TheLen

Rather than blather on and on and on and on about Scribe and how I organize my research, I’ve put together a powerpoint tutorial of the program as I use it. It’s a text- and image-heavy file, because it is intended to stand alone, online, to help other people build their own digital database — or at least help people understand what I’m doing.

Scribe tutorial powerpoint

The keyword searches at the end of the tutorial are the part of Scribe that I anticipate being most useful for me. Being able to find sources addressing veterans, women, labor groups and other specific group with a few keystrokes will make the writing process so much easier.

I have yet to spend a dime on photocopies at the National Archives. In fact, it probably costs me more to get to the Archives than to actually do research there. Now, I know it doesn’t technically cost anyone money to do research at the National Archives, but I don’t see many people relying exclusively on research notes for their projects. No, most people make photocopies of their sources. Some people have elaborate (and probably expensive) laptop-scanner combinations, but more and more people — myself included — are using digital cameras for archival research.

There are many advantages to digital cameras in the archives beyond the cost savings. For researchers travelling long distances to get to their sources, a digital camera and a laptop (both of which would probably be brought on a trip anyway) are significantly lighter and easier to deal with than boxes and piles of photocopies. It’s also much faster to process materials if you don’t have to get up and stand at a photocopier for hours and instead can take pictures at your desk. Digital files also take up a lot less space in homes and offices (and eventually landfills) than the reams of paper photocopies.

Despite these very real advantages, digital copies come with some pretty formiddable obstacles. Chief among these is the danger of information loss. With paper copies, only catastrophes — fire, flood, etc. — threaten a personal archive. However, digital sources can be lost in myriad ways: lost or stolen laptops or cameras, broken hardware, viruses, lost or damaged memory, and so on. Additionally, it is dangerously easy to rename and move digital files and in doing so, lose valuable research.

In the face of the above, I have opted for a careful combination of technology and paranoia to protect my growing digital archive. I backup my laptop hard drive once a week to an external hard drive and then backup the external hard drive on the university’s servers once a month or so.

Of course, no matter how many copies of my research I have, it doesn’t do me much good without a way to organize and use the digital copies. Rather than build a database from the ground up, I use Scribe.  Using this program, I have created a searchable database of both my research images and my secondary sources.  Scribe does not change the original file of a research image and it lets me manipulate those images without running the risk of corrupting or accidentally deleting them.  Using the keywords, I can search for very specific pages, as well as pull up a wide range of sources — searching for “veterans” returns results including the VFW, American Legion, specific leaders and veterans, as well as White House strategies to appeal to the veterans and keep them in the public consciousness.  If, however, I’m looking for a specific reference to the VFW I can simply search for “VFW” and only pull up sources directly related to that organization.

Putting theory into practice wasn’t originally how I imagined the process of researching my dissertation. Instead I saw research as I imagine most historians do: a chance to dive into original documents and learn about the past first-hand. I was actually recently chastised for spending too much time in the archives: “Yes, Sarah, I know it’s more fun. But you really need to start your week at your desk — *thinking* — and reward yourself with trips to the archives.” I love how researching and working in the archives have made me feel like a real scholar (instead of a pretender), but an unexpected side-effect has been the theory-into-practice phenomenon mentioned above. Of course, it shouldn’t have been unexpected, but I guess I was just blinded by the documents.

While I still have a lot to learn, I have a much better handle on how to use digital tools in the process of my research. I know to own a tripod if I plan to take a lot of pictures without doing an impressive (and probably annoying) imitation of a jack-in-the-box. I also learned, thanks to one of the NARA employees, to put a piece of white paper down on the desktop to make the pictures clearer — especially pictures of those tissue-thin copies of internal memoranda. Now, when I get my declas tab, I also write the bib information with pen on a piece of paper attached to the tab and get my two pieces of tape and white paper even before looking for a seat. Recently, I’ve had a couple successful experiments with tabbing pages in the folders and then having massive picture-taking days instead of taking pictures every day while reading through the folders. I’m not sure if it saves time or not, but it does make me a bit more discriminating when deciding if a document is relevant or not.

I’m not making as much progress on the database front — mainly because it’s mind-numbingly boring — but the little bit of work I’ve done with Scribe and my pictures suggests that all of the tedious work will be worth it. Now, my main decision is whether or not to switch to Zotero (the newest version of Scribe from the brilliant minds at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.)

Honestly, I hate admitting I don’t know things. My sister loves to tell me “You don’t know!” — especially when I would respond to anything she told me with “I know.” So, it was interesting for me to be in a class where I had no delusions of knowing and no investment in denying my ignorance. Of course, I still didn’t ask questions every time I didn’t know or didn’t understand something and I certainly didn’t learn everything I need to know to use digital media/technologies as effectively as I know they can be used.

That said, I learned a lot this semester and the final project for this class was possibly one of the most concretely useful assignments I’ve had in my (too, too) many years of school.[1] Building a personal quasi-database from my research was both incredibly challenging and rewarding. Fortunately, someone else did the hard technical part – writing the software that makes a wiki work – and all I had to do was add content.

At least, I thought all I had to do was add content.

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My website is less an actual “website” and more of a research tool. It’s a personal wiki with organized and cross-references notes from my research for my dissertation.

Eventually, I’d like to make this into a truly public site, so any suggestions for organization, clarification, etc. are very much appreciated.

wiki!

(The password is the name of the town I used to live and where my dissertation advisor currently lives — spelled backwards.)

I started to correct the very flawed Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl entry in Wikipedia, but decided not to since I didn’t want my edits to somehow influence the plagarism investigation into one of my students. But, let it be know that it is a terrible entry! instead, I added a brief overview of Project Renew to the Unexploded U.S. Explosives section of the Wikipedia entry on the Vietnam War.

With some hesitation, I do appreciate Wikipedia for what it is. I agree with Rosenzweig that it is a useful research starting point, but I will probably tell my students not to quote/cite it for research papers. Of course, I am still quite suspicious on online research, so my objections to Wikipedia are not personal, per se. However, it is frustrating to me that so many students see Wikipedia as the final arbiter of history — or maybe they’re just lazy?

Rosenzweig’s article convinced me that my innate distrust of Wikipedia is a bit of an overreaction and misplaced as the online encyclopedia compares quite favorably with professional publications such as Encarta and the American National Biography Online. Additionally, the ability to track changes and respond to errors/vandalism is a clear strength of Wikipedia. (see an earlier post about politics and Wikipedia here)

This week’s readings have given me an idea for a potentially interesting assignment for the class I’m teaching this summer: either in class or an outside paper, I will have students critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a Wikipedia entry. I have to think about this a bit more, but it might be a very useful way to convince students to question all sources, particularly unauthored, internet sources. What do you think about this potential assignment? Would you, if you were a freshman or sophomore at AU, take away something useful from such a project or would you feel insulted and belittled?

I sincerely enjoyed poking around the blogs and carnivals, but had to cut myself off because the midterms refused to grade themselves. I thought Mark Grimsley made a number of excellent points about the potential usefulness of blogging for academics — I particularly like the idea of making my work into a form of procrastination! What did you find most useful/interesting in the readings for this week?

Like Rod, I attended the “Googling for Scholars” workshop at the library on March 28, 2006. I was thrilled to learn that the library had found a way to combine the searching abilities of Google with the resources of th academic library. Now, assuming you access Google Scholar through the library, you can access the full text for many of the articles and other sources unearthed by Google Scholar. The search results link you directly to the full text (if it is provided by American University) and even link to the Aladin catalog when relevant.

The “cited by” link takes you to a new set of results listing books, articles, reviews, etc. that reference your original search. When I put together the preliminary bibliography for my dissertation, I searched JSTOR, America: History and Life, and America: Historical Abstracts, Proquest, and Project Muse. These databases were very useful and each returned a slightly different set of results, but now I want to know how Google Scholar compares — particularly, I’m curious to see if Google Scholar will direct me to any sources the other searches overlooked. I have high hopes for the “cited by” link and I hope they pan out this afternoon.

I will have to do a number of comparative searches before I replace Proquest or JSTOR with Google Scholar, but it certainly in my top five searches at the moment.

The authors of The Character, Value, and Management of Personal Paper Archives ask “what makes paper information valuable?” After the readings for this week, my gut reaction of “Because it’s paper” is a bit more sophisticated. Instead of being valuable in its own right, paper is a proven storage medium and will show changes. The Personal Paper Archives article was particularly appropriate reading this weekend as I attempted to sort through piles of paper (including many duplicate articles) and figure out a filing system for the chaos. In the terms of the article, I am a hybrid piler-filer — which I think means I am doomed to have a desk covered with half-way sorted piles for the rest of my life. Additionally, Case’s observations about the filing practices of historians were dead-on for my filing system. Did anyone else find the authors (sometimes obtuse) comments about filing systems and unread files relevant? At a bare minimum, it was comforting to read that my filing habits are pretty “normal” for the most part. (Or, I would be if my cat didn’t eat paper.)
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So, was anyone else really tempted to try a caffeine nap?

The Digital History chapter, “Becoming Digital,” offers a concise and (mostly) user-friendly discussion of the issues of digitization. I must admit I skimmed the more technical sections, but it’s good to know where I can find a basic overview if I should need it in the future.

The discussions of potential methodological shifts resulting from metadata, tagging, and most simply computer-readable text were particularly interesting to me. I’m fascinated by language and linguistic patters and keyword searches could simplify my research. Since my previous work quantitatively analyzed rhetorical and voting patterns, I had to physically read and track keywords in the Congressional Record, the Public Papers of the President, and major newspapers. Midway through an early version of this project, I tried using digital search engines, but found that they rarely turned up articles and quotes that I knew existed. Consequently, I still don’t trust keyword searches for my research.

However, I will be the first to admit that such searches are excellent exploratory tools. If nothing results from a particular keyword search, it is unlikely that the search engine missed a treasure trove of information. However, the chapter’s discussion of metadata pros and cons, while intriguing, gave me even more reasons not to trust keyword searches for my work. But, better understanding of the process has helped me to understand why and how keyword searches did not work for my earlier work and how they may work in future projects.

So, I’m curious. How much do you trust keyword searches? When do you use them in your research? If you’re interested in creating a digital archive, which metadata option(s) do you think will best fit your project. As a linguistically-inclined historian, I’d love to have both fully searchable typed texts AND page scans with exhaustiive keywords. But, I knew that’s too much to expect of small projects with limited resources. I’m still not sure what trade-off I’d make in their shoes.