Proposal for a Teach and Play Session: Testing a tool chain for humanities research

I’d like to propose a session to test out a simple digital toolchain for humanities (or perhaps any) researchers.  I have been working up an integration of zotero, Acrobat and Word to support the initial work involved in a literature review or other literature based research effort – for example a historical review or a theoretical survey.  The aim is to integrate

  • the literature search
  • storing reference and citation material
  • annotating material
  • building commentary
  • generating reports automatically

I would love to see what happens if other people take hold of the tools and find out if what I’m doing is useful and interesting to others and if perhaps other people see extensions to or modifications of the toolchain that I haven’t seen.

I propose this as a teach session because I expect it would start with me demonstrating what I now do but I really hope it would turn into a play session.  I would think it would be best as a bring your own device event so that we could start with installing the tools; investigate how I am using them; consider how useful a slightly systematic toolchain approach is; think about whether it could be done better or whether similar chains might be made with different digital tools and how the chain could be extended to integrate collaboration.