CHNM’s Roy Rosenzweig, Daniel Cohen, and Joshua Greenberg are presenting an introduction to Zotero at the bi-annual Task Force Meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Washington, D. C. on Tuesday, December 5 from 1-2 pm. For registration, contact, and other information, please visit the CNI conference homepage.

Coalition for Networked Information
Tuesday, December 5, 1-2 pm
Renaissance Washington D. C. Hotel
Renaissance West

“Introduction to Zotero”

The Center for History and New Media has just released Zotero 1.0, a next-generation scholarly research tool that runs in the Firefox web browser. On a very basic level, Zotero stores references and notes (like EndNote or other citation managers). But since it lives in the browser and is web-aware, Zotero is able to provide a number of innovative features, such as the ability to sense, record, and share scholarly metadata on the web. For instance, when you are viewing the web page for a book (e.g., on a library’s website or at Amazon.com) Zotero understands that you are looking at a book and can offer to save its full citation information. Zotero has native support for promising new web technologies, including OpenURL, embedded microformats, RDF, and a variety of XML data-exchange formats. In addition, Zotero has “smart folder” and “smart search” technology and other advanced features such as tagging. The 1.0 release of Zotero is just the beginning of what we believe will be a powerful, open, extensible platform for scholarly research. We plan to provide features to greatly enhance collaboration and autodiscovery — such as the ability to share and collaboratively construct bibliographies and notes, and find new books and articles that might be of interest based on what you’ve already saved to your library (using a server-based recommendation system). And like Firefox itself, other researchers and software developers will be able to expand Zotero with digital tools for visualization, text analysis, document classification, and translation (to name just a few possibilities). We will provide a demonstration and technical overview of the software, and we will explain how various pieces of the Zotero–such as its robust tagging and search capabilities–can be combined with other software (on both the client- and server-side) to create novel forms of research, interpretation, and communication.

(cross-posted from Center for History and New Media)

Scholarship 2.0: What Web 2.0 means for Digital Humanists

Tuesday December 5th from 5-7pm, Research 1 Room 462, Center for History & New Media, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

This fall’s Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities focuses on the opportunities and challenges presented by Web 2.0 technologies for digital humanists. Speakers will include Bryan Alexander on “Web 2.0 and Digital Humanists,” Dan Cohen on “Zotero and the Next Generation of Scholarly Research,” and Eddie Maloney on “When is an ePortfolio not an ePortfolio? Georgetown University’s Digital Notebook project.”

Bryan Alexander researches and develops programs on the advanced uses of information technology in liberal arts colleges. His specialties include digital writing, weblogs, copyright and intellectual property, information literacy, wireless culture and teaching, project management, information design, and interdisciplinary collaboration. He contributes to a series of weblogs, including NITLE Tech News, MANE IT leaders, and Smartmobs, when not creating digital learning objects (like Gormenghast). He has taught English and information technology studies at the University of Michigan and Centenary College.

Dan Cohen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media. His research is in European and American intellectual history, the history of science (particularly mathematics), and the intersection of history and computing. He is co-author with Roy Rosenzweig of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and has published articles and book chapters on the history of mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, and the future of history in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rethinking History. At the Center for History and New Media he has co-directed the September 11 Digital Archive and the Echo project, and has developed software tools for scholars, teachers, and students.

Eddie Maloney is the Managing Director of CNDLS, the Director of Research and Learning Technologies for CNDLS and the Office of Information Systems, and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English. He holds a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and a Master’s Degree from Syracuse University, both in English Literature. In his various roles at the University, Eddie helps to define Georgetown’s technology strategy as it relates to teaching and scholarship. His first love, though, is teaching, which he has been doing at the university level for the past fourteen years. As a faculty member in the Department of English, he teaches 20th-century literature and narrative theory courses. He has published on James Joyce and J. D. Salinger, as well as on issues related to narrative and literary theory, film studies, and hypertext fiction. He is currently working on a book-length project on the use of artificial paratexts in fictional narratives.

The Forum will meet on Tuesday December 5, 2006 from 5:00-7:00 PM on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus in the Center for History & New Media Lab (room 462) in the Research 1 Building, directly across from the Sandy Creek Parking Deck. There will be an informal dinner after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. You must RSVP online for dinner by November 28.

Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at GMU and the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, the DC Area Technology and Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted.

Update: There has been a room change for tomorrow’s DC Tech & Humanities
Forum, “Scholarship 2.0: What Web 2.0 means for Digital Humanists.” We
will meet in the Showcase on the first floor of the Observatory Tower
in the Research 1 Building on George Mason University’s Fairfax
campus.

We’re very interested in getting users to help us translate Zotero into other languages. If you are a fluent speaker or writer of anything other than English, you can contribute your own translation of Zotero by using BabelZilla. You’ll be able to perform nearly all of the editing through an easy-to-use web interface. For more instructions, visit our localization documentation.

Update: In just 24 hours, we have already received translations of Zotero into Chinese (simplified characters) and German. Versions in Dutch, French, Japanese, and Swedish are now in progress. BabelZilla translators, thanks for all of your hard work! If anyone else is interested in translating Zotero into another language, please jump on the bandwagon by heading to BabelZilla.

Firefox 2.0 went out of beta today, with the final release available from Mozilla. So those who have been hesitant to use Zotero with a beta browser can now go forth and download. If you’re still worrying about your other Firefox extensions and whether they are compatible with Firefox 2.0, please read “3 Ways to Make Old Extensions Compatible with Firefox 2.0.” If you’re using Internet Explorer, why not try out the latest and greatest Firefox and see what you’ve been missing (including a certain extension that will make your research easier…).

Speaking of Zotero, with the release of Firefox 2.0 we are releasing our own update, which is now available to all users, including those who have already installed Zotero as well as new users. Version 1.0.0b2.r2 of Zotero adds some great features (thanks for the suggestions, beta testers!), like support for automatic spell checking in notes, the ability to create notes via text selection on web pages, and buttons to select/deselect all items when saving multiple items from a web page, as well as a lot of bug fixes, stability enhancements, and import/export and citation style fixes. Please see the release notes for a full list of changes.