I have been dreaming of organizing academic literature digitally and keeping it “ready to cite.”  I have tried Mendeley, ReadCube, Zotero, Papers (Mac) and more… but could not find something ideal for me.  Maybe I was not patient enough, but now I really need to get this done before I take my prelim.  Some of the systems may have been significantly updated since I used them.

I propose a “Play” session for digital citation management systems.  Although I have survived my coursework with manual citation, I believe that my final paper writing would be way easier with such a system!  I now hope to meet people who can share their experience, either good or bad, while playing any of these systems.

Useful Links

• ReadCube
• Mendeley
• Zotero
• Papers for Mac
• EndNote
• Flow
• Comparison of reference management software

At Marquette, as at many schools, students, faculty, and staff are eager to learn about and get involved in Digital Humanities. And yet questions abound: What is DH, exactly? Is it an area of study? A set of interrelated theories and practices? A movement within—and beyond—the academy? Also, is “Digital Humanities” limited to the Humanities? Can artists and social scientists take part? What about alt- and nonacademics? And how is it “digital,” exactly? What moves it beyond “humanities computing”? Can only “makers” participate? Or does DH have multiple access points and possibilities for contributing?

Clearly, these questions need more than a single conference session to address. They demand at least a semester if not a year (or years!) of study, and they call for crowdsourcing. To that end we propose a collaborative THATCamp MKE session in which participants work together to build a shared syllabus designed to help open dialogue, build knowledge, and expand engagement with DH on participants’ home campuses and in their communities.

The goals: 1) to identify and prioritize topics for approximately 8 months’ worth of inquiry (i.e., an academic year); 2) to build a list of related must-read (or -watch or -listen to) resources; and 3) to compile a list of guests and/or activities, identified both in general (e.g., type of expert, purpose of activity) and specifically (e.g., by name).

The plan: We imagine a session with three parts and one break.

• Part 1 (5-10 minutes): Everyone individually brainstorms items for 1, 2, and 3.

• Part 2 (15-20 minutes): In small groups, session participants share, merge, and grow their lists.

• During the break, groups post their lists via whatever materials are available (e.g., whiteboard, flipcharts, post-Its, Google doc and data projector).

• Part 3 (time remaining): Working together, the full group further rearranges and refines all three lists.

The possibilities: If this session flies, we hope everyone who contributes comes away with not only usable resources but also a sense of shared community that continues to grow online in sync with and in support of more local efforts.

At UWM we’ve been digitizing our archival and special collections materials since 2001 – right now we have nearly 120,000 objects available online and that number is growing. Like us, many libraries and archives are working toward greater access to archival collections via digitization. We do this to provide broader and open access to the public so people can make new uses of these materials, to increase access for research and teaching, and potentially to ease the burden on fragile physical items.

At THATCamp, I’m interested in inviting a lively discussion about how researchers, instructors, artists, students, etc… actually use these digitized archival collections, especially now that we’ve entered an age of big data, access to massive corpora, and expectations of open and online access.

At UWM we have begun to experiment with making entire archival collections available online. But through design or through necessity, given limited resources and space, most of what we have made available to date are selections from collections, rather than the whole thing (stay tuned, though …). But what changes when we go big? Making complete collections available online raises a number of provocative questions about how archives might be used and how archival research is conducted.

We have seen examples of how access to massive corpora of digitized texts can enable researchers to ask questions they couldn’t have asked before. What does access to more and more (but still only a fraction of) digitized archival collections enable? What are the benefits?; what new questions can be engaged (and by whom) with access to tools like full text searching, metadata structures that reinforce relationships between objects, and simply being able to access disparate collections in a homogeneous environment; can new relationships and contexts become apparent? What are the costs when you consult a digital rather than a physical artifact; what is crucial about consulting the physical object and what isn’t; are relationships between materials and the context of the collection still apparent in an online environment; does research that relies entirely on digital surrogates count in places like academia; does its “aura” matter?

Ultimately, the point in talking through these questions would be to come up with some best practices/protocols, etc. for how can we make research in the digitized archives richer and more productive.