Finding & Organizing Digital Sources
During this module, you will consider how best to store and manage sources found online or created digitally that are important for your research.
Outcomes:
- Increase understanding of the components of digital research and the requirements for maintaining it now and in the near future.
- Ability to install and use a free, open source bibliographic management tool (Zotero) for creating libraries and bibliographies.
- Improve search technique, to include image-based searches.
Readings
- James Baker, “Preserving Your Research Data,” The Programming Historian, April 30, 2014, http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/preserving-your-research-data. ♦ Estimated Read Time = 10 minutes
- Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” The American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 735–62. https://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/links/pdf/introduction/0.6b.pdf. ♦ Estimated Read Time = 30 minutes
Questions to Consider
- In response to Baker’s piece, how do you currently manage your digital research? Can you still access notes and data you gathered and took from 20 years ago, 10, 5?
- How relevant is the Rosenzweig piece, published 13 years ago? How have your research practices changed as the formats of sources and data have changed?
- Considering both readings, have you considered your role as a scholar in preserving and maintaining data not only for your own work, but for other scholars and researchers looking beyond your own How have these changes effected your approach to teaching?
Resources for Data and Sources
- We put together some options for finding public domain and Creative Commons collections online: http://ssrc.doingdh.org/digital-collections/
- This LibGuide from MIT links to different repositories of social science data sets: http://libguides.mit.edu/socscidata/general
Resources for Searching, Preserving Digital Sources and Files
- We put together a few tips to improve your Web searches, ensure longevity of digital files, and help you address issues of password management (yes, this is important): http://ssrc.doingdh.org/finding-and-protecting-your-data/
Activities
Activity 1. Install and try bibliographic and research management tool, Zotero:
http://ssrc.doingdh.org/using-zotero/
Activity 2: Reverse Image Searching with TinEye: http://ssrc.doingdh.org/tineye-tutorial/
Activity 3: Take a Scavenger Hunt for digital sources and save them in Zotero: http://ssrc.doingdh.org/scavenger-hunt/
Activity 4: Create a bibliography from Zotero, in the citation style appropriate for your field
Use the Scavenger Hunt sources, or items from one of the new collections you created in Activity 1, https://www.zotero.org/support/creating_bibliographies
Activity 5: Make your new WordPress site Zotero-readable
Add the ScholarPress COinS plugin to make your new site readable by other Zotero users: http://ssrc.doingdh.org/install-scholarpress-coins/
Read to start your research on a specific project? Here is a good first step.
Digital Project Lens
Take a look how historian, W. Caleb McDaniel, is publicly tracking and discussing his research in “Open Notebook History.” http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/open-notebook-history.html Consider how McDaniel is working in this context. Be sure you visit his Wiki: http://wiki.wcaleb.rice.edu/
Notice the ways he is time-stamping his ideas, his progress, and his intellectual work.
- How does this contrast with the way you are currently researching, writing, and developing ideas and prose?
- What do you think of his intentions to work so openly in public?
- Are there drawbacks for working in public in this way? What are the advantages?