Zotero & SEASR Analytics

Have you tried Zotero?

I hadn't. Am not quite sure how I managed to get through all of my undergraduate studies AND a full year of graduate school without ever hearing about it ...but somehow I did. But while I was at the DHSI - Digital Humanities Summer Institute - in Victoria, B.C. last month, I had the opportunity to work with it.

Zotero is a plug in for Firefox that helps you to collect, manage and cite research sources right in your browser. It stays out of the way - all you see is the word zotero in the bottom right corner. When you are on a page (html or pdf) you want to save, you click on it, the zotero window opens, providing you with all sorts of options, including the ability to add notes to the file.

You can create your own collections, add files that are already on your computer to them, and, if you go just a bit further and also download the SEASR Analytics add-on, you can also do other nifty things with your files, including Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test, Tag Cloud Viewer, Date Entities to Simile Timeline, HITS Summarizer, and Author Centrality Analysis.

While none of the SEASR Analytics tools replace actually reading the many articles one reads through the course of studying/researching, they do provide different ways of working with the material, which, for me, at least, helps with retention. I expect that I will appreciate them even more once I get started on the whole phd thing.