Zotero @ UMW

Seemingly to whet our appetites for ZoteroFest, Trevor Owens posted “Mining Old News For Fresh Historical Insight”.  He writes about how using Zotero can change research methodologies in two ways: the quantity of research that can be addressed with relatively traditional research methodologies, and new core research techniques based around structured data-mining — as he puts it, the “structure and character of the kinds of questions a historian can ask“.

The case example he describes is his research into the visit to the U.S. by Marie Curie in 1921. (You can see his public Zotero collection for it here.)  First, in just seconds he could gather up thousands of primary sources, many of them including  full-text.  That opens the door to being able to search through the articles for keywords.  That’s 1000’s of articles — a scale of investigation that just can’t happen with traditional techniques.  (Forget having enough time just to read all those articles; there aren’t enough 3 × 5 index cards in the entire bookstore to organize the results!)

Some folks will say, quite correctly, that this isn’t the way research has always done.  That’s the point.  But it bears emphasizing that I do not think that this will replace more traditional research methodologies, including that oldie but goodie, close reading.  As Trevor points out, though, this offers additional tools for guiding researchers toward the items on which to do close reading.  More, and more interesting, lines of close-reading research are opened up because, with the greater scale of sources that can be selected from.

But the really exciting stuff comes from the use of faceted browsing made possible by working with the richer structured data associated with each source.  Faceted browsing works by looking at each “field” associated with a source — author, date, title, isbn, place of publication, rights, etc — and using them as a guide to how to display the sources around what is appropriate for the type of data in each facet.  So, as Trevor has done with Zotero, the date facet is appropriately displayed as a timeline, highlighted sources that use the word “cancer”, and discovered interesting misrepresentations of Curie’s work, placing it more in the realm of “healing” than that of “science”.  (Read his full post for the details)

Now, this is an interesting — and complex — interface on the information involved.  I’ll have lots to say about complex interfaces coming up in another post elsewhere, but for now I want to point out that Trevor has demonstrated some really interesting and complex research methodologies that let us take powerful control over all those heaps of data available.  The complexity of the interface — and by that I only mean that there’s a lot to it, not that it is particularly hard to use, reflects and makes possible the complexity and amount of information available.

Compare that to what is far too often taken to be the acme of user experience, the “simple” interface of Google.

And the results.

Compare what Trevor was able to discover and learn with what I’m likely to learn about “user experience” from these 154,000,000 or so “hits”.

This is part of my take-away message.  First, that Zotero can help generate interesting and useful methodologies of research.  But also that knowing how to skillfully use that interface is an essential aspect of doing research in the digital age.  Moreover, compared with what incoming students are familiar with as their interface into the world of knowledge, it is far more powerful, yet one that our students might dismiss as being too complicated.

That only puts into relief the essential role that we must play in teaching students about traditional and emerging methodologies of research — with special emphasis on knowing how to use the interface to help them guide and refine their own thinking and questioning tactics.

Can’t wait to learn more at ZoteroFest.