2: Keeping a Finger on the Pulse
For those tapped into an online academic community, one problem that often arises is how to deal with the large volume of information on the web. How do you block out the chatter and listen to the conversations that are important to you?
Google Reader offers one useful tool for scholars. Reader allows users to compile articles from websites and blogs (look for the RSS button on a webpage) and puts them in one central place (your Google account). Information is saved and searchable. To get started, start searching for blogs that are of interest to you. For historians, the History News Network’s blog offers a list of history-related blogs, many of which contain their own “blogrolls” of links to additional sites. Set up a few RSS feeds in Google Reader and start following along.
Although it might be difficult to imagine a “tweet” of 140 characters being of much use to scholars accustomed to communicating in thousands of words or hundreds of pages, Twitter has become a popular way of sharing information. In a short article, “How to Start Tweeting (and Why You Might Want to),” English Professor Ryan Cordell argues that “if you’re interested in technology and education, Twitter is (in my opinion) the best professional community on the internet today.”
For those not interested in following the constant chatter of individual tweets, one website has created a central clearinghouse for digital humanities scholars. Digital Humanities Now tracks the tweets of hundreds of humanities scholars, aggregates and processes them, and posts links to the articles and conversations that are “trending.” If enough scholars are linking to and discussing a certain article, DHNow will post it to their website with space for comments..
Another useful tool for combing the web is Google Alerts. Alerts allows users to receive email notifications whenever certain search terms are added to the web. Similarly, “Google Scholar Alerts” return hits specifically within the “Scholar” section of Google (articles, theses, books, or abstracts). More information on Google Scholar Alerts can be found here.
1: Virtual You
There are a lot of great tools here for collecting and receiving information — but not much information about organizing it. RSS items on Google Reader disappear as soon as they’ve been read; e-mail listservs may come in daily or weekly digests; Twitter, so far as I’m aware, only lets you view tweets in an unfiltered chronological order; you can read a blog post and comment or not, but suppose you want to refer back to it later? I’m curious to hear if anyone has ways they collect and “preserve” favorite fragments of information they find through these sources (e.g. blog posts that explain difficult concepts well and are worth referring back to) so that it’s possible to dig them up again without a tremendous amount of hunting and pecking.
(Tried to leave a similar comment on Virtual You section 5, discussion, but it didn’t work — it may be being moderated, but I got no acknowledgment on the page or by e-mail that it was received for posting — so trying again. Ignore if a duplicate.)
For capturing blog posts or articles read online for future reference, Zotero works well for me. I don’t do a lot with the tagging and folders on Zotero, but it seems like it could be a way to ensure particularly helpful materials are easily accessible when you need them again.
However, I would also be curious about whether there is a better way to filter Twitter feeds. Sometimes I’m away from my computer for a couple days — I certainly don’t need to go back and re-read every tweet I missed during those times, but there might be certain feeds I’d want to catch up on. I haven’t done much with the Twitter “list” function, maybe it can be helpful for this?
Erik,
See Sara’s reply to your post. I heartily concur about Zotero. It’s a great tool for capturing references and materials online.
Three other ways of recapturing fleeting Tweets were also brought to my attention recently when I tried to reconstruct a debate I was involved in a year ago that now turns out to be of interest historically.
One is http://topsy.com. This allows you to search social media going back as far as “all time,” though I’m not sure what exactly that means for social media.
The second is Google’s “Realtime” search, which can be found by clicking “more” under the type of search you want to do, which is also where “Scholar” and “Books” searches can be done.
Finally, a colleague has told me that you can also use this Twitter api: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/rate-limiting. But that is beyond my ken.
Jon
Hi Erik,
In regards to RSS feeds that I want to refer back to: when I see a site that consistently provides good material, like Digital Humanities Now from where I heard about “Tooling up for Digital Humanities,” I add it to my igoogle page.
When you subscribe to a page, you are given a choice of either adding it to Google Reader or adding it to your Google Homepage. Choose the latter option. (You can do it twice to use both options.)
Then, I also made http://www.google.com/ig my homepage, so instead of just seeing the normal Google search page, I get the search box, but also a reoccurring glance at what the feed has put up since last I checked. The advantage is that, even if you’ve read something, it doesn’t disappear so quickly, and you can see which links you’ve already followed, and which you have still to explore.
Hope this helps.