ACM TechNews
The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: Zotero
HPC Wire (07/09/08) Franklin, Kevin D.; Rodriguez'G, Karen
Zotero is a freely available research collection, management, and citation
system developed by George Mason University's Center for History and New
Media (CHNM) and underwritten by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library
Services, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
CHNM director and Zotero co-developer Daniel Cohen says Zotero was
conceived as a tool that resides in the Web browser with a high degree of
awareness of the operations transpiring within the browser, and capable of
engaging with elements both on the browser and the desktop. Cohen says the
tool "uses Semantic Web principles in an utterly pragmatic and invisible
fashion; indeed, the user experience is so seamless and the use of semantic
metadata so inconspicuous that Zotero is often not mentioned in discussions
of the next generation of the Web." The project's next step is Zotero's
employment as a digital research platform as well as a mechanism for the
networked sharing of semantic and computational information, and Cohen says
the Zotero Server, once linked to the client, will facilitate data-mining
of aggregated collections and new openings for collaboration. He says
scholars who use the Internet are challenged by a vast body of digitized
objects that cannot be easily managed or analyzed, and it is his hope that
Zotero will "bring digital research--from basic to advanced processes like
HPC--to the average scholar through its easy-to-use interface and its
ability to communicate with software and services wherever they may be."
Cohen says the problems of digital object abundance, management, and
analysis exist for many people outside the humanities and social science
disciplines, so Zotero ought to be applicable to them as well.
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/
The_Next_Big_Thing_in_Humanities_Arts_and_Social_Science_Computing_Zotero.html
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