Transcript Using the Web to Conduct, Manage and Disseminate Research Lisa Spiro [email protected] Digital Media Center February 2009 Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/slimcoincidence/1109995859/

Using the Web to Conduct,
Manage and Disseminate
Research
Lisa Spiro
[email protected]
Digital Media Center
February 2009
Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/slimcoincidence/1109995859/
Starting Points
 What do you find difficult about doing research
online?
 What would be your dream tool for improving
research online?
Agenda
 Open up a discussion about the impact of digital
resources and tools on research
 Introduce you to some useful tools that can help you
 Keep current in your field
 Manage & share web links
 Find & evaluate information online
 Share your research and raise its visibility
 Peek at emerging technologies relevant to research
The Internet was designed as a
research platform…
 In 1945, Vannevar Bush
proposed the Memex, a
system that would store and
rapidly retrieve information&
allow researchers to make
trails (links)
 In 1969, ARPANET was set
up for use by computer
science researchers
 In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a
researcher at CERN,
developed a plan for Web as
digital library system for
physics researchers
The Memex
Internet as Research Platform II
 2004 NSF Cyberinfrastructure report proposes
developing tools to advance e-science:
 Intense collaboration
 Data acquisition
 Data management
 Simulation
 Educational applications
NanoHUB: Web-based resource for nanotechnology offering
collaborative workspaces, simulations, teaching materials
A Simplified View of What Makes
the Web Work
Information
Text, Images, Video,
Data, etc.
Tools
Manage, analyze,
visualize, disseminate
info
People
Use, produce, share
info
Standards/
Protocols/
Hardware
Information Explosion:
A Challenge &
Opportunity
 Dutch researchers estimate that the Indexed Web
contains at least 22.36 billion pages
 The hidden web (content not indexed by search
engines because it is dynamically generated, protected,
etc.) is estimated to be 500 times bigger than the
Indexed Web
 Approx. 3,800,000 books have been digitized by
Google.
 See http://www.emc.com/digital_universe for up-to-date
ticker of amount of data produced in 2008
People
 Collective intelligence/ wisdom (?) of
crowds, e.g. Wikipedia
 Online collaboration & sharing
 Wikis for information sharing, e.g. OpenWetWare,
“an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how,
and wisdom among researchers and groups who are
working in biology & biological engineering”
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page
 Social bookmarking, e.g. Connotea,
http://www.connotea.org
 Open academic work up for comments, e.g. Chris Kelty’s
Two Bits, http://twobits.net/discuss/
Tools
http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/
(Lazy) Lisa’s Criteria for Choosing
a Tool
 It does what I want it to do
 I can learn how to use it in 5 minutes or less, or
it’s worth investing more time in.
 It’s either free or I can try before I buy
 There is an enthusiastic & significant user
community
 I can get data that I put into the tool out of it if
(when) I need to
Stay Current in Your Field
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/western4uk/173094122/
Staying Current Using RSS feeds
 Subscribe to online content & automatically receive
notification of updates.
 Like having a customized newspaper delivered to your
doorstep rather than having to seek out information
 Identify sites that have RSS feeds by looking for the
RSS icon
 Publications, e.g. the New York Times science
section
 Blogs, e.g. Lifehacker
 Journals, e.g. Nature or Victorian Studies
 You can use a service like http://page2rss.com/ to
create an RSS feed for pages that don’t support RSS
How to Use RSS
 Set up a feedreader such as:
 GoogleReader: http://www.google.com/reader/ (web-
based; translate feeds, share them, star them,
organize them, view trends, etc.)
 FeedReader: http://www.feedreader.com/ (installed
on local machine rather than browser based)
 Subscribe to the feed
 Browsers such as Firefox will usually display an icon
in the address bar if the site has a feed.
 Look for words such as subscribe, feed, rss, xml,
atom, or images such as
Journal Alerts & Saved Searches
 Set up an alert to receive the Table of Contents
of newly published journal issues, such as
Project Muse journals
 See http://www.cdlib.org/inside/instruct/alerts.html
for list of journals & publishers w/ alerts
 Set up an RSS feed to be notified when new
content matches a search term
 Ebsco Databases (including Academic Search
Complete)
 Scopus
 Many other journals offer RSS feeds--look for
“RSS” or “Alert”
Web Alerts
 Google Alerts:
 http://www.google.com/alerts
 Be notified by email when
Google picks up results
relevant to search criteria
 Specify how often you’re
notified & what you search
 Filtrbox
 http://www.filtrbox.com/
 Specify search restrictions
 Get email alerts or view online
 View “trends” in alerts
 Share articles
Twitter
 http://twitter.com/
 Short (140 character) messages broadcast to
followers; you follow people, too
 “Blog to reflect, Tweet to share”
 You can sign up for RSS feeds for particular
twitterers
Manage & Share Web Links
Diigo
 http://www.diigo.com
 Free, but ad-supported
 With Diigo toolbar, easily save
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& annotate your bookmarks
online
Tag (add keywords to)
bookmarks so you can find
them
Highlight & add sticky notes to
web pages
Email pages to pals
Create groups and lists
Find web pages others have
bookmarked
Organize Research Materials Using
Zotero

Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/
 “a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect,
manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where
you do your work — in the web browser itself.”
 Developed by scholars at George Mason’s Center for History &
New Media
 Efficient: Supports tagging, sorting by tags, automatic
download of citation information and PDFs of articles
 Search your collections, including tags & HTML documents
(not PDFs, yet)
 Innovative: Will ultimately support groups and
recommendation system, ability to store citations on server, text
visualization
 Requires Firefox 2.0
 Need to download an extension to insert references into Word
How to use Zotero
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Click on the page icon in the
address bar to automatically
download citation info & assoc.
files
Alternatively, you can add item
from Zotero toolbar
Manually add cites with the
green +
Organize cites into collections
Add tags & relationships to make
everything more findable
Take notes
Hands-on workshop this Friday
from 2-4:30
Information Management Tools
 Mendeley: “free social software for managing and
sharing research papers. It is also a Web 2.0 site for
discovering research trends and connecting to likeminded academics.”
 Devon: Store files, categorize them, take notes, run
sophisticated searches
 EverNote: Take notes, synchronize across devices
 See http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/OrganizeResearch-Materials
Forget Organizing--Search!
 Some argue that you don’t need to worry about using
complex organization systems--just search for what you
need
 For instance, use Google Desktop to search your own
machine, or Spotlight (on Mac)
 But sometimes you can’t remember what search terms
to use, or get too many results
Finding & Evaluating Information
What makes it difficult to find
information online?
National Academies Reference
Finder
 http://www.nap.edu/nap-cgi/reffind5.cgi
 “take a large block of text… and use it
intelligently to ‘find more like it.’”
 Paste in text, extract key terms, search for
related information
Finding Information via Fondren
 You can type the name of a favorite database
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into the search bar at the Fondren web site
To get a list of resources relevant to a particular
field, visit
http://library.rice.edu/research/find.../how-do-iintro
Follow the Full Text at Fondren link to get the
text, if available:
Ask a reference librarian for help (you can even
do so through online chat)
Coming soon to Fondren: AquaBrowser
Search Innovations
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Visual search
 Useful in finding images and to use visual cues in finding
information
 Example: searchme, http://www.searchme.com/
Faceted search
 Useful to narrow down your topic; presents sub-topics
 Example: Clusty: http://clusty.com/
Visualize results, or isolate key information
 View results on a timeline or map
 Example: Google Experimental
Search within specified sites
 Restrict your search to certain sites
 Example: Rollyo: http://rollyo.com/
Semantic search

Search based on concepts
 Example: http://hakia.com/
Save Time Using Toolbars
 Toolbars provide shortcuts to information via your
browser
 Google Toolbar, http://toolbar.google.com/ , includes AutoFill,
ability to search within a site, etc.
 Project Muse plugin
 WorldCat search plugin
 Firefox extensions:
 Research Words, https://addons.mozilla.org/enUS/firefox/addon/3803: right click on a word and select where
to search for it (dictionary, Google, news, custom)
Be Productive with Browser
Extensions
 Speed Dial, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/4810: open a page that gives
you instant access to your favorite web sites.
 CoolPreviews 2.7 https://addons.mozilla.org/enUS/firefox/addon/2207: Speed searching by
previewing pages
 DownThemAll https://addons.mozilla.org/enUS/firefox/addon/201: Download mutiple files at
once
Speed Dial
Common-Sense Criteria for
Evaluating Web Sources (1)

Accuracy
 How well-supported are the arguments? Is the research
methodology described?
 Are references provided for the information cited in the page?
 Can you validate the facts against other information sources?
 Does it link to reliable sites?
 Audience:
 What kind of audience is targeted? Is the source sufficiently
sophisticated?
 Why was the page put online?
Criteria for Evaluating Web
Sources (2)

Authority
 Who wrote the page? What are their credentials? (Look in the
“About” section of the site)
 How credible is the publisher? (Content coming from journals,
as well as the .edu and .org domains, is generally perceived as
being more reliable)
 Is the publisher recognized in the field that you are studying?
 In general, prefer pages associated with an organization to
personal pages
 Objectivity
 Is the point of view impartial or partisan?
 Is the language neutral and unbiased or is it
overly emotional?
Criteria for Evaluating Web
Sources (3)
 Relevance
 How relevant is the source to your research?
 Timeliness
 How frequently is the web site updated?
 Is the information up-to-date?
 Dates should be associated with statistical information
 Coverage
 What does the resource add to the information you’ve already
collected?
 How does it build on prior research?
 Is it a primary or secondary source?
Use the Web to Filter & Evaluate
Online Information
 Clay Shirky: “It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter
Failure.”
 Use social bookmarking sites such as diigo and
delicious to discover information valued by others
 Evaluate who links to the site that you are looking at:
 In Google, type link: {url}
 Determine how often an article you’re interested in has
been cited
 Google Scholar
 Scopus (sophisticated citation analytics for publications &
authors as well as article)
Get a quick sense of an article
 Visualize word frequency by creating your own
tag cloud
 If you have a text (HTML, Word, plain text, etc)
version of your text, you can easily make a tag
cloud
 Tag cloud services:
 TagCrowd, http://www.tagcrowd.com
 Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/
Tag Crowd of Ch. 8
of Kelty’s Two Bits
Share Your Research and Raise
Its Visibility
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself
without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine,
receives light without darkening me.” (Thomas Jefferson)
Image: http://flickr.com/photos/furiousgeorge81/177926979/
The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority?
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Information abundance = shift in
establishing scholarly authority
 Old model: scholarly credentials,
peer review, # of citations
 Web 2.0 model: “collective
intelligence,” e.g. Amazon
recommendations, votes, tagging
 Web 3.0: “algorithmic filtration” of
authority based on…
 Prestige of publisher, author,
commenters
 Links to article
 Discussions in blogspace,
comments in posts, etc.
 Nature of the language in
comments: positive, negative
 Inclusion of a document in lists
of "best of," in syllabi, indexes
 Types of tags assigned to it
 Etc.
Michael Jensen, “The New
Metrics of Scholarly Authority”
Chronicle Review (6/15/2007)
http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i41/
41b00601.htm
Jensen: “preconditions for
scholarly success” in 3.0 World
 “If you are writing a scholarly article about the trope of
smallpox in Shakespearean drama, how do you ensure
you'll be read? By competing in computability.”
 Make text available online for indexing, linking, tagging,
and make sure it’s clearly identified
 “Encourage your friends and colleagues to link to your
online document. Encourage online back-and-forth with
interested readers. Encourage free access to much or
all of your scholarly work. Record and digitally archive
all your scholarly activities. Recognize others' works via
links, quotes, and other online tips of the hat. Take
advantage of institutional repositories, as well as openaccess publishers.”
Increasing Visibility: The Case of
DiRT
 1/29: 69 visits to
home page
 1/30: DiRT included
in Scout Report: 902
visits
 2/3: DiRT blogged
by Cathy Davidson
& referenced by
Brett Bobley: 492
visits on 2/4
 2/4: DiRT included
in MetaFilter: 730
visits on 2/5
Contribute to Rice’s Institutional
Repository
 http://scholarship.rice.edu/
Why Contribute?
Increase the visibility & impact of your research.
Many studies suggest that open access works have a
greater impact. See http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitationbiblio.html
2. Share openly with researchers around the world
3. Let the library manage access to your publications for
the long-term. Don’t hassle with emailing papers to
colleagues--point them to a web site.
4. Most (70%) publishers allow “self-archiving.” Search
SHERPA/RoMEO to determine if your publisher does.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
5. It’s easy to contribute articles, reports, etc. to
scholarship.rice
See http://tinyurl.com/33cjvz
1.
Start a Research Blog
“Blogging makes me a better academic because it
increases my visibility, name recognition and
credibility among the public and among academics who
read blogs (which are many more than one might think).
It hones my public writing skills, allows me to test
new ideas outside of formal publication and get
feedback. It allows me to have a public voice
consistently and persistently between formal
publications.”* (April DeConick, Religious Studies)
 You can use free, easy-to-use blogging platforms such
as WordPress and Blogger
* http://tinyurl.com/cexnw3
Create a Research Portal
http://www.pageflakes.com/lspiro/
How & Why to Create a Research
Portal
 Aggregate online resources (a bio, publication list, RSS
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feeds, images, etc) at a single site with minimal effort
Can serve as a start page for your research, a page
that you use to inform others of your research, or both
Information is online and available from any computer
“Widgets” include to-do lists, RSS feeds from news &
info sources, search tools, etc.
People can subscribe to the RSS feed for your portal
It’s easy to add new content
May be especially useful as a teaching tool, e.g.
http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography
Free services for creating research portals:
 PageFlakes: http://www.pageflakes.com/
 NetVibes: http://www.netvibes.com/
Emerging Tools for Research
http://flickr.com/photos/16209788@N00/433077007/
Use Your Browser to Perform
Tasks
 Mozilla Ubiquity: Firefox tool that enables uses
to type what they want to do rather than what
they want to find.
Using Ubiquity
 After you install Ubiquity, hit option space bar (on a
Mac) to call it up
 Example commands:
 Convert to pdf
 Translate
 Wikipedia
 Define
 Map
 Command-list to see all available commands
 See
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_U
ser_Tutorial for more info
Auto-Summarization
 Deal with huge amounts of information by
automatically generating summaries or outlines,
or extracting key facts
 Still very much “beta” technology
 Examples:
 Pluribo add-on for Firefox (works only for electronics
& book reviews in Amazon)
 Powerset search through natural language;
generates summaries, outlines, “factz” for Wikipedia
articles
Cautions
 Tools come and go. To avoid getting trapped, choose
tools that:
 Are fairly mature
 Have a number of adopters
 Allow you to easily export data in standard formats.
 Some tools that you download from the Internet may
bring with them risks of viruses. Check for reviews to
verify that the software is secure & authentic.
 You may be sacrificing some privacy (or dignity) in
exchange for access to some tools. For instance,
PageFlakes briefly put up ads for diet pills on user
pages.
 Sometimes you can waste a lot of time learning a new
tool that doesn’t do what you thought it would do.
Challenges of Doing Research in the
Web 2.0 World
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There’s so much information it’s difficult to
 find what you need
 discern quality
Not everything is in a digital form—you may be missing crucial
information by ignoring print (Anthony Grafton, “Future Reading,”
2007)
Searching may diminish the chance of serendipitous discovery &
reduce the number & quality of citations (James A. Robinson,
2008)
It can be difficult to focus when so much information is swirling
around you (Nicholas Carr, 2008)
Search engines such as Google evaluate “popularity,” which may
not correlate to quality
Learning new approaches & tools requires time & sometimes $
Advantages of Doing Research in the
Web 2.0 World
 Access to richer variety of resources, from
archival materials to scientific data
 Speed & efficiency: you can search vast
databases from your desk
 Software + human intelligence enables
 Manipulation & analysis of data
 More quickly determining quality & relevance
 Organizing your research
 Sharing your research
 Web can increase visibility as a researcher
More Info
 Find links cited in this talk at
http://www.diigo.com/user/lspiro/dirtclass
 Visit DiRT (http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/) to
find more information about digital research tools--and
please provide feedback