(cross-posted from Center for History and New Media)

Scholarship 2.0: What Web 2.0 means for Digital Humanists

Tuesday December 5th from 5-7pm, Research 1 Room 462, Center for History & New Media, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

This fall’s Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities focuses on the opportunities and challenges presented by Web 2.0 technologies for digital humanists. Speakers will include Bryan Alexander on “Web 2.0 and Digital Humanists,” Dan Cohen on “Zotero and the Next Generation of Scholarly Research,” and Eddie Maloney on “When is an ePortfolio not an ePortfolio? Georgetown University’s Digital Notebook project.”

Bryan Alexander researches and develops programs on the advanced uses of information technology in liberal arts colleges. His specialties include digital writing, weblogs, copyright and intellectual property, information literacy, wireless culture and teaching, project management, information design, and interdisciplinary collaboration. He contributes to a series of weblogs, including NITLE Tech News, MANE IT leaders, and Smartmobs, when not creating digital learning objects (like Gormenghast). He has taught English and information technology studies at the University of Michigan and Centenary College.

Dan Cohen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media. His research is in European and American intellectual history, the history of science (particularly mathematics), and the intersection of history and computing. He is co-author with Roy Rosenzweig of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and has published articles and book chapters on the history of mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, and the future of history in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rethinking History. At the Center for History and New Media he has co-directed the September 11 Digital Archive and the Echo project, and has developed software tools for scholars, teachers, and students.

Eddie Maloney is the Managing Director of CNDLS, the Director of Research and Learning Technologies for CNDLS and the Office of Information Systems, and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English. He holds a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and a Master’s Degree from Syracuse University, both in English Literature. In his various roles at the University, Eddie helps to define Georgetown’s technology strategy as it relates to teaching and scholarship. His first love, though, is teaching, which he has been doing at the university level for the past fourteen years. As a faculty member in the Department of English, he teaches 20th-century literature and narrative theory courses. He has published on James Joyce and J. D. Salinger, as well as on issues related to narrative and literary theory, film studies, and hypertext fiction. He is currently working on a book-length project on the use of artificial paratexts in fictional narratives.

The Forum will meet on Tuesday December 5, 2006 from 5:00-7:00 PM on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus in the Center for History & New Media Lab (room 462) in the Research 1 Building, directly across from the Sandy Creek Parking Deck. There will be an informal dinner after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. You must RSVP online for dinner by November 28.

Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at GMU and the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, the DC Area Technology and Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted.

Update: There has been a room change for tomorrow’s DC Tech & Humanities
Forum, “Scholarship 2.0: What Web 2.0 means for Digital Humanists.” We
will meet in the Showcase on the first floor of the Observatory Tower
in the Research 1 Building on George Mason University’s Fairfax
campus.

We’re very interested in getting users to help us translate Zotero into other languages. If you are a fluent speaker or writer of anything other than English, you can contribute your own translation of Zotero by using BabelZilla. You’ll be able to perform nearly all of the editing through an easy-to-use web interface. For more instructions, visit our localization documentation.

Update: In just 24 hours, we have already received translations of Zotero into Chinese (simplified characters) and German. Versions in Dutch, French, Japanese, and Swedish are now in progress. BabelZilla translators, thanks for all of your hard work! If anyone else is interested in translating Zotero into another language, please jump on the bandwagon by heading to BabelZilla.

Firefox 2.0 went out of beta today, with the final release available from Mozilla. So those who have been hesitant to use Zotero with a beta browser can now go forth and download. If you’re still worrying about your other Firefox extensions and whether they are compatible with Firefox 2.0, please read “3 Ways to Make Old Extensions Compatible with Firefox 2.0.” If you’re using Internet Explorer, why not try out the latest and greatest Firefox and see what you’ve been missing (including a certain extension that will make your research easier…).

Speaking of Zotero, with the release of Firefox 2.0 we are releasing our own update, which is now available to all users, including those who have already installed Zotero as well as new users. Version 1.0.0b2.r2 of Zotero adds some great features (thanks for the suggestions, beta testers!), like support for automatic spell checking in notes, the ability to create notes via text selection on web pages, and buttons to select/deselect all items when saving multiple items from a web page, as well as a lot of bug fixes, stability enhancements, and import/export and citation style fixes. Please see the release notes for a full list of changes.

With this week’s release candidate 3, development on Firefox 2.0 is nearly complete. At this rate, it looks like the code should be finalized by the end of the month.

For those who were unable to download a copy of Firefox 2.0 yesterday because Mozilla was preparing a new version, or who have been worried about trying Zotero because it requires Firefox 2.0, the good news is that Mozilla posted release candidate 2 of their new browser last night. Firefox 2.0 RC2 is probably very close to the final version of the software. Just click on the link to Firefox 2.0 on our home page to get a copy of it, then get started with Zotero by clicking on our download button!