The Scholarly Commons would like to wish you a warm welcome back as we gear up for an exciting new semester of research and opportunities together! We have officially resumed our regular semester hours. Come visit us anytime Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and it’s a new semester at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And with that new semester come all of the happenings at the Scholarly Commons. We have some great things coming up!
We’re back to our normal hours. Come visit us from 9 AM – 6 PM, Monday – Friday. We hope to see you soon!
Survey Research Lab open hours are back! Walk-ins are accepted from 2 – 5 PM every Thursday, or you can make an advance appointment by emailing Linda Owens, Sowmya Anand, and Karen Retzer (please copy all addresses on your email).
During Open Horus, the Survey Research Lab can look at sampling, questionnaire design, and analysis. Come in with questions about the dos and don’ts of survey wording, recommendations for designing a sampling strategy, or advice on drafting a questionnaire!
Starting August 28th and running through the end of the semester, CITL graduate students will provide free statistical consulting in the Scholarly Commons. CITL consulting will be 11 AM – 4 PM every Monday – Friday. Consultants work with SPSS, ATLAS.ti, Stata, R, and SAS. The consultants may take walk-ins, but you can also email statconsulting@illinois.edu for an appointment.
Savvy Researcher Workshops
Our Savvy Researcher Workshop calendar is finally up! New offerings this semester include Understanding Bias: Evaluating News & Scholarly Sources, Copyright for Educators,Conducting Research with Primary Sources and Digital Tools, Managing Your Copyrights, and Finding Data about Residential Real Estate, and more. Of course, old favorites will be offered, as well!
We have some new and returning staff members at the Scholarly Commons! Digital Scholarship Liaison and Instruction Librarian Merinda Hensley is back from sabbatical, and Carissa Phillips is now the Data Discovery and Business Librarian. We’re also welcoming Data Analytics and Visualization Resident Librarian Megan Ozeran, as well as Scholarly Commons Interns Clay Alsup and Matt Pitchford, and Graduate Assistants Billy Tringali and Joe Porto. Stop in and say hello!
The Scholarly Commons is a great place to write the next great American novel; in fact, I’m surprised it has not happened yet (no pressure dear patrons — we understand that you have a lot on your plates). We’re open Monday-Friday from 9-6 and enjoy a well-lit, fairly quiet, and overall ideal working space, with Espresso Royale and the Writing Center nearby. But actually getting that writing done, that’s the real challenge. Luckily, we have suggestions for tools and software you can use to keep writing and stay on track this semester!
Writing Your First Draft:
Yes, MS Word can be accessed for free for University students through the Web Store and you can set it up to better address your research needs with features like the Zotero and Mendeley plugins to incorporate your references. And don’t forget you can go to Word > File > Options > Proofing > Writing Style and select Grammar and Style and Settings to set what Spellcheck will check for so that passive voice gets underline. However, believe it or not, there are word processors, other than MS Word, that are better for organizing and creating large writing projects, such as novels, theses, or even plays!
Scrivener is a word processor created with novelists in mind that lets you organize your research and notes while you are writing. With an education discount, a license for Scrivener costs $38.25. Scrivener is very popular and highly recommended by two of the GAs here at Scholarly Commons (you can email Claire Berman with any questions you may have about the software at cberman2 [at] illinois.edu). To really get started, check out our online copies of Scrivener: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide and Scrivener for Dummies!
Unfortunately, Mellel is only available on Mac. An educational license for the software costs $29. To some extent Mellel is similar in style and price to Pages for Mac, but also shares similarities with MS Word for Mac. However, this word processor offers more options for customizing your word processing experience than Pages or MS Word. It also provides more options for outlining your work and dividing sections in a way that even MS Word Notebook version does not, which is great if you have a large written work with many sections, such as a novel or a thesis! Mellel also partners with the citation managers Bookends and Sente.
Ulysses is a simple and straightforward word processor for Mac, but you do have to write in Markdown without a WYSIWYG editor. It costs $44.99 for Mac and $24.99 for iOS. However, it has many great features for writers (such as built in word count writing goals for sections of a paper, and Markdown makes outlining work very easy and simple). We have discussed the value and importance of Markdown elsewhere on the blog before, specifically in our posts Digital Preservation and the Power of Markdown and Getting Started with Markdown, and of course, want to remind all of our lovely readers to consider doing their writing in Markdown. Learning Markdown can open up writing and digital publishing opportunities across the web (for example: Programming Historian tutorials are written in Markdown). Plus, writing in Markdown converts easily for simple web design without the headache of having to write in HTML.
Maybe you don’t want to buy a whole new word processor. That’s fine! Here are some tools that can help creating the “write” environment to get work done:
Freedom : costs $2.50 a month, so Freedom is not free, indeed. This is an an app that allows you to block websites and even the internet, available for Mac, Windows, iOS devices. This app also has a lock feature that will not allow you to make changes to what is blocked for a set period of time.
RescueTime : another app option. Taking a slightly different approach to the rest here, the lite version of this app helps you track how you use your time and what apps and websites you use the most so that you can have a better sense of what you are doing instead of writing. The premium version, which costs $54 a year, allows you to block distracting websites.
SelfControl: a Mac option but Open Source, with community built Linux and PC versions, and most importantly it’s free! This app allows you to block websites, based on their server, for a set period of time, in which there is basically NOTHING you can do on your computer to access these sites. So choose which sites to block and the time limit wisely.
Editing Tools:
Named after Ernest Hemingway, this text editor is supposed to help you adapt his style of writing, “bold and clear.” When you paste your text into the free web version, the applet gives you the text’s reading level as well as pointing out instances of awkward grammar, unnecessary or complicated words and adverbs, and sentences that are too long or too complicated.There’s a Desktop version available for $20 though I honestly don’t think it’s worth the money, though it does give another simple space on your computer to write and get feedback.
This is an alternative to MS Word spell check with a free version to add to your browser. As a browser add-in, it checks automatically for critical spelling and grammar mistakes (advanced ones cost a monthly fee) everywhere you write except situations where you’d really want extra spell check such as Google Docs and can be wonky with WordPress. You can always copy and paste into the Grammarly window, but at that point, you’re probably better doing spell check in MS Word. There are also only two versions of English available, American and British (take that Australia!). If you are trying to learn English and want instantaneous feedback while writing on the internet, or studying for high school standardized tests, or perhaps a frequent YouTube commenter in need of a quick check before posting, then Grammarly is for you. For most people at Scholarly Commons, this is a plugin they can skip, though I can’t speak for the paid version which is supposed to be a little bit better. If you uninstall the app they try to guilt trip you, so heads up.
SpellCheckPlus: It’s BonPatron in English! Brought to you by Nadaclair Language Technologies, this web-based text editor goes beyond MS Word’s spellcheck to help identify grammar errors and ways to make your writing sound more normal to a native (Canadian) English speaker. There is a version that costs money but if you don’t import more than the allotted 250 words of text at one time you will be fine using the free version.
Let us know what you think and any tools we may have missed! Happy writing!
And to learn more and find more great productivity tools, check out:
This latest installment in our series of interviews with Scholarly Commons experts and affiliates features Eleanor Dickson, the Visiting HathiTrust Research Center Digital Humanities Specialist.
What is your background education and work experience? What led you to this field?
I have a B.A. in English and History with a minor in Italian studies. As an undergraduate I worked at a library which was a really fun experience. I also took an archival research trip to Florida for my undergraduate thesis research and realized I wanted to do what the archivist was doing. I have a Masters in Science in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and completed a postgraduate fellowship at the university archives / Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. And now I’m here!
What is your research agenda?
I research scholarly practice in humanities and digital scholarship, specifically digital humanities with a focus on the needs and practices in large scale text analysis.I also sometimes help with the development of train the trainer curriculum for librarians so librarians can be better equipped with the skills needed to teach patrons about their options when it comes to digital scholarship.
Do you have any favorite work-related duties?
My favorite work-related duties are talking to researchers and hearing about what they are up to. I am fascinated by the different processes, methods, and resources they’re using. With HathiTrust I get to talk to researchers across the country about text analysis projects.
What are some of your favorite underutilized resources that you would recommend to researchers?
I wish more people came to the Digital Humanities Savvy Researcher workshops. If people have suggestions for what they want to see PLEASE LET US KNOW.
(To see what Savvy Researcher workshops might tickle your fancy click here to check out our complete workshop calendar.)
If you could recommend only one book to beginning researchers in your field, what would you recommend?
Debates in Digital Humanities, which is an open access book available free online!
Need assistance with a Digital Humanities project? E-mail Eleanor Dickson or the Scholarly Commons.
Hello Savvy Researchers! The moment you have all waited for has arrived… the spring 2017 Savvy Researcher Workshop schedule is now available on the University Library website. We have the old standbys like “Improve your Research Strategies,” a variety of citation management sessions, “Introduction to Infographics Using Piktochart,” “Understanding Impact: Impact Factor & Other Bibliometrics,” “GIS for Research II: GIS Research, Data Management, and Visualization.” There are several new workshops including ““Copyright for Educators,” “Show Your Work! Publishing in IDEALS for Grad Students,” “Papers and data deposit drop in hours,” “International Fieldwork 101: IRB and Beyond,” and “Usability for Researchers – Office Hours.”
To see the full schedule, click here.
Scholarly Smackdown is the Scholarly Commons’ new review series comparing popular online research tools and resources. This week we’ll be taking a look at Scalar and Omeka, resources for presenting research digitally.
No scholars were harmed in the making of this column.
Scalar
Scalar is a content management system for creating digital books of media scholarship from The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, based out of University of Southern California. It features a WYSISWYG editor that allows you to edit different types of pages within a digital book. You choose how and in what way these pages connect. It’s free and you can create as many Scalar books as you want. It makes it easy to incorporate content from partner archives such as the Internet Archive and Critical Commons. The biggest selling point to Scalar, especially for media scholars, is that it lets you present media without having to host the media yourself, which is especially relevant for those analyzing media that is still under copyright. However, please do not let all of this potential power go to your head, and instead check out our copyright resources and feel free to contact the Copyright Librarian, Sara Benson with questions you may have.
In my opinion, Scalar is not as easy or intuitive to use as the people who created it seem to think it is, though USC provides some instructions for Scalar 2. The latest update has been buggy, and while ANVC/Scalar GitHub is very helpful, Scalar is clearly still a work in progress. If you do have any experience with web development, there is very limited customization, and I was not able to find specific instructions for CSS styling for Scalar 2. Finally, you cannot import your own files larger than 2 MB, which can be frustrating if you want to use your own very high quality scans of items.
Omeka
Omeka.net Image of Research!
Omeka.net is a content management system designed for creating online exhibits from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and Corporation for Digital Scholarship, the people behind Zotero and THAT Camp.
Omeka basic features a WYSIWYG Editor and 500MB of file storage. The biggest advantage of Omeka is that it makes it very easy to add a lot of metadata about items that you want to display in an exhibit and create and arrange collections of these items. It also features lots of plugins (such as a CSS editor and a PDF embedded documents viewer), and the website provides very clear and thorough instructions. However, you can create only one Omeka site per account on the free version. If you contact the Scholarly Commons we can set up an Omeka site for you through the library institutional account, and you can learn more information and request an Omeka site here.
One major difference between Omeka and Scalar is that with more storage, comes more responsibility; specifically, making sure that you have the permission to use items so that your research does not get taken down. Once again — please check out our copyright resources. Other notable drawbacks include the fact that customization is limited and Omeka.net is not great at creating things that aren’t online exhibits or exhibit-like sites.
Conclusion
Omeka and Scalar are two options of many for creating digital humanities projects. For specific questions and to learn more about Scalar and Omeka and other digital humanities resources at Scholarly Commons email us, and don’t forget to join us for a Savvy Research workshop about Scalar October 17 from 1-2 pm.
Let us know in the comments about your Scalar and Omeka experiences! Which do you prefer and why?
Further Reading:
Omeka Libguide: http://guides.library.illinois.edu/omeka
Scalar Libguide: http://guides.library.illinois.edu/scalar
Sources:
Not sure where to start? Next Tuesday, March 18th, there will be two Savvy Researcher Workshops geared to help guide students through the first steps in the creation of a future financial plan. The two workshops will be held in room 314 on the third floor of the Main Library. The first session will run in the morning from 11:00am-11:50am and the second session will take place in the afternoon from 1:00pm-1:50pm.
The Scholarly Commons and the Student Money Management Center (SMMC) have partnered to create: “Steps Toward Financial Planning.” These workshops will address ways to handle issues such as unburying yourself from undergraduate student loans, securing a brighter financial future after graduate/professional school, and implementing a smart financial plan for your future dreams. The sessions will also cover the ins and outs of necessary financial documents, important questions to ask a financial planner, and how to set realistic future financial goals. Both sessions are free to attend, so you’ll already be taking a step in a fiscally responsible direction.
If you have any questions or require any special accommodations, please contact SMMC at studentmoney@uillinois.edu. To register for one of these sessions, or for more information on this and other Savvy Researcher Workshops, take a look at the schedule. You can also check out the Savvy Researcher’s Twitter account @learnlibrary. We hope to see you there!
