Even though assembling a database was a significant time commitment, I can now easily sort and find all of my documents as I write. In a single dissertation I examine three neighborhoods and three community institutions over 35 years, from the perspective of single individuals all the way up to a national organization. The amount and range of sources required to cover all of this space and time is overwhelming without a way to organize and search documents by topic, by year, by author, by archival collection, or by keyword.
The scope of my project is only possible because of the capabilities of my database. The following tools help me accomplish humanistic research and to then share my findings with other historians.
I define DH as: the use of digital technologies to further research and debate on questions that help us understand what it means to be human. I thought I'd take this opportunity to round-up the ways that I use digital technologies on a regular basis to write my dissertation and network with other historians. Not a bad way to end the week!Ĭoincidentally, I am spending this year's Day of Digital Humanities at Carnegie Mellon's inaugural DH Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty. I'm curious to see what I find-most of these documents were collected over a year ago, and I'm guessing that I will experience the excitement of discovery all over again. Now that I've created the Smart Group, I will spend the rest of the week immersing myself in the documents and thinking deeply about what I want to focus on in chapter three. Another method of screening for omissions is to review all of the documents tagged by year in the appropriate date range-for this chapter, that means I will scan through every document tagged with a date from 1960 to ~1975 and check if there are any that are about civil rights, open membership, or the urban crisis that are missing from the Smart Group. It's imperative, as the research progresses, to return to the archival notes taken during the research process and to thoroughly examine whether there are any relevant documents listed there that did not make it into the Smart Group. If I accidentally omitted a tag or incorrectly tagged a document, I would not necessarily notice my mistake-the Smart Group is not smart enough to identify things that should be included but are not.
#DEVONTHINK PRO END NOTE SCRIVENER ARCHIVE#
And any time I want to go look at the other materials that I collected with that document, I can click on it and see (as shown in the gray box above) exactly where I found it in the archive (because my database mirrors the organization of the original archival collections).Īs with any method, there are limits to the Smart Group. It captures my documents from multiple collections, archives, and manuscripts and brings them all together so I can easily review how the JCC movement responded to the civil rights movement and the urban crisis. To do this, I navigate to the "Actions" button and click "New Smart Group." In the creation pane, I then select that any documents with the desired tags be collected together in the group-in this chapter, that would be anything I've tagged "Civil Rights," "Urban Crisis," or "Open Membership": With DEVONthink, I'm able to make "smart groups" in my database for each of my chapters-all of the documents I need are together in one place. These tags make it easy to find and unite documents on related topics, especially when the documents may have come from different archives or collections and are thus organized separately in my database. I take pictures of all of my archival documents, turn them into PDFs, enter them into my database, and then add relevant tags to them such as the date they were written, important subjects they discuss (like "synagogue-center relations" or "open membership"), or organizations they reference (like the JWB or NAJCW). Fortunately, because I have a good system in place, gathering my documents is a relatively simple task.Īs I have written about before, I use DEVONthink Pro Office to create a giant database of all of my sources.
In doing so, I remind myself of the major events, actors, and issues that I plan to discuss. Before I can even attempt an outline or begin to draft an argument, I have to review a good portion of the documents that will serve as my evidence for that chapter. The first thing I do when I begin a new chapter is I gather all of the sources I will need to write it. It was such a joy to return to my project after a three week hiatus. I am a woman of my word. This morning, I ignored all of the small, distracting tasks that have consumed my time as of late and instead devoted myself to my dissertation for 90 minutes.
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