collaboration – Parerga und Paralipomena http://www.michelepasin.org/blog At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded - Wittgenstein Thu, 24 May 2012 07:22:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.11 13825966 The role of Digital Humanities in a natural disaster http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2012/05/24/the-role-of-digital-humanities-in-a-natural-disaster/ http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2012/05/24/the-role-of-digital-humanities-in-a-natural-disaster/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 07:22:46 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=1914 As part of the New Directions in the Digital Humanities series this week we had a very inspiring presentation from Dr Paul Millar, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English, Cinema and Digital Humanities, the University of Canterbury (NZ). The talk focused on the CEISMIC project, with which Millar and his team intended to ‘crowdsource’ a digital resource to preserve the record of the earthquakes’ impacts, document the long-term process of recovery, and discover virtual solutions to issues of profound heritage loss. (p.s.: this entry was cross posted on the DhWip blog)

Screen Shot 2012 05 24 at 15 11 40

In the months since a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit New Zealand’s Canterbury province in September 2010, the region has experience over ten thousand aftershocks, 430 above magnitude 4.0. The most devastating aftershock, a 6.2 earthquake under the centre of Christchurch on 22 February 2011, had one of the highest peak ground acceleration rates ever recorded. This event claimed 185 lives, damaged 80% of the central city beyond repair, and forced the abandonment of 6,000 homes. It was the third costliest insurance event in history.

As part of the project, a number of inspiring community-oriented digital resources have been made available, including:

  • Quakestories http://www.quakestories.govt.nz/: it allows anyone to share stories and photos of the Canterbury earthquakes.. e.g. “Shelves were crashing to the ground and books spewing everywhere. Everyone was bent over and.. “
  • Quakestudies https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/: a digital archive, built to store all types of content related to the Canterbury earthquakes. It has been developed with companies, government organisations, websites and individuals, to help them to preserve their content. The resource will be made available in the coming weeks..
  • Whenmyhomehook http://whenmyhomeshook.co.nz/: a website dedicated to helping Canterbury School children overcome the recent earthquake by providing a plaform where they can openly share their personal earthquake stories.

    • In particular, Quakestudies is going to become a massive federated archive, containing content sourced from the research community and peak agencies involved with the earthquakes. All of this information will be “looked after in perpetuity and be available to approved researchers either now or in future years”. As it is being indexed using a number of approaches (including semantic web technologies too, says Millard) it’ll make available a number of exploratory pathways into these materials – many of them it is not possible to foresee.

    This is certainly an inspiring example of the employment of digital technologies to support a large number of people; in particular, it is remarkable how the entire initiative was promoted and coordinated by a team of dedicated people at the University of Canterbury that has managed to become a key reference point for the community in such a difficult time.

    From DDH, we certainly want to send our best wishes to the project, and we’re looking forward to using Quakestudies!

    Related resources

  • The September 11 Digital Archive: http://911digitalarchive.org/

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    ]]>     http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2012/05/24/the-role-of-digital-humanities-in-a-natural-disaster/feed/ 1 1914     Social Reference Manager: Mendeley http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2009/08/21/social-reference-manager-mendeley/ http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2009/08/21/social-reference-manager-mendeley/#comments Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:58:49 +0000 http://magicrebirth.wordpress.com/?p=287 A colleague mentioned the existence of Mendeley to me – a new and free reference manager. I’ve stuck with Papers for a while and was really really happy with it, but I have to admit that Mendeley seems to have quite a few cool features there.

    For example:
    1) it’s free (and hopefully it’ll remain like that forever)
    2) it provides an online counterpart, so that you can check/manage your reference library online too
    3) it’s a social application – it aims at building up a community of researchers/users based on the categorization of one of their primary interests: papers
    4) it can be used by researchers as a ‘research homepage’ which features quite a lot about their academic profile..

    Conclusion: definitely worth a try!

    Mendeley #3

    Mendeley #4

     

    What else is available in the market?

    Not much that handles well both the tasks of a document manager and a social application; however these other tools/apps are worth checking out:

  • Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/, “Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.”
  • Papers: http://www.mekentosj.com/, “Award winning applications for scientific research”
  • Citeulike: http://www.citeulike.org/, “citeulike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references”
  • Qiqqa: http://www.qiqqa.com/, “The essential software for academic and research work”
  • Sente: http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/SenteForMac.html, “Sente 6 for Mac will change the way you think about academic reference management. It will change the way you collect your reference material, the way you organize your library, the way you read papers and take notes, and the way you write up your own research.”
  • Wizfolio: http://wizfolio.com/, “WizFolio is an online research collaboration tool for knowledge discovery. With WizFolio you can easily manage and share all types of information in a citation ready format including research papers, patents, documents, books, YouTube videos, web snippets and a lot more. “
  • Refworks: http://www.refworks.com/, “RefWorks — an online research management, writing and collaboration tool — is designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.”

    • For a more extensive list and analysis, check out this awesome wikipedia page: Comparison_of_reference_management_software

     

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