This week, I was confronted with a veritable smorgasbord of groovy tools in HIST 8500. On the one hand, something more familiar, an area in which I could in fact see myself drawing on it for teaching purposes and even creating work of my own; the other, a place where frankly I’m completely at sea…
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My dive into the world of Tableau taught me two things: 1) this is a powerful tool for people who use statistics in their work, and 2) I have no idea what I’m doing with it. My troubles began when I opened the sample workbook we were working with in class at the same time…
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To be 100% frank, when using Palladio, I ran up against a bit of a wall: while all the nodes and edges and such in the readings on network theory made perfectly good sense to me, I had absolutely no idea how that translated into something that a computer could actually read. As a result,…
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So, the tool for this week’s HIST 8500 seminar wasn’t totally new to me–I took an online class through EdX some years ago that spent some time on Voyant Tools. I’ll say that I could approach it with a lot more theoretical understanding this time around, though! I was going to go through a poem…
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I was really excited this week to dive into digital mapping tools. This is an area where I’ve dipped my toe before–I’ve used StoryMapsJS to make tools for teaching like this one–but I don’t have a lot of experience either using ESRI StoryMaps or, for that matter, conducting actual research using mapping. Pretty much everything…
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This week in HIST 8500, we learned about databases and tried our hand at designing them using Airbase. I’ll be honest, this is an intellectual challenge I’m going to need some time and practice to wrap my head around. I have a lot of experience in using databases, and had a job for a couple…
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Alas, I knew not everything was going to be as successful an adventure as my introductions to Tropy and Zotero were! I was quite excited to use Omeka–I’ve seen it demonstrated at conferences before and looked at model projects created in it, and I’ve really wanted the ability to curate digital exhibits for years now,…
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I may have been dubious about Zotero, but when exploring our digital tool for HIST 8500 this week, Tropy, all I had to do was watch the introductory video and I knew this was something I wanted to use. Why the big difference, one might ask? Tropy is in many ways similar in functionality to…
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I found myself somewhat hesitant when approaching Zotero as one of our webtools for HIST 8500, not because it was unfamiliar to me, but rather because it was too familiar, something I’ve tried to use once or twice before. Zotero, along with other citation managers like RefWorks and Mendeley, first came on my radar in…
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Well, I think Codecademy, whose introductory lessons on HTML and CSS we went through in my Digital Methods class last Wednesday, might be my new fixation. I’ve known about CodeAcademy for a while, but the step-by-step instructions, the color-coded text in the command panel, the instant gratification when you successfully implement a line of HTML—I’m…
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