How to Write a Zotero Translator

I have put together what I hope is a very comprehensive online guide detailing How to Write a Zotero Translator. This guide is the guide I wished was available for me when I was given the task of writing a Zotero translator for the site http://www.canadiana.org/. The task was part of an internship during my Masters of History at the University of Western Ontario. This internship, during the summer of 2008, was held at the Center for History and New Media — the home of Zotero. When I took on the project, I had no experience with computer programming; when I left, I had created over fifty site-specific translators.

This guide is the product of that brief, yet intensive learning experience.

The goal of this guide is to provide readers enough skills and direction to create a Zotero translator of their own (which I hope they will share). It also gives researchers, libraries, archives and databases a specific resource to make their own translators rather than rely on the overworked Zotero team.

http://niche-canada.org/zotero-guide

Voting with Twitter

I've started using Twitter to keep up with the wide world of Digital Humanities research which prefers to disseminate itself in 140 character messages 500 times a day, rather than wait 8 months to publish now out of date material in a journal. And whilst Twittering I noticed that one of my followers was also following Federal NDP leader Jack Layton.
I began to wonder how politicians are using Twitter, and how effective it is or how effective they are at using it, so I added the five national party leaders to my list. I've discovered two things. First, most don't Twitter very often or very effectively. At best it's a brief propaganda message once or twice a week preaching to the converted, with very little dialogue to be seen. In fact, one party leader doesn't even pretend they care to engage in a dialogue and doesn't follow his followers.
The second thing I noticed was that the number of followers each leader had did not necessarily represent the percentage of seats that their party received in the last election (Oct 08).

The total number of Twitter followers was 19 545, taken on Mar 27, 2009.











If we attempt to infer meaning from this, we might be tempted to suggest that Elizabeth May's "Green Party" supporters are overrepresented amongst Social Networkers. Perhaps they are young, and they are more likely to be comfortable with a computer.

We might also ponder, Jack Layton's NDP Party has almost twice as many Twitter followers as seats. Maybe the old adage that the NDP has trouble getting the vote out, or that its supporters vote for Ignatieff's Liberal party in an attempt to thwart the Harper's Conservative party is true?

Lastly, it looks like Gille Duceppe's "Bloc Quebecois", the separatist party either isn't in to Twittering (perhaps a language / culture issue), or he's lost a lot of support since October. I'd bet on the former.

However, when we make the same comparison by looking at the popular vote, rather than the number of seats in parliament, an entirely different situation arises.

Now, the only presumption that looks like it was correct is the one about Gilles Duceppe's lack of Twitter support being a cultural issue. The Green Party and NDP (Green & Orange) are much more closely preportional between Twitter followers and Voters.

In fact, with the exception of Gilles Duceppe's Bloc Quebecois, the number of Twitter followers accurately reflects the percentage of the popular vote that a party received in the last election, within 5 percentage points.

What does this mean? Keep in mind that almost 6 months have passed since the election (including a ridiculous power struggle that went no where back in January), so support levels will have changed a little. But I think this proves A) Pie Charts are fun to make. B) You don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on researching voter intentions. C) Make sure your data sets reflect reality. In this case, the "Seats" graph gives a skewed view of what really happened.

If you'd like to make lovely pie charts like those in this post, you can do so for free at MrNussbaum.com

Day in the Digital Humanities Day

Today, March 18, 2009, about 80 scholars from all over the world who somehow fit into the category of "digital humanists" are recording what they do on a series of blogs set up specifically for the task. The idea is not much different than the "Day in a Life" photo books that incorporated photos from many photographers all over a given country, taken on a single day. This project has been set up by the Text Analysis Portal for Research at the University of Alberta. I'm looking forward to checking out the results and playing with the data sets created by the collective blogging!

Of the 80 participants, I've met two. You can see what they were up to today here:

Bill Turkel, University of Western Ontario
Trevor Owens, Center for History & New Media

Or you can check out the main page for the project.

Charles Taylor Prize to Historian

The Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction was given out today in Toronto.

The jurors narrowed down a field of 135 books from all fields of non-fiction to just three. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the three finalists had all written histories.

Tim Cook's Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917-1918, a history of Soldier's letters in WWI, won the grand prize. Tim is also an employee of the Canadian War Museum.

Also on the short list were Elizabeth Abbott's Sugar: A Bittersweet History and Ana Siljak's Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russian's Revolutionary World.

Take that non-historians!

Academic and Public Historians: Working together?

Sean Kheraj, a postdoctoral student at the University of British Columbia recently defended his doctoral thesis on the environmental history of Vancouver's famous Stanley Park. In most people's books, that' makes him an expert on the field.

Sean was recently asked to write a review of the Vancouver Museum's exhibit, "The Unnatural History of Stanley Park." The experience, which Kheraj likened to "witnessing the physical manifestation of my dissertation as a museum display," was a challenge for him. Every detail that the museum had gotten wrong popped out. But, rather than posting a negative review, Kheraj reflected on the role many academic historians could be playing as consultants in instances that they choose not to.

It's something that came up a lot last year in our UWO Public History discussions, but perhaps not something that regularly enters the consciousness of many academic historians.

You can read the review at http://niche.uwo.ca/foresthistory/resources/exhibits

New Zealand Museums: Good

I spent the Christmas break in northern New Zealand this year and dutifully visited a couple museums. The two museums were the Kaori Museum in Matakohe and the Auckland War Memorial Museum, incidentally in Auckland.

I must say, I was extremely impressed with the two museums. Even better than some of the world's best institutions such as those I visited in Washington DC last summer.

The Kaori Museum

Kaori is a species of tree that grows for thousands of years and is akin to the Redwoods of the North American west coast. The Kaori Museum is essentially a small town museum, entirely funded on ticket revenues and giftshop sales. It does have the good fortune of being able to sell large quantities of Kaori wood products which fetch a pretty penny. Nevertheless, any museum which runs on private funds is impressive. One that does it so well is amazing.

The museum has dozens of 'townspeople.' One for just about every role of 19th century life in New Zealand. These townspeople don't move much. Most mannequin's don't - Today's Special exempt. However, what's intriguing is that each mannequin has the face of someone who actually lives in the town. The tag might read, "This barber is modelled after Jim Smith who still lives in town and whose family ran the original barber shop in Matakohe."

Perhaps I don't get out much, but this was the first time I'd ever seen such community involvement in a museum.

I can't say enough good about this museum.

The walls are packed with old photographs - probably a large percentage of the archival holdings of the museum - each with a caption that viewers can choose to read or to ignore. Dozens of artifacts are on display, including many tools which I was allowed to try out - at least, I did try out and nobody said anything. Sensors in the walls took note of passing visitors and initiated coversations with some of the townspeople.

Needless to say, I was impressed.

The Auckland War Memorial Museum

I actually only got a chance to pop into the Museum, so I really only saw a small, temporary exhibit which I think was called "behind the scenes." It certainly put the muse back into museum. The exhibit was a collection of all the weird stuff the museum had collected over the years, including a baby orangutan which is being kept in a freezer "until they get around to doing something else with it." I must say, it was cute and intriguing, in a morbid kind of way.

Oh, and there was the stuffed deer that "had been in the women's toilet in the storage area longer than anyone could remember."

Apart from the weird and wonderful, the exhibit was also artistically and technologically marvelous. A giant wall of ticking clocks was the perfect - and extremely creepy - setting for peep holes, through which users could find any number of strange things. The atmosphere that wall of clocks created was unreal.

One aspect of the exhibit involved a series of dots spaced on the floor, each infront of a series of artifacts. To my sheer amazement, when you stood exactly on the dot, you could hear a perfectly clear narrative. Move one step to the left and the sound vanished.

If you are in the museum field, these are two museums you should definitely make the effort to see. And if you're doing an internship at a Kiwi museum, you should hop on a plane up to Auckland and check it out.

Kudos to the Kiwis and their museums. They were an absolute delight and an example the world should be following.

Book Review: "Remember, Remember (the Fifth of November)"

Parkinson, Judy. "Remember, Remember (the Fifth of November): The History of Britain in Bite-Sized Chunks." (London: Michael O'Mara Books, 2008). 182p. 10pounds.

The book attempts to survey all of British history through a chronological series of encyclopedia entries, each one page in length. Each page outlines a major historical event, figure or stage in British history, beginning with the Roman Invasion of AD43 and ending with the founding of the United Nations. The title, of course, refers to the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November, 1605, still remembered with the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day.

Parkinson has succeeded in creating an abundantly clear survey, which will no doubt clear up confusion many people have as to the order of events in British history. Readers can clearly see how events influenced or were influenced by one another; no entries appear to stand out as isolated from the rest, which is a credit to the author's choice of topics.

Each entry can stand alone and the book can be used as a reference, or it can be read through from front to back. Those who elect the latter will note that at times events or persons are explained in more than one entry, especially in cases where one entry is the subset of another - a battle and a war, for instance. This repetition makes it possible for readers to use the work as a reference book and should not be considered a failing.

Someone looking for a brief survey, or an undergraduate about to embark on a British history course, could certainly benefit from this book. Its brevity and journalistic prose make for light reading. Parkinson has done a fabulous job of creating what is essentially a chronological encyclopedia without leaving the reader feeling like they have been sitting with a copy of Britannica.

As the entries are short and without footnotes, the book is not of much scholarly use - though no encyclopedia is. There are a handful of instances that used direct quotations in which even a quick footnote or reference would have been appropriate so that readers interested in pursuing further reading could at least be directed. However, the lack of references was not a major issue.

Nearly all British historians will feel that their area of expertise did not receive proper treatment; many important events are only referenced in an entry devoted to something else. For instance, the South Seas Bubble gets a single sentence in King George I's article (p. 102) and nothing of its own. Likewise, many other important aspects of British history do not appear at all. Nevertheless, the task of writing two-thousand years of history in 150 entries is a major undertaking and many worthy events must be cut to make the project doable.

Since it is impossible for anyone to be an expert on a topic so vast, I am unable to comment upon the accuracy of each entry. However, I can say that the entries are fairly consistent, with a few notable exceptions. The articles "Munich and the run-up to the Second World War" (p. 174) and "Germany Invades" (p. 177) list that Britain formally declared war on Germany on September 1, 1939 and September 3rd respectively. Even a non-historian can see issue with this claim.

The most glaring problem the reviewer noted was in the "Magna Carta" entry (p. 53). In this article, the author makes a bold claim that the Magna Carta is "the most famous and most significant legal document in the history of democracy" (p. 53). This is a very partisan claim that most Americans and a good many others around the world would certainly debate. Given that the book has limited itself and decided not to provide evidence to support such bold claims, they should not be included. One cannot assume that a reader has the time or inclination to look further into the topic to come to an educated conclusion.

Apart from these minor failings, the book is certainly worth the cost and time required to read it. It would make an excellent course reading for the first week of a British history survey. More countries could benefit from a similar survey of their own history.