Making Research Open Source
About the Project
This project, funded by an SSHRC Image, Text, Sound and Technology grant, will create plugins to enhance Zotero, a new open source research tool (http://www.zotero.org), produced at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in the United States. Project participants hope that this software will ultimately create new communities around documents, collections, and disciplines, in effect, make humanities research open source.
About Zotero
Zotero, a free bibliographic and notetaking tool, an extension to the Firefox browser, senses when its user is viewing a digital library or museum object or a library catalog entry and captures automatically the metadata from the page, such as the creator and title of an object, and its copyright information. The users can organize, sort, and annotate this information, as well as store full copies of digital objects. The next generation of this research tool, to be developed in 2007, will enable users to share their collections with other researchers and analyze these collections using next generation data mining and visualization tools in a shared space, Scholar Central.
Objectives of the Project
- Make Zotero compatible with Canadian and Quebec online databases and archival collections
- Add Francophone citations styles and interface to make the software useful for Quebec and other Francophone Canadian scholars
- Develop tools for biographical research in Zotero—create fields for biographical data, interface with databases such as the Census of Canada website, and explore potential for statistical analysis
- Develop interfaces for collaborative media research through Zotero's future Scholar Central, including collaboration in oral history and media studies, video and audio clipping, tagging of clips, and management of privacy and copyright issues
- Facilitate collaborative research in Zotero using visualization technology which would allow researchers find each other's collections and ongoing projects more easily
- Add Russian and Japanese citation styles and interface to encourage international collaboration through Zotero
Participants
Elena Razlogova, History, Concordia
Steven High, Canada Research Chair in Public History, Concordia
Matt Soar, Communication Studies, Concordia
Natalia Teplova, Études Françaises, Concordia
Dan Cohen, History, George Mason University
Stuart Thiel, Programmer, Concordia
