What have you used in your class or in your own research to annotate images or to compare images…that you recommend or reject? I’d like to create a public Zotero group, at a minimum, of recommended tools or plugins.

For those working with visual culture, we analyze images regularly. But, as has been noted in some of the conference’s digital history sessions, we all work with digital images at different stages of our research or teaching (which may actually be digitized documents). I think this session could be of interest to folks engaging in all types of history research or teaching.

I’m interested in ways that we can annotate, by highlighting or selecting portions of images, for annotating and/or linking those highlighted areas to other sources. I’d also like to make those annotated images easily available within a CMS like WordPress, for others to use or to annotate themselves.

Flickr lets you highlight and annotate, but only within Flickr. Thinglink is a service that lets you annotate and embed, and then anyone else can access those images for annotating or sharing themselves. Omeka even has a deprecated plugin, but it was somewhat limited in scope.

For my own project, I would like to be able to annotate images within WP + Comment Press. I imagine others have or might want to integrate a similar exercise within their blog or WP-powered syllabus.

If I’ve missed something big (which is very possible), please let me know in the comments.

For this session, I’d also be willing to test out some tools, plugins, or services that other participants know of and use and are interested in other feedback.

For grad students and faculty alike, digital components to dissertations present opportunities to consider the nature of scholarly inquiry, research, and publication.  I am imagining a session designed for graduate students (and faculty who are interested, but more for the benefit of students) who either are or would like someday to include digital components to their dissertation.  In the session, we would share challenges, opportunities, best practices, lessons learned, and also hear from others about what worked and what was less useful along the way in completing such a dissertation.  I’m happy to share my experiences completing a dissertation with a significant digital component, but I’m also eager to help graduate students from across institutions connect and to create support networks and share lessons learned.  The purpose here is not just to commiserate over the challenges, but to help brainstorm alternative approaches.  The ideal outcome would be a Google document with suggestions for 1.) what challenges are most frequently faced 2.) ways in which those challenges have been addressed and 3.) challenges graduate students feel still need to be overcome as they move ahead with their work.

I’m a reference and systems librarian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and as such I work with historians at all stages of their career who are utilizing the primary and secondary sources in the Museum’s Library and Archives. I’ve also been helping Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the Museum and an ABD in history at George Mason University, in constructing her personal digital archive of more than 30,000 documents (not images; PDF documents, ranging from a single-page memo to a 100+ page report, almost all created from photographs of primary sources from various archives), all while retaining relevant metadata. About a year ago, I took what Rebecca and I had learned about how to build a useful personal archive and did a well-received workshop at the Museum for visiting Fellows. We realized today, during a talk about personal archives and big data sets, that some AHA participants might be interested in this workshop. Rebecca and I are proposing to lead a how-to session to provide a framework for the step-by-step process of constructing a personal digital archive of all the photos and scanned documents you have created as part of your research, incorporating them into software that allows you to analyze the documents and, if you want, export your work into fielded data sets (all with no or minimal programming or coding skills). You can adapt or reject any aspect of the framework to make it work for you, but if you truly have no idea how to get from zero to personal archive, we might be able to help. This could certainly build upon (or lead into) Jordan’s proposal for a discussion about “Notecards for the New Century.“

I’m interested in having a conversation about how historians’ construct their personal databases. This topic has come up in some more traditional conference sessions – Friday’s ”Digitally Informed Dissertation,” for instance – but I’d like to discover whether scholars are using software like Zotero, Evernote, DevonThink, or FileMaker to organize their research, explore new questions with their historical data, and share their research with others, both pre- and post- publication. We could split our meeting time between more theoretical questions (What are the merits of open, iterative research practices? How can we protect the intellectual property of archives and libraries? When is adding more metadata just fiddling?) and basic tips and tricks (Is geocoding worth it? How can I hack my tags? And so forth).