Review – Parallel Archives

At the DHLU Symposium 2012, I complained in a tweet that there was no equivalent to Zotero for managing my archives. Marin Dacos from openedition.org told me of a product developed by the Central European University in Budapest, called Parallel Archive. Last week, I spent some time at the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and decided to give it try. Parallel Archive (PA) is essentially a tool to manage the photos you take during your research: all eight researchers who visited the archives of the RF last week took photos and several complained that they have no idea how to manage them. That’s why I stopped using a camera because I have hundreds of photos on my computer, which I have never looked at. This time I used PA from the beginning on: it allows you to upload the photos, obliges you to describe them, makes pdf’s of the them and transforms these pdf’s into text thanks to an optical character recognition software that produces satisfying results for English texts. The aim of the organisation behind Parallel Archive, the Open Society Archives (OAS), is to create a digital repository of all the millions of documents that are copied every day but remain on the computers of the individual researchers.

At the moment, PA suffers however from four major flaws:

  • Since 2008 (!), there has been no development. I was a little bit worried on the perennity of the site1. I wrote them a mail and got an answer from Csaba Szilagyi, one of the guys working for PA, who reassured me that the project is still supported. He told me that they plan to start a second phase this year and that from now on all the online requests addressed to the OAS for documents will be served via PA.
  • Several small technical problems remains. The downloaded pdf’s are sometimes of dreadful quality and no longer ‘readable’. It is not possible to rotate all your photos at once: so you have to do it individually, which takes a lot of time, when you have copied a report of 50 pages. The options to sort your photos before transforming them into a pdf are quite limited.
  • The private space is not very important (500 MB) and so you are obliged to make your archives public (no limits for this option), which is understandable when one knows the general philosophy of the project, but which is problematic in a lot of archives where you don’t have the right to put your photos on the internet.
  • Finally, only a few scholars use PA at the moment. Is it because nobody knows about it or are researchers reluctant to share their work?

In general, I found PA however convincing and it would be interesting to persuade institutional archives to join PA by proposing the researchers already prepared folders where they can post their photos. I spoke with one of the archivist of the RF who estimates that a least a fifth of their collections has already been photographed individually. Would it not be great to have access to all these copied material from wherever you are working? And I am sure that the restoration of the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne which collapsed in 2009 would not take 30 years, if they had used a system such as PA. PA cannot replace institutionalised digitisation programs, but is a great complementary tool to these projects.

  1.  I downloaded all the pdf’s on my computer. But I was less anxious about losing my usb-stick with everything on it, because I knew that all my photos were saved on PA.

Quelle: http://majerus.hypotheses.org/393

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Digitales Publizieren

Derzeit wird viel über die Zukunft wissenschaftlicher Publikationen als digitaler Publikationen diskutiert. Das ist wichtig und das ist gut. Dabei sollten aber auch wir HistorikerInnen nicht aus den Augen verlieren, dass neue Publikationsformen auch neue Möglichkeiten bieten, die über den Einbezug der "Community" hinausgehen. Digitales Publizieren ermöglicht nämlich auch - und das klingt (und ist

Quelle: http://geschichtsweberei.blogspot.com/2012/04/digitales-publizieren_16.html

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Digitales Publizieren

Derzeit wird viel über die Zukunft wissenschaftlicher Publikationen als digitaler Publikationen diskutiert. Das ist wichtig und das ist gut. Dabei sollten aber auch wir HistorikerInnen nicht aus den Augen verlieren, dass neue Publikationsformen auch neue Möglichkeiten bieten, die über den Einbezug der "Community" hinausgehen. Digitales Publizieren ermöglicht nämlich auch - und das klingt (und ist

Quelle: http://geschichtsweberei.blogspot.com/2012/04/digitales-publizieren_16.html

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CfP: Digital Humanities Congress 2012

The Digital Humanities Congress is a new conference which will be held in Sheffield every two years. Its purpose is to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities. Digital humanities is understood by Sheffield to mean the use of technology within arts, heritage and humanities research as both a method [...]

Quelle: http://weblog.hist.net/archives/6172

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History journals in the new ranking proposed by Google

Google proposes a new ranking for scientific journals based on Google Scholar, called Google Scholar Metrics (GSM)1. It establishes a slightly different image from the one created by Thomson Reuters and “its” impact factor.

The top 10 publications proposed by Google in comparison to the Thomson Reuters Index2

Name of the journal Google Scholars Ranking Thomson Reuters Index
Nature 1 3
New England Journal of Medicine 2 1
Science 3 7
RePEc 4 not considered as a journal
arXiv 5 not considered as a journal
The Lancet 6 4
Social Science Research Network 7 not considered as a journal
Cell 8 6
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 9 11
Nature Genetics 10 2

The initiative is quite interesting. First, there is no longer one single reference but at least two. The monopolistic position of Thomson Reuters is slightly challenged. Second, with RePEc, ArXiv and Social Science Research Network, Google takes into account initiatives outside the medical and biological fields, which is beneficial for a broader image of what science is.

The limits of Google Scholar Metrics appear however quickly when I tried to use it for historical journals. In the English top-100 list, no historical journal is recorded. In the German top 100, one historical journal – Historische Sozialforschung – is listed at 33. And in  the French top 100, Genèses (48) and Annales (57) represent history. If you ask GSM for the most influential journals in history you get the following top ten:

  • The Journal of Economic History
  • Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies In History and Philosophy of Modern Physics
  • The Economic History Review
  • Explorations in Economic History
  • Journal of Natural History
  • Amsterdam Studies in the theory and history of linguist science series 4
  • Comparative Studies in Society and History
  • The International Journal of the History of Sport
  • Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
  • Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A

If I am quite pleased by the importance of journals dedicated to science studies3, it does clearly not represent the major trends in the field. So I wonder if Google Scholar Metrics will be another Google Beta project that will disappear in a few months or if it will be improved by a new magic Google algorithm.

  1. All the requests for this post has been done on 6 April 2012
  2. The Thomson Reuters Index I used is the one published for the different journals on Wikipedia (2009 or 2010). Google’s ranking covers articles published between 2007 and 2011
  3. Based on GSM, I will claim from now on having published an article in a top ten historical journal: Pieters Toine et Majerus Benoît, « The introduction of chlorpromazine in Belgium and the Netherlands (1951-1968); Tango between old and new treatment features », Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 42-4, 2011, p. 443–452.

Quelle: http://majerus.hypotheses.org/362

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Who are you, Digital Humanists?

Todd Pressners Bild zeigt es deutlich: Die Karte der Digital Humanities ist noch nicht vermessen. Damit sich das ändert, ist zum heutigen Day of Digital Humanities eine internationale Umfrage lanciert worden, bei der auch wir nicht fehlen möchten: Das Centre pour l’édition électronique (Cléo) und OpenEdition.org in Marseille (Frankreich) führen eine internationale Umfrage durch, um [...]

Quelle: http://weblog.hist.net/archives/6119

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Coding in the Humanities / Alt-AC

Die Frage welche technischen Skills Studentinnen und Studenten geisteswissenschaftlicher Fächer im Rahmen ihres Studiums erwerben sollen, wird bei uns noch wenig diskutiert. Ich hab gelegentlich das Gefühl, dass man allgemein schon sehr froh ist, wenn die gängigen Datenbanken bekannt sind und auch genutzt werden. Das Nutzen von Literaturverwaltungsprogrammen wirkt in der Tendenz schon ziemlich

Quelle: http://geschichtsweberei.blogspot.com/2012/02/coding-in-humanities-alt-ac.html

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Coding in the Humanities / Alt-AC

Die Frage welche technischen Skills Studentinnen und Studenten geisteswissenschaftlicher Fächer im Rahmen ihres Studiums erwerben sollen, wird bei uns noch wenig diskutiert. Ich hab gelegentlich das Gefühl, dass man allgemein schon sehr froh ist, wenn die gängigen Datenbanken bekannt sind und auch genutzt werden. Das Nutzen von Literaturverwaltungsprogrammen wirkt in der Tendenz schon ziemlich

Quelle: http://geschichtsweberei.blogspot.com/2012/02/coding-in-humanities-alt-ac.html

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Making a virtual encyclopedia – Part Two

 

Screenshot of the website (20 January 2012)

Screenshot of the website (20 January 2012)

No doubt, 14-18-online will be a big encyclopedia: they plan more than 500 long articles and more than 1000 encyclopedical smaller articles (about 10 000 pages).1 But will it be more, as among others John Horne asked during a two-day workshop dedicated to the project?

After  listening to several historians and IT-specialists, some points remain unclear:

  • I still do not see the link between technology and history. At the moment, the plan is to write “printable” texts that are published on the web, after being adapted by the staff hired for the project. But I have somehow the impression that writing immediately for the web implies a different form of composing an argument: the text should/can/must (?) be less linear. One of the numerous problems, which Wikipedia has not resolved either, is how to deal with article-hopping, which happens quite often thanks to the hyperlinks.
  • Secondly, as a classic printed encyclopedia, 14-18-online is a very closed project. The licence is at the moment quite restrictive. Neither on the technological nor on the “content” side of the project has there been given much thought on how to integrate not planned content. I could for example imagine working with my students on “World War One in Luxembourg” and assess them on editing and writing posts for 14-18-online: today Wikipedia gets a lot of content this way.2
  • Thirdly and this is related to the aforementioned point, the refusal to think about user interaction is very problematic. Academics still seem to see readers mainly as passive users. Wikipedia proves them wrong. I know that a lot of people are quite sceptical on a collaboration with lay historians and the general public in general – I was even struck how much scholars still have reticences on publishing on the net – but this is one of the paradigm of successful publishing on the net.

I hope we will at least find partial solutions to these questions for 2014.3

During the workshop, Annette Becker told me about the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence. This is probably the worst virtual encyclopedia I have seen so far because if the content is, as far as I am able to judge, written by THE specialist in the field, there seems to be no reflection at all on the medium used to transmit the message.

  1. The German reference encyclopaedia has 26 overview articles and 650 lemmatas on 1000 pages: Hirschfeld, Gerhard, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz, eds. Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003. 
  2. Wikipedia has even a page dedicated to these projects, entitled School and university projects.
  3. I am associated to the project as a section editor for France, Germany and Belgium together with Christoph Cornelissen and Nicolas Beaupré.

Quelle: http://majerus.hypotheses.org/150

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Making a virtual encyclopaedia on World War One

The planned logo of the encyclopaedia

This week I am invited to a workshop organised by a project entitled 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Under the direction of Oliver Janz from the Freie Universität Berlin, a team of international historians will try to establish the leading encyclopaedia on the topic. The goal is to have a finished product for the centenarian commemoration of the First World War in 2014. It is the third time that I participate at a dictionary on the history of the Grande Guerre1 but the first one that it is immediately built for the internet. Till today the only virtual encyclopaedia I am using regularly is Wikipedia, which defines itself as a “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”2. The project of 1914-1918-online is quite different. As in a classic printed encyclopaedia, the authors are chosen by an editorial board. As for the the copyright of the content, I have no idea, which model Oliver Janz has in his mind. I am quite curious how the editors will implement the “virtuality” of the encyclopaedia. At the moment I am quite sceptical because they are asking quite long articles (up to 7 500 characters), which nobody will read on the net. And we did get no instructions on how to implement the possibilities offered by internet. The printed encyclopaedia seems still to be the ideal type. Besides Wikipedia, there are two other german virtual encyclopaedia, which I use sometimes: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte and European History Online (EGO). Both are graphically nice, but not very adapted to the internet because the interaction with the reader is very limited. One of the most important elements of successful products on the web is the blurring of the frontiers between readers and authors who become users. Neither EGO nor Docupedia gives the possibility to “like” (Facebook), “tweet” or “+1″ (Google) an article. Contrary to Docupedia, EGO does not even allow comments. The texts are normally quite long, links to other resources on the net are rare and they do not make use of  image, sound and video possibilities. In a recent article on the use by students of historicum.net, a german history webpage, which defines itself as a platform for students and people interested in history, Schmitt and Kowski underline the following points. The first problem of historicum.net is the low level of awareness of the existence of the platform. How can an academic site compete with Wikipedia? The missing linking between the articles was a second point that was often criticised. Finally students – are they the main public of 1914-19148-online? – prefer small, introductory texts to long articles. Internet is still only used as an introduction to a topic not as the main resource. Interestingly “facebook-functionalities” were not a priority demand.3. If you have some examples of successful academic encyclopaedias, please let me know in the comments.
  1. Hirschfeld, Gerhard, KRUMEICH, Gerd, RENZ, Irina Hg., Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, Paderborn, Schöningh, 2003 and LE NAOUR, Jean-Yves, Dictionnaire de la Grande Guerre, Paris, Larousse, 2008
  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page 12-1-2012
  3. Schmitt, Christine, and Nicola Kowski. “Zwischen Handbuch und ‘Facebook’ – was erwarten Studierende von einem geschichtlichen Fachportal?” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 62, no. 11/12 (2011): 655-668.

Quelle: http://majerus.hypotheses.org/111

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