New blog on digitial research methods: SHARE-IT

In December 2011 we won a ‘Leading in Learning’ grant of €10,000 to develop a blog on digital research methods, together with colleagues from UNU-MERIT and the Faculty of Health and Medicine. It was launched in April 2012 and is called: ‘Support & Help for Academic REsearchers by using Information Technology’ (SHARE-IT).

Our blog presents knowledge and experience in IT-based ways of doing research. This ranges from the use of online forums for discussing research results to the use of Google for searching for literature; from online reference managers to ways of keeping track of current developments online. Overall SHARE-IT provides short, accessible and critical discussions of such online tricks and tools.

Posts will be written by and for early career researchers. So if YOU’RE a researcher with something relevant to share with the world, why not contribute by contacting us here? You could discuss a particular tool or workaround from you own experience. And beyond sharing your knowledge, it’s a way to make your research better known.

Our project team consists of Koen Beumer and Joeri Bruyninckx (at Maastricht University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences), Florian Henning and Martin Rehm (at UNU-MERIT) and Jeroen van Merrienboer and Daniëlle Verstegen (from the Faculty of Health and Medicine).

Integrated web-tools

We have commented in separate posts on reference managers, file synchronizers, networking platforms, and bookmarking tools. A new generation of online tools now tries to integrate all these functions into singular but powerful softwares. Mendeley is one of those tools. Here’s just a brief overview of what it (cl)aims to provide:

1. Organizing material: the software scans PDF’s to identify author, title, journal by matching it with its research library, it allows organization and advanced search and filtering options.

2. Read and Annotate PDFs: highlighting, annotating and adding sticky notes to PDFs, share annotations with others and print them.

3. Collaborating: sharing papers and folders with connections on the platform, while notes, highlights and additions to group documents are visible to all group members.

4. Reference managing: compatible with pretty much all common word processors and citation styles, plus the possibility to collaborate on bibliographies through private groups.

5. Back-up and synchronization: online storage (up to 1Gb for free), to automatically back-up and synchronize libraries across deskptio, web and mobile.

6. Networking: Mendeley is also an academic networking site where papers can be sourced and exchanged, an online presence can be established, or new collaborators can be sought.

+ Makes libraries available across multiple computers (home desktop, office or library computers), across operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux), and through the website also on computers that don’t have the software installed.

Time-travel on the web

In a recent post, we briefly highlighted the Wayback Machine as a particularly interesting tool for all kinds of STS research because it integrates the time dimension into web research. The Wayback Machine, part of the internet archive, has archived some 150 billion web pages to date, which allows one to visit a number of previous versions of a website. Searching for previous versions still required a detour via the Wayback Machine website however. In order to integrate the web’s past more smoothly with its present form, researchers at Los Alamos National Labs and Old Dominion University have been working on a web archive protocol called ‘Memento’. It allows one to see a version of a web-resources as it existed at some date in the past, by entering that URL in one’s browser and specifying the desired date in a browser plug-in. The Memento website currently has a number of tools available for virtual time travel, including an easy-to-use Firefox add-on ’Memento Fox’ – which allows one to move a date slider to previous versions if any exist. Another of the team’s Firefox add-on ‘Synchronicity‘ helps to overcome the problem of ‘link rot’ in the web by searching for the missing webpages and dead links in real time. When it encounters a 404 ‘Page not found’ error, it provides archived copies of missing pages and extracts their title, keywords and tages to rediscover the page or find a replacement (check this page by the team at Old Dominion University for more details).

Bookmarks

For a researcher in the social sciences/humanities, bookmarks get increasingly important. Bookmarks refer to the list of URL’s that you keep of websites that you would like to visit again, with Internet Explorer’s ‘Favorites’ the best known. With blogs and online archives, newspapers or libraries growing, such bookmarks are an aid to navigate the web according to your personal preferences. Several useful tools are available to keep one’s own and to explore those of like-minded web-users.

• Delicious is a social networking platform for bookmarks. A button in your browser-window (available for Fire-fox, Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer, simply install the extension or add-on) allows you to store the URL of a web-page to your profile and add personal notes and personalized ‘tags’ (or: keywords) to the website – ascribing tags facilitates retrieval at a later point. It is a powerful approach that allows you to easily retrieve your bookmarks from any computer and in any browser. A second important feature is that it allows you to share the URL with other delicious users and to screen others’. Each user ‘mines’ and ‘tags’ webpages they like, because of which similar content or like-minded users can easily be traced. This webpage gives a short introduction to all delicious features.

• Xmarks is a free tool that synchronizes your bookmarks to your different computers. The tool works for different internet browsers and requires nothing but installing it and a one-time registration. (courtesy of Bart).

• A good alternative is Diigo, a bookmarking tool that aims to function as a research tool and a knowledge-sharing community at the same time. As a knowledge-sharing tool, it enables actions similar to delicious: advanced searching and retrieval of bookmarks and making them accessible from different locations. In addition, as a research tool, diigo allows you to highlight information and attach sticky notes to a web-page (which are stored for later use), to archive entire web-pages, to save them in cache for offline work, and to pool/share resources with your social network (class, peers). As such, Diigo combines advantages from tools like delicious (although its user base is not as large), Chrome’s NoteAnywhere and Zotero. Learn more over here.

Online sources

The internet does not only invite virtual ethnographers or controversy researchers. It is also a rewarding resource for historians of all sorts. In recent years and months, a number of archives and libraries have developed digital pendants that have become increasingly rich and elaborate. The list continuously expands (a comprehensive overview by Wikipedia can be found here), but the following are already some well-established examples you are likely to find useful:

• OAIster is an extensive catalog of open access digital resources (digitized text, images, moving images, data sets and sound) that is integrated with the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. Search over here.
• Archive.org assembles several internet archives (amounting to an enormous volume of digital media and digitized books): American and Canadian libraries, the Gutenberg Project, Children’s Literature, and Biodiversity Project (dealing with historical biology-related publications are only some of the suppliers included). Books and prints are scanned versions of the original, available in a number of current formats, and are free to download.
• The Archive.org initiative also archives web-pages. The Wayback Machine allows you to visit archived webpages (in 2007 it took a snap-shot of the global web, representing 2 billion webpages), but the website also assembles specific collections of webpages linked to events of global importance (For instance, September 11th, the Asian tsunami or Web Pioneers, a collection of websites that played a crucial role in the development of the web).
• Digital Archive of the Bibliothèque Nationale Francaise is rapidly digitizing its collections of text and images.
• Harvesters – is a gateway to several Open Archives combined and allows searching their meta-data.

Networking

Are you looking for a way to network and collaborate with other academics in your field? The digitalresearchtools wiki DiRT assembled the following list of platforms.

• Academia enables academics to have free webpages and displays them in a tree-format, grouped by university and departments.
• Academici: “a web-based environment in which knowledge workers can interact, collaborate, transfer knowledge and conduct commerce with each other, with commercial and governmental organisations” (Free, with premium commercial upgrade; web-based).
• Cestagi: ”a free service that you can use to create and maintain a biographical sketch site. The focus of the Cestagi project is to provide educators and young scholars innovative tools to manage and promote their unique credentials, enabling interdisciplinary communicative and collaborative efforts.” (Free, web-based)
• EventSeer: service that networks academics–allows users to build personal profiles and post their own events, notifies users of upcoming events that are significant to their interests (Free, web-based).
• H-Net: “an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web” (Free, web-based)
• HUBzero: “allows you to create dynamic websites that connect a community in scientific research and educational ideas” (Free, web-based)
• MyPeers: “follow your peers and get notified when they publish new works”; access publications; measure impact (Free, Mac)
• Pronetos Professor’s Network: “a service that hosts peer-reviewed journal management software to make publishing your journal easier and much more inexpensive” (Free, web-based)
• Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN): “is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences (Free, web-based)

Mendeley also offers academic networking possibilities. For more details, check this post.

Mindmapping

There are several free mindmapping tools available online, and there does not seem to be a ‘best’ – they all have a short learning curve and they’re free. Unfortunately, though, most of these tools enforce hierarchical tree structures, and seem to be useful only for particular (structured) kinds of mindmaps.

• Xmind is an open-source software that lets you export your mindmaps to PDF and extensions supported by MS Office.
• Freemind and Mindomo are also free and simple.
• Bubble.us allows you to share very basic mindmaps online.

Managing references

We all know Endote, but there are also other programs to manage references.

Zotero
Zotero is a free, web-based reference manager, originally only available in Firefox but currently also supported by Safari and Chrome. The citation library, which is managed in a standalone program in Endnote, lives in your browser. Like Endnote it allows you to create full bibliographies in various styles, search bibliographies and create item tags or import subject headings – although tagging in Zotero is more intuitive.

But Zotero also aims to be an integrated database not only for citations, but also for primary sources (various image, text, sound and video files), which can be easily captured from within databases, Amazon, youtube and other social media sites, and allows these libraries to be accessed from any computer. A comprehensive comparison of both reference managers can be found here (this post was based on a slideshow compiled by LSU Library).

Because Zotero can be used to collaborate with colleagues in these libraries online, in principle it would also be possible to keep one’s own Endnote library available online, for reference and synchronization on several work spaces.

Diigo 

See this post.

Mendeley

See this post and this web-page.

Webbrowsers

Do you know what your webbrowser can do for you? Although your system administrator kindly suggested Internet Explorer as a default, there are other browsers available that are infinitely more customizable to your need.

Firefox and Google Chrome may each have their particular advantages and disadvantages, but both offer a host of interesting applications and extensions that can boost your productivity somewhat. They are very easy to install (although you will have to request administrator rights to change browser, you do not need them to adjust the browser to your needs and taste).

• Among some of the tools Chrome offers is the extension ‘StayFocusd‘, which limits the time you allow yourself to spent on time-wasters and interesting webpages.
• ‘Readability‘ converts full and noisy webpages into your preferred book or newspaper layout without the adds, banners and picture that demand your attention.
• ‘NoteAnywhere‘ allows you to leave post-it notes on webpages, for the next time you visit them. (If you like this, Diigo may be your kind of tool).
• When you have the habit of opening many websites at the same time, ‘Trashcan’ enables you to save and reopen tabs for a later session. TooManyTabs helps to organize your browser when many tabs are opened at the same time.
• ‘TinyEye Reverse Image Search’ lets you trace the source of any image used online.
• And the ‘RSS Subscription‘ extension, finally, detects the feeds available for the website you visit and allows you to subscribe to them with a single button. Many of these Chrome extensions have their pendant in Firefox’ add-on collection.

File synchronization

Back2Zip 2.0 is an online storage infrastructure that allows you to back-up your important files on a server (Amazon S3 for instance) – because of this you not only have a safety copy of your files, but it also allows you to access it at a different location than your work spot. The software is freeware, but you pay for a subscription to Amazon S3 (a rato of $0.14 per TB per month). We haven’t tried this ourselves, but it seems a worthwhile alternative to the USB hassle.

SyncBack is a free software that helps you to make easy backups of your files to local drives (your I drive), external hard drives, (USB for instance), servers or zip archives and systematically and frequently synchronize them automatically. After specifying the source location and destination for your files and the frequency at which to synchronize them, the software does the rest.