What Tools Do Historians Use
By Evelyn Strope (@emstrop e )
As nosotros all keep to navigate an increasingly virtual world during the coronavirus pandemic, I thought I would share a list of my favorite digital tools that I apply to organize sources, annotate readings, manage citations, draft chapters, and conceptualize the 'big picture' of the PhD, in the hopes that they assist make online research a piffling less daunting.
ane. Zotero (Free, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux)
Zotero is an oldie simply a goodie – a digital reference manager developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, it allows you to go on track of the hundreds (or possibly thousands!) of books and articles that y'all engage with throughout your inquiry. Best used for secondary sources, it saves all of the metadata for the work in question – author, date, publication information, etc. – alongside any PDFs, annotations, or research notes that you may have for that particular particular, and its sync function gives you access to all your information both on the desktop app and on the web. The Zotero browser extension is a lifesaver – it lets yous add books to your library without leaving iDiscover! The software also lets yous tag sources by theme, type, and topic, so you can organize your library to accommodate your projection. My favorite feature is the Quick Add together wand on desktop – just blazon in an ISBN and BOOM! – citation managed.
2. Tropy (Free, bachelor for Mac, Windows, and Linux)
Tropy is a desktop archival enquiry software brought to you past the makers of Zotero, and it is my go-to resource for managing the nearly xx,000 images I took at the athenaeum during my second twelvemonth. It lets you group images together to create new items and so images of each page of letters, tape books, and diaries can be viewed equally a whole. It also lets you add citation metadata for each item, like its sister software, but it is much more customizable – you can make metadata templates for each archive you visit, each document blazon, a specific collection, whatever suits your fancy. Yous tin even pre-populate categories so that you aren't typing the proper noun of the archival institution over and over. It has similar list and tag functions to Zotero, so you could even coordinate your thematic organization across platforms, if you lot wanted. It is fully keyword searchable, and then one time you add subjects, titles, and authors, y'all tin can find exactly what you're looking for with the click of a button. Best of all, Tropy creates a separate-screen between the notes box and the prototype viewer, then you can transcribe messages or jot down ideas within the same plan. Its main downfall is the lack of cloud saving for the images y'all import – it currently requires you lot to keep the originals on your hard drive and generates thumbnails each time you open the program, just the developers have appear that the cloud will be coming to Tropy in the nearly time to come, and so it won't exist an issue for long. As a fabric civilisation historian juggling images of objects at museums all over the earth, though, I can't recommend Tropy enough!
three. Scrivener (£39.95 1-time license for students [£47 standard] after xxx-day gratuitous trial, available for Mac, Windows, and iOS)
While it'south the simply paid resources in this list, Scrivener is well worth the investment. It is technically a word processor specifically designed for screenwriters, novelists, and researchers, but is much, much more in practise. The software lets you keep your resources, ideas, and outlines in the same identify where y'all draft your work, minimizing the need to have dozens of tabs and Word documents open as you write and letting you lot get downwardly to business. Similar Tropy, its split-screen function lets you lot write equally you consult a primary source, reference book, or other notes, which streamlines the writing process and helps you focus on the task at hand. At the same time, Scrivener combines the best of both worlds of writing and editing in its interface, including fully-integrated heed-mapping features that allow you lot formulate and express your ideas seamlessly. Information technology includes a 'corkboard' characteristic that lets you lot tack notes, definitions, or random thoughts – called 'scrivenings' – onto a virtual corkboard, which makes visualizing your project from a macro-level much easier. At the aforementioned time, Scrivener lets you carve up huge projects – like a PhD, for instance – into more manageable content sections on a micro-level, which tin can be pieced together as the piece of work develops. For the terminal affiliate I wrote in Scrivener over the summer, I divided the writing past source, and then by department, moving bits and pieces to the trash and back again until final typhoon came together – all without leaving the program or opening a new window. Once you've finished a draft, you can export all of your sections as a unmarried file to Microsoft Word for editing, reformatting, or distribution, as you see fit. For anyone who is ill of Word documents titled "Chapter iii Department four Typhoon 1.9 final final last one.docx" clogging up their computer, play effectually with the free trial and encounter what yous call up!
Height Prototype: Jessica Lewis via Pexels
What Tools Do Historians Use,
Source: https://doinghistoryinpublic.org/2020/11/10/top-3-digital-tools-for-doing-history/
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