History 513 2007-08 05. Information Trapping

17 Oct 2007

Web searches are typically done once to find something in particular. If you want to continually monitor the arrival of new information on the web, you should use an information trapping strategy instead. In information trapping, web searches are run repeatedly, and the results aggregated as RSS feeds in a feed reader. This week we discuss the dynamic nature of libraries, texts, and audiences online, and some of the tools we can use to stay on top of the changes.

“Information Trapping - An Interview with Tara Calishain,” Future Perfect Publishing (3 Sep 2007).

Besser, Howard. “The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Libraries,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Calishain, Tara. “Kebberfegg — Keyword Based RSS Feed Generator,” ResearchBuzz (5 Oct 2005).

Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig. “Building an Audience” and “Collecting History Online,” Digital History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

Courant, Paul N. “Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their kin) in the World of Google,” First Monday 11, no. 8 (2006).

Crane, Gregory and Alison Jones. “Text, Information, Knowledge and the Evolving Record of Humanity,” D-Lib Magazine 12, no. 3 (Mar 2006).

DeRose, Steven J., David G. Durand, Elli Mylonas and Allen H. Renear. “What is a Text, Really?” Journal of Computing in Higher Education 1, no. 2 (Winter 1990); reprinted in ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation 21, no. 3 (1997).

McLemee, Scott. “Mark of Zotero,” Inside Higher Ed (26 Sep 2007).

Calishain, Tara. Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web. New Riders, 2006.

Easy. Install Firefox and Zotero. The Firefox browser provides a powerful alternative to proprietary software, in part because it can be extended with third-party add-ons. One of the best of these is next-generation research tool Zotero. Both programs are open source. Try installing them and seeing how well they fit into your research process.

Easy. Learn more about RSS. W3 Schools has a good RSS tutorial which you should work through. When you’re finished, think about how the syndication model introduces new possibilities for historical practice.

Easy. Collecting experiences. Digital history provides new opportunities for people interested in memory, oral history and the recent past. Researchers at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, for example, have created a number of websites to collect people’s recollections of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the creation of critical infrastructure in the US. MemoryArchive and The Time When are completely different kinds of project with similar intent. Explore some of these projects and then write a short proposal for a new one.

Easy. Create a tour at the McCord Museum. As I noted in my blog, the McCord Museum allows users to tag digital images from their collection in order to create online tours. Put together a tour that is related to your own research. (Sign up here.)