![]() For example, I had a tag that was “educational reforms.” This phrase, in French, was used in so many of my documents. I sometimes found that the terms I used were too broad. The third level of tagging I did was as I was starting to write. I soon realized that this term was too broad, so I had to scrutinize these documents further and add other tags to make these documents more useful for me. For example, as you can see here I had 572 pages of documents that I tagged as “ Réforme de l’enseignement” or educational reforms. However, the second level of tagging was crucial: this time I went through and tagged them with more concepts and not necessarily words that were in the documents. At first I found myself tagging based on key terms in the documents, or even how the documents were filed in the archives themselves. I used the Pomodoro technique of 25 minute work segments with 5 minute breaks so I could remain focused. This takes quite a while so I had it run at night while I was asleep. I started with the ones I knew I would need to write my first chapter. With DEVONthink, you first need to import your documents and OCR them as they are imported. There are other products out there that help you create a database, and if you are a Macintosh user you can actually tag your photos with metadata without any program it’s built into the Mac architecture. I’m not trying to advertise for this particular product, though I myself did find it very effective. The program I used to do all of this was DEVONthink Pro Office, the pro version means it has the OCR software, ABBYY Finereader bundled with it. OCR stands for optical character recognition, which rendered all of my sources text searchable. The second layer of processing that I did was to OCR my sources. You can also see here that I’ve put a box around text that I think is particularly important in this document. In other words, instead of putting a source in either a folder about teachers salaries ( salaires in French) or Parakou (a town in Benin) when I searched for either, the file came up. This allowed me to group my sources in a flexible and dynamic way. In its purest form, what I did was “tag” my sources with key terms, which I could then call up later. I found these three posts ( 1, 2, 3) by Rachel Leow especially useful for starting off.Ī few years ago I learned about metadata and I was transfixed. So if in a few minutes you’re reading and thinking that what I’m describing is too complex or too difficult, just remember that I also started from zero. I went into cataloguing my sources as a complete novice. Not only that, but I’d like to propose that the act and process of cataloguing your sources is an act of analysis and interpretation crucial to formulating an argument. What do we do with this abundance of sources? My premise for going into this is that in the struggle to transform sources into a written argument, knowing what you have is half the battle. If you’re like me, you have an external hard drive full of digital photos you took. Most of us who work on the 20th century come back from the archives with more sources than we know what to do with. A roundtable I co-organized on digital tools for historians for the American Historical Association 2015 meeting is up on H-Digital-History. * If you would prefer to listen and look at slide decks, please click here. Metadata As An Analytical and Writing Tool
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |