TagCrowd, del.icio.us, Zotero, Needle, HASTAC: A Primer of Useful Online Sites

On my recent two-week visit at UIC, I was asked which online resourcesI use most frequently. I mentioned TagCrowd, del.icio.us, Zotero,Needle, and HASTAC (of course!). Several people didn't know aboutthese and I promised to send them url's and a brief annotation ofeach. Most readers of this blog will know these sources and how to use them, but, for thosewho don't, a primer. I'd also like to invite any HASTAC readers to add their own favorite online tools. We can all learn by sharing our favorites.

TagCrowd can be accessed at http://tagcrowd.com/. Thisis a web-based tool that allows you to take any document and simplycut-and-paste it into the site and it will generate a tag cloud with keywordsfrom your text, all sized relative to the number of times they are used. I usethis tool as a simple index, as a way of revealing my own language-patterns,and, sometimes, to help me see tics in my style. You can include or exclude properties such as"common English words" depending on what you are using it for. Youcan also upload any text file from J-Stor or other sources and have aninstant-keyword (not conceptual) index. For example, I just now uploaded my forthcoming PMLA essay"Humanities 2.0" into the Tag Crowd and, within probably 3 seconds,it generated the following fifty tags (you can adjust the number of tags) withtheir frequency. On the website itself,these graphically are sized according to frequency but I have simplified ithere:

TagClowd of ?Humanities 2.0? showing top 50 of 1019 possible tags

age (18) archives (18) assumptions (6) changed (9) collaborative (20) computational (7) culture (6) data (8) different (7) digital (18) draft (7) education (8) field (5) final (5) freedom (6) future (9) humanists (16) humanities (42) information (7) institutions (9) intellectual (11) issues (8) knowledge (5) learning (10) networked (5) online (7) open (7) peer (9) process (6) professional (5) project (15) public (7) questions (6) research (15) responsible (6) review (7) scholars (9) sciences (12) sites (6) social (6) students (9) teaching (6) technology (9) theory (7) thinking (7) users (11) web (13) work (5) world (8) writing (7)

Zotero.www.zotero.org Zotero was designed by a team of humanistsand computational scientists at George Mason University to allow thoseespecially in the humanities and interpretive social sciences to save onlinetexts, annotate them, download quotations and attendant bibliography andfootnote (in proper form) into any word document), and in other ways managedigital online sources. Currently, youhave to load all this on to your hard drive which is a big pain but soon itwill have a web interface much like del.icio.us (explanation to follow). For a review of Zotero, including some bugsthat are currently being worked on and improved, you can see my blog reviewat: http://www.hastac.org/node/949

Del.icio.us. http://del.icio.us/ This is a social bookmarking site. That means I can use it to bookmark, save,and sort any interesting article I find online or on a website. It is ?social?in the sense that I have a network and they can see my bookmarks and I can seetheirs. If I used this part of the sitemore, I would be able to be constantly sharing bibliography with those I amclosest to intellectually. I tend to usethe social function less than the bookmarking, but I often search the entiresite (not just my network) to see what others have posted on subjects ofinterest to me and frequently find things I would have missed otherwise. I have del.icio.us on my toolbar. I click on it, and then the bibliography forthe essay transfers immediately to this website where I can both write a100-word description for myself and come up with some keywords (folksonomy?aterm that combines ?taxonomy? with ?folk,? meaning anyone can contribute andthere are no formal rules, just impressionistic or practical ones). It aggregates those keywords with thekeywords from every other article I post there. As with TagCrowd, it then displays all my keywords from all articles bysize (relative to use). I can then reshuffleall my postings any way I want?alphabetically, by date posted, or bykeywords. (?HASTAC,? ?MacArthur,??cognition? appear a lot in my folksonomy).

Needle. http://www.hastac.org/needle Needleis the Information Commons we?ve just launched at HASTAC. Needle isan interactive site where you can find or you can post jobs, fellowships, callsfor papers, conference announcements, book and special issue announcements, andso forth. You can also start your ownblog or make comments on other people?s blogs and they will be indexed on thesite. You can find out about the latestnews from HASTAC members and use this site to post your own news. As long as you abide by the mission of HASTACand the social rules of any interactive site, you can contribute freely. You can have an RSS feed of Needle directly to your homepage.

HASTAC (?haystack?: Humanities,Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). You become a HASTAC member simply byregistering to the site, which takes about three minutes. The registration form asks no rudequestions. As a HASTAC member, you willreceive no more than three or four emails a month of upcoming news andevents. You will, however, be entitledto post news of your conferences or events or jobs or new book or your opinions(in the blog feature) on Needle. HASTACis a virtual organization, a network of networks. Should you wish to sponsor a HASTAC event,contact us via the site and we can work out details. Mainly, you conceive of, organize, and fundyour event. We help you get out the wordby advertising it (for no cost) to the HASTAC network. That makes it a HASTACco-sponsorship and makes you an institutional member. We never sell our mailing lists?and we know,from the astonishing success of the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and LearningCompetition, that we have formed one of the most effective networks anywherefor digital media and learning and the humanistic implications and applicationsof technology. Share and share alike. All our events use Creative Commons licensing.