#DH23 Thing Eleven: Storing Information

In a very short time, researchers have gone from storing all their information – books, articles, notes, data, and documents – on paper,  and often in a single, vulnerable copy, to digital storage on computers. Many of us found that even this wasn’t foolproof and we could still lose large amounts of useful information and important research files if our computers failed (hard drive dies, we get a computer virus, or our computer was stolen). Many of us took to keeping an additional digital ‘backup’ on an external hard drive, floppy disc, CD or datastick. This gave peace of mind against the risks of losing information, but required a complicated process for managing files and making sure we had the right, up-to-date ones, and that external drives, datasticks etc themselves aren’t lost, stolen or corrupted. The most recent development is cloud storage – the ability to store data in ‘the cloud’, hosted by a service which synchs versions of files automatically and allows you to access and work with them from any internet-enabled device and give others access to collaborate on files easily too.

Tool

We’re looking at two tools this week, Google Drive and Dropbox. You may be familiar with these tools already or yet to explore them, but even if you already use them, there are a number of issues to consider with cloud storage tools of this sort (and last week’s Evernote is another such). Both tools allow you to upload files of various types and organise them into folders, and to synch these folders so that they are the same, on each of your devices or wherever you access them from online. They both allow you to access your account from the Web or to download the software to your computer so you don’t have to log in from the website each time. They also allow you to share selected files or folders with others by sending them an invitation, so you can collaborate on files without needing to email attachments any more.

Dropbox

Once you set up a Dropbox account and, if you wish, install it onto your computer and other devices, you can upload documents, images and video files and share them with others if you want. There’s more information on what Dropbox does here.

Google Drive

If you have a Google account already, then you’ll have access to Google Drive (used to be Google Docs), which you’ll find as one of the tools listed along the top of the screen. If you don’t yet have a Google account, then you can sign up for one here.  Google drive allows you to upload your files, but also to create and edit files within the platform, from word processed documents to presentations, drawings, spreadsheets and forms (the registration form for this programme was created using a Google Drive form, which dropped responses into a spreadsheet). Have a look at the instructions and a tutorial for using Google Drive here.

The main difference between the two is the amount of storage space you get for free (Dropbox’s 2GB vs Google Drive’s 5GB) and that Google Drive allows you to create and edit Google files within the platform, so that you don’t have to download and then re-upload them when you (or others) make changes, but you can only do this in the web browser, rather than offline. There are other points of comparison.

Task

If you’re using one or neither of these services already, you could explore both of them and see which one you prefer. They work in very similar ways, so think about the criteria you are using to decide between them.

Reflective Framework

Key Skills: Although both these tools make backing-up files easier through synching to the version in the cloud, you’ll still need to consider other back-up strategies so you’re not entrusting all your work to a remote service provider. What elements of your hardware back-up strategy will you retain, including managing different versions of files, files you’re actively working with or just need to store, long- and short-term storage? What problems of storage will cloud services solve, and which will they not solve? Are there any circumstances where you might not be able to access your information if it is stored online?

Discipline-specific: are there any sorts of information which it would be unprofessional, inappropriate or possibly illegal to store using these services? Unlike every-day users, you may have professional codes of ethics to comply with around the storage of sensitive data. How will you integrate this into your file management? What uses do you see for the ability to share files with others?

Evaluation: Which of these tools do you prefer, and what criteria matter most to you? Do you trust cloud storage? Evernote recently required users to change their passwords as they had been hacked. If data is stored by services based in other countries, it becomes subject to their legislation. Services may also be withdrawn if the company goes bust. Does this affect your willingness to use these tools?

Integration: How does automatic synching, sharing and the ability to access files from any web-enabled device change your file management? Will you use cloud storage as your main storage site and use hard drives and datasticks as back-up, or will you see cloud storage itself as the backup? Or might cloud storage work best for you for sharing and collaborating, or files you’re actively working with in the short term? Cloud services synch automatically, and its easy to get out of the habit of backing up manually using hardware – how often will you do this, and which parts or stages of your workflow?

There’s more guidance and information about data management from Cambridge University’s DSpace@Cambridge 

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#DH23 Thing Ten: Processing and Presenting Information

Personal computers have been used to create documents and store text files for a long time. This was perhaps one of the first uses of home and office computing, and word processors are one of the most frequently used types of software, particularly for researchers. Word processors have until recently been rather unimaginative in the way they work. The main programmes, Microsoft’s Word, Apple’s Pages and Open Office’s Writer,  work in very similar ways – they allow you to type, edit, format and prepare text for print. They are therefore very bound by print-based modes of presentation and production, focussing largely on compositing, the final stage of the writing process, rather than working flexibly throughout the process of planning and composing a text. Although the digital medium allows for far more flexible use than paper, word processors still generally make you write in a linear fashion. This doesn’t represent the varied range of activities that actually make up the workflow of producing a piece of text from assembling notes, planning, jotting, scribbling, organising, filing and rearranging.

 

Tool

Scrivener is an alternative wordprocessor, available for PC or Mac, which aims to support the whole process of writing a long document,  focussing as much on planning and drafting as on the final proofed version. It encourages you to break up writing a long document into a series of sections (which could be paragraphs, pages, sections or chapters, whatever works best for you). You can begin by free-writing and then breaking it up and organising it, or by sketching out a structure and then writing to those prompts. It offers you the digital equivalent  of index cards, a jotter notepad, a ring binder, and a notebook as well as sheets of blank paper you can rearrange in any order you wish, and you can see all of these simultanously in one window rather than switching between applications. You can also see your work in different modes – as index cards on a cork board,  as a bullet point outline, as separate sections (like pages) or as a whole document. When you’re done, you can export your document in a number of formats, from PDF to Word, Rich Text or Open Office, as well as ebook  or webpage.

DH23Things usually only explores free or fremium software, but there is a charge to buy Scrivener of about £30. However, it also offers a free trial of 30 days, which you need not use consecutively, so it may last you longer than a month. This should hopefully be long enough for you to explore what it can do and whether it works well enough for you to consider purchasing, as well as think more broadly about the possibilities of producing text in a digital age.

Task

Download the appropriate free trial version (PC or Mac) of Scrivener.

Learning to use Scrivener is a bit of a learning curve, but it has good instructions and support. Watch the introductory video and work through the ‘Getting Started’ interactive tutorial which you will find when you start Scrivener. Blog posts from other researchers who use Scrivener may also be interesting.

To begin with, you might

• in the ‘file’ menu, create a new project using the ‘blank’ template
• add a number of sections using the ‘add’ button. Add new folders to organise them under using the same button.
• click on the ‘inspector’ button to see the index card associated with each document. Either write some text and then summarise it on the index card to get an overview (click on the ‘draft’ or any other folder to see all your index cards in that folder on the corkboard), or write a plan on each index card and use them as prompts to write up some text.
• while looking at a whole folder of sections, experiment with the different ‘modes’ in the three options at the top: Scrivening, Corkboard and Outline, to see different ways to present the organisation of your text.
• using the ‘file’ menu, import some documents (PDFs of journal articles, web pages, audio or images, for example, or you can simply write your own notes) in the ‘research’ folder. Use the split screen button (in the top right corner of the editing window) to see your notes and write your text at the same time.
• in the ‘file’ menu, compile your document into a suitable form for printing or presenting to others.
• you could also import a document you’re working on from another word processor and experiment with ways of working with it in Scrivener, rather than starting a piece of writing from scratch.

Scrivener also has far more advanced functionality, including metadata to enable searching your work, but the list above will give you a good sense of how the programme works.

Reflective Framework

Key Skills: Some of the functionality of Scrivener will be familiar to you from other word processors, but other aspects will be very different. Although Scrivener allows you to mimic the natural processes of writing more flexibly than other word processors, do you find it intuitive to use? Or has using other word processors shaped the way that you write, making Scrivener too complex to be user friendly?

Discipline-specific: Scrivener is particularly useful for writing long documents, and length is one feature of academic writing. Other than this, do the features of Scrivener support the kinds of planning, note-taking, annotating and organising that are helpful in working on a piece of academic writing? For example, Scrivener can create footnotes, and supports Endnote, but integration with bibliographic software is not otherwise one of its strong points. Does this lessen its use as a writing tool for you?

Digital Humanities: Scrivener’s unique feature is that it doesn’t simply reproduce print format in digital form, but exploits the possibilities of the medium more fully. It’s worth considering whether other digital media we use  or create (software or outputs) are similarly missing the opportunity to do original things with the digital, but are bound by assumptions and limitations of older formats. Have any other examples occurred to you, using Scrivener?

Evaluation: How well does Scrivener work with the way you plan, compose and format a document as a researcher? Does it support the whole process well? Can you see yourself working with it throughout, or only at particular stages of the writing process? Does its functionality cover all that you need to do, or will you need to combine it with other programmes, platforms and applications?

Integration: Scrivener may lead you to reevaluate your writing process and the ways in which it has been shaped by word processing and other tools. Will this be a process of simply reverting back to more intuitive ways of writing, or will it be difficult to change ingrained habits?

The Researcher Online 3: Making and Sharing Content Online

This week we ran the last session in our series The Researcher Online, and looked at ways in which you can create digital content, but also the hows and whys of sharing that online, as well as considering copyright and copyleft issues. Whether it’s creating a youtube video for public engagement, or simply making your teaching materials more widely available (as I’m doing here!), there are many ways in which digital technologies can help you make your work more widely visible. This session aimed to give you a starting point to help you feel that you can make and share digital content yourself.

There is now a website to accompany the session, The Researcher Online, on which I’m collecting the tools, software and platforms you can use (with a focus on those which are easy to use and free). This is a work in progress, and I’ll add more over time!

In the spirit of the session, I’ve made both the slides and handouts available online too.

Making and sharing content online from Helen Webster

View this document on Scribd

#DH23 Thing Nine: Annotating Information

When so much information is in a digital format, it makes sense to explore digital ways of capturing and annotating it. The digital has implications for note-taking, in that it does not restrict the form in which notes are recorded: they could be text, but could just as easily be an webpage, image, video or sound. Digital notes can also be stored in multiple places at once (both your own computer and the cloud, to be accessed from any web-enabled device) and searched for metadata and keywords. The benefits over paper-and-pen notes are obvious, although it may mean reassessing your approach to note-taking to make the most of these possibilities.

This week, we are also beginning to explore two of the major aspects of digital technologies on Humanities research practice: searching of machine readable text, and the cloud.

Tool:

Evernote

Evernote is a tool designed for digital note-taking. You can download it to your computer (or download the app to your mobile device), but by creating an account, you can synch your notes to the web and access them by logging in on any computer with internet access. Evernote is a ‘fremium’ service, in that the basic service is free (limited to a a certain amount of storage a month), and you can pay for an upgrade if needed. You can type notes, of course, but also make image or audio notes, clip webpages, email and tweet yourself notes.  You can then organise your notes into folders, tag your notes with metadata to enable alternative organisation and better searching (keyword, location, date etc as well as wherever you filed them), search text in PDFs and images, compile notes into ‘notebooks’ to export.You can also share notes by email, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook with others by clicking the arrow icon above each note, as well as share whole notebooks with others.

Task:

There is a good guide to getting started with Evernote online. Follow the instructions to download the software, create an account, download the webclipper and explore how to take text, image, audio and webpage notes. You can then experiment further during the course of the week as you take notes as part of your usual research, to see how you might use Evernote to organise and search your notes, and how Evernote impacts on your note-taking strategies.

Reflective Framework:

Key skills: given the possibilities offered by taking notes from digital material in digital forms, it would be worth beginning by taking a moment to review your current note-taking strategies. For many of us, we may have learned ways of taking notes in more traditional ways, using paper and pen, and have adapted these to some extent when working with digital material. We may have begun to use digital tools to make notes which aren’t necessarily designed for this purpose, so you might think about any shortcomings of the tools you currently use to take and store notes digitally.

Discipline-specific: When taking notes for academic research, we have particular concerns which impact on our strategies whether we use pen and paper or digital tools. We need to make a clear distinction between the original material and our own excerptions, annotations, alterations, summaries, paraphrases, commentaries etc.  We need to preserve the context of the original source from which we take notes. You will probably have developed your own well-tested strategies over time for this; how does using a digital tool like Evernote impact on your practice?

Digital Humanities: Digital formats enable us to take notes in new ways. Does this mean that you are interacting with the source material in new ways, or are you replicating paper-and-pen strategies?

Evaluation: How well does Evernote work in terms of your note-taking preferences? How easy to use is it? How well does it accommodate the specific note-taking needs of the academic researcher in the Humanities? Will the ability to take notes in the form of images and sound be useful to you?

Integration: Evernote automates so many things which were laborious in paper-and-pen days, and even before cloud computing. Backing up your notes is made much easier with cloud computing (though it may still be sensible to store them elsewhere in addition), organising and searching is automated, and bringing together different formats from different sources is easy. So much more is possible; do you think the transition to this way of creating and storing your notes will be seamless? Or will the transition require more thought and work?

The Researcher Online 3: Making and Sharing Digital Content Online

Following the session The Researcher Online 1: Building your Online Identity  and The Researcher Online 2: Building your Online Network, there will be another workshop next week looking at creating and sharing digital artefacts to enhance your research, teaching and public engagement activities.

The Researcher Online 3: 

Easily available digital software  and social media platforms can help you to enhance your research outreach, teaching and public engagement in creative ways. From sharing files such as documents and powerpoint slides to creating podcasts or youtube videos, there are new ways of expressing and sharing your work online with a much wider audience than traditionally possible.  If you’d like to find out more about the different platforms and software available, and how to create a strategy for using digital artefacts effectively to extend your reach, then sign up for Making and Sharing Digital Content Online, Tuesday 12th December, 12.30-2.30 in CRASSH SG1. To attend, please register here.

This won’t be a software training session,  but a discussion of how easy to use tools might be employed. The session will however be followed up on Wednesday 20th February at 12, with a more hands-on chance to explore.

#DH23 Thing Eight: Finding and Filtering Information Online

Welcome to the first Thing of Module Two of DH23Things, Finding and Filtering Information online!

Information in hard copy is expensive to print and distribute, and is available only to a limited number of readers at a time. Digital information, on the other hand, can be uploaded to the Web and shared simultaneously with anyone with internet access; moreover, with Web 2.0 anyone can create and share information online. This means of course that there is a vast quantity of information available to the Humanities researcher, either as primary source material, secondary analysis (e-books and online journals and blogs) and, as explored in Module One, information which supports dialogue with other academic colleagues in your field.

This abundance of available information of course results in rather different problem than that which faced researchers in the past, and a number of challenges for the researcher.

• Selecting, storing, cataloguing and retrieving information is now no longer solely the preserve of professionally trained librarians. The researcher needs to take responsibility for learning new search techniques.
• Locating high-quality, relevant information in an over-abundance of online data
• Tools for searching for relevant and high quality information rely on complex algorithms to identify and rank the results. Without understanding how they work, search results may be skewed or limited without the researcher being aware.
• Much of the information on the internet is actually inaccessible to search engines – databases, dynamic web content, scanned material and PDFs, multi-media which is not tagged, information behind password protected privacy settings or paywalls. This is known as the ‘deep’, ‘invisible’ or ‘hidden’ web, and may include a lot of academic content.

Tools:

There are a few things to try out this week – dip in and see what might work well for you. Some of these tools help you to stay up to date by alerting you to content which may be of interest to you; others help you to search in different ways. Automating ways of delivering information to you rather than going out to find it may be one way of dealing with the information overload of the Web.

RSS

RSS (or Really Simple Syndication), is a personalised aggregation tool. You can bring together the sort of content you’re interested in by using RSS feeds – subscriptions to online information sources –  to create a customised collection of up to date information you’re likely to be interested in. When a site you’ve subscribed to is updated, the RSS feed will deliver the new content, with a link to its source, to your feed reader. You might be interested in updates to blogs like this one, or news websites, but as a researcher, one of the most useful applications might be to subscribe to the Table of Contents of a journal in your field so you can see what articles have been published in each issue.

To use RSS feeds, you will need to set up an account with a feed reader which will check RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to and deliver the content to you. The most commonly used ones are Google Reader and Netvibes, which are web based and can be accessed from any computer (there are also desktop versions which can only be accessed from the computer you download them onto).

To set up an account, you’ll need to go to Google Reader (or Netvibes) and sign up, either with your existing Google account if you have one, or an email address and password if not. Once you’ve set up your account, you can add your first subscription. You can do this in one of two ways. The first way is to click on the ‘subscribe’ button in the left hand menu and enter (or cut and paste) the URL from a website you want to subscribe to. The second is to subscribe directly from websites. Look for the RSS symbol and click on it.

RSS icon

You will be taken to the site’s feed, and can either subscribe from there or cut and paste the URL into the ‘subscribe’ box on your RSS feed reader as in the first option. Once you’ve subscribed to a few feeds, you can check your account much in the same way as you would your email inbox, for new content. You’ll find more instructions in the Google Reader videos, including the one below, for getting started.

Email alerts

Another way to stay up to date with new content is via email alerts. Google has a service called Google Alerts which allows you to perform a search and then receive an email at a frequency of your choosing which delivers the most recent results for your search. You can set up to 1000 alerts to your email account, and if you have a Google Reader account, you can also have the results delivered to your feed reader. You can then manage the alerts (to cancel them or alter the frequency). There are more detailed instructions here to follow to set up your first Google alert.

Other services use email alerts; this blog has an option to subscribe for email updates, for example.

Alternative search engines

Google is the first point of call for most of us searching the web; Google Scholar helps to narrow down search results to those of academic quality. However, Google’s increasingly personalised results ranking may not give you a transparent set of results, and you may wish to compare with other search engines. You could try a more specialised PDF search engine, or a search engine dedicated to social media (SocialMention) or blogs (Technorati), or one which is better able to search the deep web such as CompletePlanet.

Task:

RSS feeds: Set up your account with Google Reader. Subscribe to this blog, if you like, using the RSS option in the right hand menu. Find a journal in your field and see if it has an RSS feed to its table of contents to subscribe to, or a news site such as jobs.ac.uk or Guardian Higher Education. You could search the Cambridge University Library catalogue using LibrarySearch and use its RSS facility to keep you in touch with new results for that search. Bibliographic databases often allow you to subscribe to a feed on a particular topic – look for buttons labelled ‘share’, subscribe’ or ‘alert’.

You can also embed a RSS feed reader on your own blog, to display updated content from this blog and others, if you look at the ‘widgets’ option in your Appearance settings (if using WordPress; other blog platforms will have similar options).

Email alerts: Next time you perform a search on Google or LibrarySearch for academic purposes, set up an alert for your search to keep you informed of any future results.

Alternative search engines: next time you perform a search on Google, compare with another search engine to see how the rankings differ, and if anything is indexed which Google cannot discover on the deep web.

 

Reflective Framework:

Key skills: 

Whatever degree of automation is possible, any search will rely on the effectiveness of your own search strategies – your choice of keywords and appropriate search portal, your ability to frame the search using the appropriate conventions (e.g. Boolean logic) and to interpret the results. How fresh are your basic search skills?

Discipline-specific:

What are the most appropriate portals for locating the type of information you use in your research? What uses might be made of the open web, rather than the ‘cloistered garden’ of the academic databases?

Digital Humanities:

If creating digital artefacts (online editions and databases) becomes a more common mode of presenting research material, how might your search strategies need to change to accommodate this, particularly if these resources are part of the ‘deep web’?

Evaluation:

How transparent are the ways of locating information in Thing Eight? How well do they locate and present information that’s relevant to you, and how easy are they to operate? Are they a good alternative or supplement to more traditional ways of finding and filtering information, given the amount of information that’s available now?

Integration:

How easy will it be to stay on top of the information that’s delivered to you? How will you make sure that you are not swamped in the information that might be delivered to your RSS feed reader or email account?

#DH23 Module One Feedback

We want your views on DH23Things Module One!

If you participated in Module One, we’d love to hear your feedback, so we can feed it into Module Two and make it even better!

We’re interested in any level of participation, whether you blogged about all seven Things or only those which interested you, if you dropped out partway through, and also if you have been following the programme but not blogging (lurking!).

If you’re an Early Career Researcher at Cambridge, then please complete the online survey. If you aren’t a researcher at Cambridge, but have still been following the module, we’d be glad to hear your feedback too!

#DH23 Things Module 2 begins in January!

If you’re thinking about New Years’s Resolutions, then DH23Things Module 2 – Managing Information Online – may help you to rethink the way that you organise your work and tidy up the quantities of information you’re dealing with in your research!

We’ll be covering a number of digital tools for managing information online, including

• Thing One: Finding and filtering information (Alternative search engines, email alerts, RSS to Journal ToCs)
• Thing Two: Annotating information (Evernote)
• Thing Three: Creating and using information (Scrivener, Colwiz)
• Thing Four: Collating and curating information – for yourself and others (Mendeley/Zotero, Delicious)
• Thing Five: Using information from others (Flickr, Creative Commons and copyright)
• Thing Six: Storing information (Dspace@Cambridge, Dropbox, Googledocs)

Thing One will be posted on January 28th, 2013! You can sign up for the module here and join in in the New Year.

The Researcher Online 2: Building Your Online Network

Today’s session was the second in our series The Researcher Online, looking at ways in which researchers can use digital and social media to enhance their professional practice. Building Your Online Network looked at using digital tools to enhance networking – a more interactive approach than creating a profile online (covered in the previous session).

For those who attended, and are interested in joining DH23Things as a way to explore to tools and issues in more practical depth, scroll down to the bottom of this blog to find the beginning of the programme, or jump to the post for Thing One here. You can also find out more about how the programme works by viewing the presentations from the launch event, again at the start of the blog or look at the sections above, especially on how to join and FAQ.

For those who couldn’t attend, as the session was fully booked, the slides are available on Slideshare:

Building your online network from Helen Webster

and the accompanying handout on Scribd:

View this document on Scribd

Throughout the session, we used the Twitter hashtag #RONetwork – search for it on Twitter and contribute to keep the debate going!

#DH23 Module Two: your first blog post

If you’re joining us for Module Two of DH23Things, you’ll now have set up and registered your blog. The first task, before we begin properly with Thing 8, will be to write a short blog post about your current strategies and your aims for the module.  DH23Things is a self-directed, reflective format to help you explore digital tools and the issues they raise in the context of the work that you’re doing, so your first post may help you to focus on what you’d like to get out of the module, as well as helping us tailor the module to your needs and interests!

Your first short blog post might cover the following questions:

• What are your current strategies for finding, organising, storing, sharing and managing information? This might be for your research, but also your broader professional development, and other academic-related activities such as teaching, collaborating, applying for grants or jobs, organising events etc.
• What is your current level of confidence in using digital and online tools for managing information? What tools do you currently use, and how well do you feel you use them? How well do you feel you understand the issues raised by the use of digital technologies for managing information?
• What are your aims for this module? What do you hope to gain or have learned by the end?

And finally – DH23Things is about building a peer network so you can share encouragement, ideas and tips! The next thing to do is to find one of the other participants’ blogs (you can do so in the blogroll menu on the right) and leave a comment on their post!