News
Vertov: A Media Annotating Plugin for Zotero
Try out the public beta of Vertov, a free media annotating plugin for Zotero. Vertov allows you to cut video and audio files into clips, annotate the clips, and integrate your annotations with other research sources and notes stored in Zotero. Vertov is a free, open source Firefox 2.0 extension/Zotero plugin written in Java and JavaScript. The Vertov issue tracker allows anonymous browsing of tickets, changesets, and source code. If you are interested in contributing to this project, please post on the zotero-dev mailing list.
U.S. Federal Census Translator for Zotero
Use a new translator for Zotero to collect U.S. Federal Census Records at Ancestry.com. In the fall of 2007, Zotero developers will implement a new hierarchical item types structure, making it possible to create dedicated item types for genealogical research. In the meantime, Zotero creates proper citation for the census as a whole (as book), adds name (as contributor) and location (as book section title) for a particular individual, and, finally, attaches all remaining searchable data and the original census image. The translator is automatically available to all Zotero users.
Pre-Beta of Video Annotating Tool Now Available
Download and test a pre-beta version of a video annotating tool, tentatively named VideAnnotate, created by Stuart Thiel for the Making Research Open Source project. Right now this is a standalone tool; the next iteration will be a plugin for Zotero, a research tool from the Center for History and New Media. This tool will aid collaborative research in oral history and media studies, making it possible to create, annotate, tag, and search video and audio clips, and manage privacy and copyright permissions. Please email your comments and feature requests to erazlogo@alcor.concordia.ca.
Fall 2007: A Course in Digital History at Concordia
History 387: History and Digital Media. In the past decade, new digital media and technologies have begun to transform the ways we experience history. This course offers an introduction to the changes that these new media and technologies are bringing to how historians research, write, present, and teach the past. Students will study the history of the Internet and digital media, and examine historical work—by scholars, teachers, archivists, museum curators, and popular historians—on the web. Historical and critical readings will provide the basis for the hands-on section of the course in which students will develop pilot online history projects.
