The American Historical Association annual meeting is the largest of scholarly conferences that historians usually attend. As far as I can tell, it’s a conference that faculty members will gripe (quietly or not) about going to, because:
- it’s gigantic, and research talks usually only draw the 5–10 people interested in what you’re working on
- it’s a jobhunting conference, so faculty members are locked in rooms with candidates all day.
As far as I can tell, neither of those two has changed for many people. However, compared to the two previous AHA annual meetings (San Diego in 2010 in Boston in 2011), this conference has a measurably livelier vibe.
Feeling like you're in over your head with that research project? You're not alone. Here's one tool for learning to swim.
Recently, I stumbled on Rachel Leow‘s series of posts (part 1, part 2, part 3) about DEVONThink Pro Office (DTPO) and how she used it for organizing her dissertation sources and writing (on decolonization in British Malaya). Chad Black, who studies early Latin America, is also a big fan of DEVONThink.
I’ve known about DTPO for years, but I held out on buying it. It’s relatively pricey for a grad student (over $100 even with a 25% student/educator discount), although the versions of DEVONThink without optical character recognition (OCR) features are cheaper.1 I experimented with an earlier version of DTPO a few years ago and didn’t see anything overwhelmingly awesome about it, plus it was slow on the hardware I had at the time. But Marta Rivera Monclova‘s recent effusive praise about DTPO led me to try it again (there’s a 30 day free trial version), and the current version (2.3 as of this writing) is much better than the last time I looked. I now wish I’d gone for it sooner.2
- For me, OCR is worth the money. One thing I’ve learned in graduate school: sometimes throwing money at a problem is cheaper than throwing time at it. This is a great example of the financial barriers to doing research with experimental digital methods; my institution doesn’t site-license most of the software research tools I’ve found most useful, so I’ve been paying out-of-pocket using my student loans. Not everyone’s able to make that choice or comfortable doing so. ↩
- In case you’re wondering: I am not being paid by DEVONTechnologies, the makers of DEVONThink Pro Office. My effusive praise for DTPO springs solely from the fact that when you’ve been bashing your head against a (research-methods) wall for months, you feel so good when the pain stops. ↩
International copyright law isn't quite as pointy as this, but the effect is similar. (Image credit: Cornell University Library/Flickr Commons)
The comments on my previous post about Google Books research hacks and further conversation on Twitter revealed an aspect of historians’ evolving digital practices that I hadn’t known before.
Historians around the world can see different things in major digitized-books collections depending on the place where they’re working. Which open-access digital collections they use depend on a combination of their own scholarly interests and the vagaries of international copyright law. read more…
