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Teacher-scholars unite! I’ve been testing some possible applications of Omeka archives and Zotero as collaborative tools organizing the development of literary research methodologies classes, and I’d like to take the wonderful opportunity of THATcamp to begin developing the structure and content of project I see as The Next Step. I’d like your help to discuss, plan, and/or block out a template for a full-class, full-term student project that works toward researching, annotating, and encoding a small number (perhaps just one per term?) of thematically-selected texts in our shamefully neglected special collections room. Ideally, this project would therefore include study of the texts themselves, research about their material and digital existences (using the ESTC, Google Books, and something like Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker)  a basic practical/theoretical framework for DH, collaboratively writing a useful and accessible overview and producing an XML version of the text. Each term or year, students and faculty would work together to select, create, and grow the entries according to a broader thematic logic that can expand over time, based on the strengths of the collections. I’d like to use this template as a basis for a grant application that would allow the project to grow and, ultimately, link faculty, students, and resources at area institutions.

I think this would be a viable model for an advanced undergraduate seminar, and it has the benefit of drawing together a variety of practical and theoretical facets of the digital humanities. Some questions to consider include how we can best design the arc of the class? What specific parts of the project would have as their goal which practical or conceptual outcomes? What are the technological hurdles to be 1.) aware of, 2.) avoided, or 3.) embraced? What should the Omeka site look like/allow, in order to help the project grow over time? How might faculty help students approach the text encoding portion of the project? What are the most useful introductory text-based sources providing a theoretical framework for such a practical project? And what might steps after The Next Step look like?

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Don’t talk to me about citations, what I love about Zotero is that I can write a translator that will extract useful structured data (and perhaps images or snapshots) from any old collection database and add it to my own research library. Match that EndNote! It’s Zotero’s capacity as a research manager that really excites me.

A few years ago I wrote a Zotero translator for the National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch database. It’s been through several versions and can now do some pretty neat stuff. For example, using it and the Zotero add-on for Omeka, I was quickly able to create this mini-exhibition of some of my favourite letters in the Archives. With the arrival of the web API I can imagine even more exciting possibilities — NAA files have unique barcodes, so… barcodes, smart phones, metadata, digital images, Zotero, join the dots!

More generally, writing the translator really set me on a different path because it got me thinking about new ways of extracting, sharing and re-using collection data. With the web API and translators for archives and museums databases, for example, Zotero could become a platform for ‘routine’ crowdsourcing. Enriched metadata created and shared by researchers as part of their own projects could be harvested back into descriptive systems. Users of archives could create their own parallel finding aids alongside the institutional systems.

But there are some problems. The rigidity of the item types system is frustrating, and there really needs to be some way of creating semantic relations both between Zotero items and between an item and some external entity (it’s been talked about for a while).

I’d like a discussion about the future of Zotero that didn’t get too hung up on citations. A discussion that explores Zotero’s capacity to share, not just references, but research, that sketches some of the apps we might build and the collaborations we might create.