Signing Up
Signing up for Non-University Accounts
In this class, we'll be working with various digital platforms that will allow us to do tackle different parts of working with a digital archive. Our goal in using different platforms is not to make a perfect digital copy (Latin: per "thoroughly" +factus "made/ complete"), but to see how digitization work can look differently depending on uses and expectations.
One of our first steps is establishing an online public profile. This process will require that all students sign up for a number of different accounts (see below) in order to begin to establish a professional and an academic presence. We will set up a profile, first on hcommons.org, using your real name. BUT, if you have a reason to not want to use your real name, please let me know and together we can sort out another option.
Week One
Slack
To help with communication in this class, I want to try to avoid email or cuLearn, but instead will try to centralize communication through Slack. Slack is a group messenger application that can be installed on your phone and tablet, used on your browser or a desktop app.
Download desktop apps here and other versions depending on the OS of your mobile device.
Register yourself and sign in to our slack group – following the link I will send out after our first class.
Click on the header "Channels" in the sidebar (on desktop or browser versions). It should say "Browse all channels" if you hover your cursor over it. Add yourself to all the public channels you can, by clicking on a channel and then pressing the "Join" button. These channels will now remain in your sidebar, updating you on contributions people make.
Trello
[I need to complete this entry for the next time I teach the course]
We will be using Trello in conjunction with Slack to communicate and keep track of tasks. Trello is an organizational/ project management app/ site which we will use for brainstorming your final project, but we will also use to keep track of small exercises I will expect students do to each week.
Follow this link [add here] to join our Medieval Book team.
Sign up, and look at the various boards.
Create a card in this list [provide link], with your name to show you logged in and successfully navigated to this [add link here] board.
Humanities Commons
Humanities Commons will be a hub for much of our initial activity, your profiles acting as a repository for much of the information about each student as well as the place where students will be blogging about their work and ideas.
Visit here to sign up for a Humanities Commons profile.
After you have successfully registered and added content to your profile page (pretty pictures, description of yourself, your academic interests), search for the group "Medieval Book @ Carleton" (or go to the group's url) and click on the button in the header, "Join group".
Post a link to your profile on Slack in the channel #profile.
Check with me to make sure I add your profile to the Medieval Book blog.
ORCID
As it notes on their website, "ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized." This means you create an identity which allows your work to be identified as yours (including work completed in this course).
Register for an account here. Add your level of education and, if you have published something, try to add it to your "Works". Click on "Add Works" button, and click either "search and link" using CrossRef Search or "Add manually".
Add your ORCID identifier to your hcommons profile.
Twitter
We want to get you on the Twitter to encourage you to get familiar with what digital medievalists are talking about, what they are reading and what they are writing about. Twitter operates like medieval fama – an echo chamber of speech flitting about and spreading rumours. With the immediacy of digital pseudo-presence, Twitter collapses distance and difference. It is rarely obvious who is a senior scholar and who is a student, who is simply an interested on-looker and who is a hyper-specialist. Our goal in engaging with Twitter is for each of you to use it as a way to do some superficial research, network with other likeminded scholars and put yourself (and your work) out there....
Sign up for Twitter here. If you are already on Twitter you may wish to create a new account for the class.
Make sure to add your Twitter handle to your hcommons profile and, once you've joined our slack group, add your twitter to the channel, #twitter.
Navigate to the professor's Twitter profile and subscribe to the Twitter list DigitizingMedievalMss. A Twitter list is simply a list of interesting people and institutions working in the fields manuscript studies and the digital humanities. If you find people you think are interested, follow them directly so that you get ongoing updates from their Twitter feed (a twitter list only updates when you click on it).
Add your twitter feed to the slack channel #twitter. Navigate to the channel and then click "Add an App". On the right sidebar, you should see a twitter icon with the drop down button named "Settings". Click on that to configure the app so that you can post from your twitter feed to the Slack.
Add the hashtag #Hist4006 to your class tweets. Actually, let's only use this hashtag if we don't come up with something more catchy in class.
Omeka
The class will be working together on a Omeka site here. Once you navigate to this site, on the top right hand corner, there will be the option to "Register". Click on the link and fill out the form. The Omeka user names are private so please use a name by which I will know you. You will be sent an email with a link to confirm your email (it will take a few minutes to arrive so be patient). After you click you will be registered as a guest user, which I will update to "Admin" (which gives you more access) as soon I have a chance.
Once I've approved your registration, try to login to the Omeka site. Try to locate your folio and in its catalogue record (of the collection corresponding to your folio, not an item) and attempt to add your name as the "Contributor".
We will talk more in a later week about how we will be using Omeka.
Week Two
Github
You are currently reading this on Gitbook, derived from files hosted on Github. You can see the Github file for this page here. That file is written in "Markdown", a simple text formatting language. For a guide to writing .md (markdown) files, take a look here. But your first steps should be:
Sign up for a GitHub account - either by going to the top right hand corner of this page and click on the Sign Up link or by clicking here. Try to make it possible for me to identify you from your username (such as using your real name).
Go to Slack and in the channel, "Github" and post your profile address. My personal Github profile is https://github.com/MarcSaurette and our shared organizational account is https://github.com/MedievalBook.
Try to integrate your account on Slack. I think it should be as easy as typing "/github signin" under the Slack app channel and then following the instructions they provide, It might not. If not, let me know on Slack.
The reason why you need to let me know you're profile is so that I can invite you to join the organizational Github MedievalBook. This might take a day or so for me to do, but you can keep going before that happens.
Navigate to our organizational repository and press on the button "Fork" at the top right hand corner of the page. "Forking" copies the contents of this repository to your own Github repository so you can edit it.
On your forked repository (which automatically will be given the name
[Your username]/HIST4006), edit the Readme.md file by clicking the file name and then on the pencil icon at the top right corner of the text box. You should add you name and link to your Github profile in the following fashion:- [Name that you want to appear](url of your Github profile)- [Marc Saurette](https://github.com/MarcSaurette)Press the "Commit Changes" button to save the file.
There are several readme.md files in the various folders - so be sure you edited only the Readme.md in the /HIST4006 folder.
Now return to the Folios folder of your repository (something like Username/HIST4006/Folios) and create a new file by clicking on the "Create New File" button that should be middle to top right corner of the page. You will be prompted to give it a name.
Use the following convention: "Your last name, Code for text." E.g.
Saurette, Ottawa CU ARC charter 2. Here CU = Carleton University and ARC = Archives and Research Collection. Your texts will usually either be "ARC ms. fol. X" or "CUAG ms. fol. Y" if it is one of the manuscript (ms.) folios (fol.) on loan to ARC from the Carleton University Art Gallery.Press the "Commit Changes" button to save the file.
Now look for the tab "Pull Requests" on the top left corner of the page. Click on it. Then click on the green button on the top right corner "New Pull Request". This will load a page entitled "Comparing changes" and if all is well, then you can press the green button "Create new pull request".
You will be prompted to type a title, which can be something as simple as "[Your name here] is updating the readme.md file and adding their folio page". You don't need to add any description. You can choose to be more whimsical in your prose.
Then press the green button "Create Pull Request". And you are done.
I need to approve your "Pull Request", which updates your changes to the master copy at https://github.com/MedievalBook. You should get a notification when I have approved your request.
Next Steps:
Complete the GitHub starter guide through the browser portal. Optional: look through as many guides as interest you, here.
Download the GitHub desktop which allows you to manage/work with your GitHub files offline. Install and set up the desktop version.
Press the "Fetch" Button, to download your online files to your hard drive. Locate where these files are on your hard drive for future reference.
Atom or others
Atom is a free and simple text editor, useful for working with many different kinds of file formats that we will use this year, including MD, HTML and TEI files. If you use Linux, you can also use Remarkable for editing markdown files (.md), which has the benefit of providing a live preview of how the file will look online. Visual Studio Code is another option for Linux, Windows and Mac; with a bit of work it can also be configured to provide a live preview.
Download Atom here.
Install Atom on your hard drive.
Open Atom and from the Welcome Guide (which should be in an open tab), click on the button "Version control with Git and GitHub". Following the instructions to sign onto your Github. If you don’t want your lines going all the way across the screen, click View >> Toggle Soft Wrap.
Next find your repository "HIST4006" (usually inside a folder "GitHub") on your hard drive. There should be a folder entitled "Folios" and inside it should be a copy of your file that you created through the web interface. Open your file (something like
Saurette, Ottawa CU ARC charter 2) with Atom or other app. Add a line to this file saying "[Your name here] has successfully edited this file on their desktop with a text editor."Save the file.
Open the Github desktop. It should already have noted that the your file has changed. In the "Summary" field, add something like "changed my folio file", then press the "Commit to master" button at the bottom left hand corner. Then press the "Push Origin" button at the top right (same button you previously used it to fetch, now with a different caption).
If I've laid this out properly, you will have learned how to successfully edit something so that it can be easily shared with the group.
If you want to learn more about Atom, here is a useful and quick tutorial.
Zotero
Zotero is a research tool, free to use, which allows users to "collect, organize, cite, and share research", as they say on their website. Zotero is particularly useful for organizing research as it allows you to browse the web and, with the click of a button, save websites, pdf's, etc. to the program, along with all the necessary bibliographic data. It also will automatically export this information as bibliographies or footnotes.
You will need to sign up for an account here.
You will need to download the free software here and install the software on your computer. Zotero works best if you also install the plugin on your internet browser, to enable you to add content to your repository with a single click.
You also need to join the Zotero group for the class, which allows us to organize content as a group. The group can be found here.
For help adding resources to Zotero, see here. Carleton has a short userguide here (pdf).
Hypothes.is
Hypothes.is is a tool which allows you to annotate web content for your personal research use or, in our case, to allow us to collaborate as a group. It is, in essence, a digital version of you writing notes in the margins of a book/ photocopy. If you open a pdf in your browser, for example, you can annotate it and all your comments are saved in a central We will use hypothes.is via a plug-in on your Chrome Browser.
If you don't already use Google Chrome, download a free copy here and install.
Navigate to the hypothes.is website (https://web.hypothes.is) and press the "Get Started" button.
Following the instructions there, sign up for an account and download/install the plugin.
Go to Slack, look in the #resources channel and follow the posted link to join the class group, "Digital Archiving". This will allow your classmates to see your comments (but not outsiders).
Play around with Hypothes.is. The first step is to view this page with the plugin activated, and see the final instruction I have posted there. You might also want to make a separate private folder for comments you want to keep to yourself (or for each research project you are working on this year...). For a sense of what hypothes.is can do, take a look at their tutorials.
Google Calendar
We've incorporated the class schedule into an open Google Calendar. It will updated as we go along and you should receive notifications about the class schedule through Slack. You can consult the calendar directly here. This link will bring you to google which will ask you to sign onto your gmail account to add to the calendar. If you click on the vertical ellipsis (⋮) beside the name "Digital Archiving", and then on "Settings", you can scroll down to the various other options for integrating the calendar into, for example, Outlook or Mac Calendar.
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