intended workflow presumes the ability to view PDFs in your browser, and this is impossible for Firefox on an Intel Mac. (I think you can do so if you run Firefox under Rosetta with the accompanying loss of performance.)

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]]> By: ckelty http://savageminds.org/2008/10/08/savage-minds-visits-the-digital-humanities/comment-page-1/#comment-505895 ckelty Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:14:02 +0000 http://savageminds.org/?p=1350#comment-505895 Agreed... Zotero's greatness isn't about user-friendliness. It's not End Note, and that's a good thing in my opinion... but you can't beat the ease with which it adds things to a bibliography and preserves bibdata in things like wordpress or html... it's a major step towards the semantic webdream, for those who dream of semantics (I dream of a pragmatic web, but no one is dreaming with me). It does build timelines though... or did Scibe do something more than what the timeline plugin for Zotero does? Cohen also showed some integration with google earth that was pretty impressive: an archive of documents from 9/11 tagged and geo-located which allowed you to look at interesting maps that cross-referenced the content of texts ("I was praying that day" was the example he used) with location. The ability to do this does indeed require some skills, but I think the harder part is coming up with meaningful research questions that can take advantage of it... Agreed… Zotero’s greatness isn’t about user-friendliness. It’s not End Note, and that’s a good thing in my opinion… but you can’t beat the ease with which it adds things to a bibliography and preserves bibdata in things like wordpress or html… it’s a major step towards the semantic webdream, for those who dream of semantics (I dream of a pragmatic web, but no one is dreaming with me).

It does build timelines though… or did Scibe do something more than what the timeline plugin for Zotero does?

Cohen also showed some integration with google earth that was pretty impressive: an archive of documents from 9/11 tagged and geo-located which allowed you to look at interesting maps that cross-referenced the content of texts (“I was praying that day” was the example he used) with location. The ability to do this does indeed require some skills, but I think the harder part is coming up with meaningful research questions that can take advantage of it…

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]]> By: MTBradley http://savageminds.org/2008/10/08/savage-minds-visits-the-digital-humanities/comment-page-1/#comment-504680 MTBradley Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:24:31 +0000 http://savageminds.org/?p=1350#comment-504680 I've been using Zotero for about a year and half now and it is indeed promising. I would caution anyone intrigued by it that 1) while it can be customized, you really need some programming skills to do so & 2) features tend to appear much more slowly than promised by the developers—there is, for example, a potentially great "hierarchical records" feature that was to appear over a year ago but that seems to have been lost in the pipes. Zotero is great for citation harvesting, perhaps unequaled. I stopped using it intext citation some months ago—it was slow and buggy at the time and I can't comment on any possible improvements in recent months—when I became competent enough with LaTeX to quit word processors (Zotero has very good but not quite perfect BibTeX export). As a broader research tool it doesn't yet approach the wealth of features available via the CHNM's older Scribe application such as the ability to build chronologies and various sorts of lists. There has been some mention on its forums of extending Zotero to include those capabilities but I don't know if there is any movement towards making them a reality. I’ve been using Zotero for about a year and half now and it is indeed promising. I would caution anyone intrigued by it that 1) while it can be customized, you really need some programming skills to do so & 2) features tend to appear much more slowly than promised by the developers—there is, for example, a potentially great “hierarchical records” feature that was to appear over a year ago but that seems to have been lost in the pipes.

Zotero is great for citation harvesting, perhaps unequaled. I stopped using it intext citation some months ago—it was slow and buggy at the time and I can’t comment on any possible improvements in recent months—when I became competent enough with LaTeX to quit word processors (Zotero has very good but not quite perfect BibTeX export). As a broader research tool it doesn’t yet approach the wealth of features available via the CHNM’s older Scribe application such as the ability to build chronologies and various sorts of lists. There has been some mention on its forums of extending Zotero to include those capabilities but I don’t know if there is any movement towards making them a reality.

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