prepared for American Educational Research Association Division F (History)

Carter Savage asked me to lead a mentoring session on digital research strategies for graduate students and new faculty members in the field of educational history. Most of what I’ve learned came from reading posts by contributors to ProfHacker in the Chronicle of Higher Education, attending THATCamp unconferences, and working with wonderful colleagues on two freely-accessible edited volumes: Writing History in the Digital Age (with Kristen Nawrotzki, University of Michigan Press, 2013) and Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning (in-progress).

Before digging into specific tools, consider some guiding principles:

1) Figure out what works for you. My own digital strategies have been shaped by my specialization in 20th-century metropolitan history (with an overabundance of sources) and my need to publish visual evidence (such as interactive maps) to accompany my interpretative text.

2) Consider adopting a new tool or strategy if it adds significant value to your scholarship and/or teaching, or else they may distract you from your goal.

3) Favor tools that allow you to shift from doing research in isolation to collaboration, to help “bust the myth of the lone historian,” the subtitle of the division’s fireside chat this year.

4) Never put your data into a tool unless you can easily get it back out and migrate to another platform.

5) Capture your ideas, whether on paper, keyboard, or voice recorder, to sort out which ones are worth expanding and revising.

6) The Internet is your best friend and your worst enemy. Learn to disconnect from the net (e.g. turn off wifi) in order to focus your scarce time and energy. Reward yourself after you’ve completed your writing.

Tools for Searching, Scanning, Organizing, and Analyzing Sources

Start with the growing array of scholarly database search tools – see link to list of recommended search tools for students in my Education Reform: Past & Present course

Plus three search tools that may lead you to think differently about sources:

– Google NGram – for my student who researched the question: when did people start talking about “teach to the test”?

– Internet Archive, WayBackMachine – for my student who researched the question: how did Teach for America portray itself over time?

– Serendip-o-matic — insert your writing or biblio and it draws sources from major archival collections – learn how we built it

Consider the pros/cons of digitally capturing archival sources with a scanner or camera

– Example: the National Archives allows cameras/scanners in their reading room

– See Shane Landrum’s post on digital cameras and archives, and Dan Royles’ post in ProfHacker on his TurboScan workflow

Consider a reference management tool that organizes your biblio/notes, can read PDFs, and create citations

– my preference is Zotero, which links with my word processor, syncs online, and is FREE. See my basic tutorial and screencast

– bonus point: Zotero allows me to publicly share my citations online, or privately share citations and PDFs with selected collaborators, to avoid doing history solo

Read essay by Ansley Erickson, “Historical Research and the Problem of Categories: Reflections on 10,000 Digital Notecards,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, 2013.

Tools for Writing and Editing

Consider the strengths and weaknesses of different word processors, and do not automatically choose Microsoft Word, which many of us do simply out of habit, without evaluating its pros and cons.

– Libre Office – free alternative, does better job of exporting live links in PDFs — see LifeHacker review

– Scrivener – some writers prefer its “zoom out” feature to view & reorganize structure – see 9to5 review

– Google Documents – best feature is collaborative writing and live commenting — read draft book chapter in Web Writing

– Evernote – free tool that I use for sketching outlines, scribbling pieces of drafts, and “talking out” ideas on my phone to capture text for later — see Evernote tutorials

– Consider investing in a second monitor for $150 to work with your word processor and biblio/data tools side-by-side

– Automatically backup your work to an off-site location (my preference is Dropbox.com)

Questions about Publishing, Ownership, and Access

As Kristen and I wrote in our introduction to Writing History in the Digital Age, the ability for anyone to write history and share it instantly online has raised new questions:

1) How can you publish your work in ways that will be recognized by scholarly communities, and also more widely and quickly available to the public?

– my experience with traditional journal submission to publication has been 1-2 years, and behind paywalls

– consider open-access journals (see directory), or with contracts that permit you to share final draft online or repository; see Sarah Werner’s scholarly contract repository (beta)

2) Should you embargo your dissertation until you have completed the entire book — or connect with communities of readers and begin to build an audience online?

– see debate on recent AHA policy and its critics in Inside Higher Ed

3) If you are sharing your work-in-progress in a public conference, why not share it on the web and invite comments from readers who share interests but could not attend in person?

– consider the pros/cons of sharing your scholarly process and/or content on a personal website (see WordPress.com), or an institutional site (ask if your college/university supports WordPress.org), or an institutional repository

– consider the open-access and open peer review model, where authors post works online for non-blind commentary by designated experts and general readers; there are risks, but also rewards to formative feedback and wider communities of readers. Writing History in the Digital Age began as a conference panel of three essays that we posted online for comments, a month before the History of Education Society meeting. The result was an open-access, peer-reviewed book with an academic publisher: the best of both worlds.

4) How can you share your work online while also maintaining ownership?

– see my essay, Who “Owns” Oral History? A Creative Commons Solution, 2012

My closing advice, according to @Berlisha, who kindly wrote this part down for me, and which I believe is a blend of ideas previously heard from Jason B. Jones (@jbj) and Timothy Burke (@SwarthmoreBurke):

Lean Open — Share Your Work — Build Reputation Capital