Thursday, December 17, 12:00 noon
Frist Multipurpose Room A
Research Tools for the Humanities
Ben Johnston
This session will look at three freely available tools useful in organizing materials used in research. The first tool, Mendeley, is a desktop application that helps to organize PDF documents. In the course of collecting research materials, researchers often end up with a large collection of PDF documents. Mendeley acts as a kind of iTunes for scholarly publications. The software scans files on your computer, extracting information such as author and title automatically from PDF files. After building a library, the files can be categorized, tagged and searched.
The two other tools covered in this session, Textgarden and Heurist Reference Database, are online databases oriented toward scholarly research. These databases allow the researcher, or group of researchers, to keep searchable records of research notes and documents online and allow the interlinking of these materials. Heurist, developed at the University of Sydney, is described as a digital knowledgebase for managing heterogeneous or unstructured data in small to medium collections of typically textual data. Textgarden, developed here at Princeton University, focuses on the collection of text documents and images and allows the researcher to apply meaningful links between these resources, creating a network of records.
Speaker Bio: Ben Johnston is an Educational Technologist at OIT's Educational Technologies Center and manager of the Humanities Resource Center in East Pyne. Ben has been involved with educational technology for over ten years in positions at Columbia University, Bryn Mawr College, and at Princeton University. While at Princeton, Ben has worked with educators and researchers across the Humanities and Social Sciences to facilitate the use of digital assets, technology tools, databases, and digital video in teaching and research.
