Soaking in the Twittersphere

My first story on Storify aggregates more than 100 tweets (from one day!) containing quotes from Montaige's Essais. My tweet about the story has been retweeted, and I've gained three new followers. I've been captured by the Twittersphere... and I'm having fun!

Exciting DH Tools: TraduXio

TraduXio is a collaborative platform for the translation of cultural texts. The primary developers are French. This is a potentially radical tool that must be explored.

Questions for Zotero Workshop at First THATCamp

I'm heading to my first THATCamp on Friday (woot!), and I plan to attend the Zotero workshop. After a few failed attempts, I managed to get the Firefox add-on installed and I've added a few entries. Now the questions begin... I'll be updating this post throughout the week and then (hopefully) adding answers during or after the workshop.

- If I want to enter the Companion to Digital Humanities, should I enter each chapter separately or the work as a whole? (I vaguely remember seeing something about a parent/child relationship between resources; maybe this is the answer).

- Do I need to capture a snapshot of every webpage and blog post if I want to view it offline?

- What is the difference between the first and second levels in the center panel? Each item I have saved so far (all blog posts) has been created this way.

- Is there any way to blog directly from Zotero?

-There has to be a better way to import the PDF of a paper than what I did for the "Translation, Style, and Ideology" paper - what is it?

Tom Scheinfeldt is My New Hero

... Because he writes things like this:

I believe we are at a similar moment of change right now, that we are entering a new phase of scholarship that will be dominated not by ideas, but once again by organizing activities, both in terms of organizing knowledge and organizing ourselves and our work. My difficulty in answering the question “What’s the big idea in history right now?” stems from the fact that, as a digital historian, I traffic much less in new theories than in new methods. The new technology of the Internet has shifted the work of a rapidly growing number of scholars away from thinking big thoughts to forging new tools, methods, materials, techniques, and modes or work which will enable us to harness the still unwieldy, but obviously game-changing, information technologies now sitting on our desktops and in our pockets.

And like this:

Eventually digital humanities must make arguments. It has to answer questions. But yet? Like 18th century natural philosophers confronted with a deluge of strange new tools like microscopes, air pumps, and electrical machines, maybe we need time to articulate our digital apparatus, to produce new phenomena that we can neither anticipate nor explain immediately.

Method over theory, tools over arguments. This is the most appealing academic approach I have come across.