On my recent two-week visit at UIC, I was asked which online resources I use most frequently. I mentioned TagCrowd, del.icio.us, Zotero, Needle, and HASTAC (of course!). Several people didn't know about these and I promised to send them url's and a brief annotation of each. Most readers of this blog will know these sources and how to use them, but, for those who don't, a primer. I'd also like to invite any HASTAC readers to add their own favorite online tools. We can all learn by sharing our favorites.

TagCrowd can be accessed at http://tagcrowd.com/. This is a web-based tool that allows you to take any document and simply cut-and-paste it into the site and it will generate a tag cloud with keywords from your text, all sized relative to the number of times they are used. I use this tool as a simple index, as a way of revealing my own language-patterns, and, sometimes, to help me see tics in my style. You can include or exclude properties such as "common English words" depending on what you are using it for. You can also upload any text file from J-Stor or other sources and have an instant-keyword (not conceptual) index. For example, I just now uploaded my forthcoming PMLA essay "Humanities 2.0" into the Tag Crowd and, within probably 3 seconds, it generated the following fifty tags (you can adjust the number of tags) with their frequency. On the website itself, these graphically are sized according to frequency but I have simplified it here:

Tag Clowd of ?Humanities 2.0? showing top 50 of 1019 possible tags

age (18) archives (18) assumptions (6) changed (9) collaborative (20) computational (7) culture (6) data (8) different (7) digital (18) draft (7) education (8) field (5) final (5) freedom (6) future (9) humanists (16) humanities (42) information (7) institutions (9) intellectual (11) issues (8) knowledge (5) learning (10) networked (5) online (7) open (7) peer (9) process (6) professional (5) project (15) public (7) questions (6) research (15) responsible (6) review (7) scholars (9) sciences (12) sites (6) social (6) students (9) teaching (6) technology (9) theory (7) thinking (7) users (11) web (13) work (5) world (8) writing (7)

Zotero.www.zotero.org Zotero was designed by a team of humanists and computational scientists at George Mason University to allow those especially in the humanities and interpretive social sciences to save online texts, annotate them, download quotations and attendant bibliography and footnote (in proper form) into any word document), and in other ways manage digital online sources. Currently, you have to load all this on to your hard drive which is a big pain but soon it will have a web interface much like del.icio.us (explanation to follow). For a review of Zotero, including some bugs that are currently being worked on and improved, you can see my blog review at: http://www.hastac.org/node/949

Del.icio.us. http://del.icio.us/ This is a social bookmarking site. That means I can use it to bookmark, save, and sort any interesting article I find online or on a website. It is ?social? in the sense that I have a network and they can see my bookmarks and I can see theirs. If I used this part of the site more, I would be able to be constantly sharing bibliography with those I am closest to intellectually. I tend to use the social function less than the bookmarking, but I often search the entire site (not just my network) to see what others have posted on subjects of interest to me and frequently find things I would have missed otherwise. I have del.icio.us on my toolbar. I click on it, and then the bibliography for the essay transfers immediately to this website where I can both write a 100-word description for myself and come up with some keywords (folksonomy?a term that combines ?taxonomy? with ?folk,? meaning anyone can contribute and there are no formal rules, just impressionistic or practical ones). It aggregates those keywords with the keywords from every other article I post there. As with TagCrowd, it then displays all my keywords from all articles by size (relative to use). I can then reshuffle all my postings any way I want?alphabetically, by date posted, or by keywords. (?HASTAC,? ?MacArthur,? ?cognition? appear a lot in my folksonomy).

Needle. http://www.hastac.org/needle Needle is the Information Commons we?ve just launched at HASTAC. Needle is an interactive site where you can find or you can post jobs, fellowships, calls for papers, conference announcements, book and special issue announcements, and so forth. You can also start your own blog or make comments on other people?s blogs and they will be indexed on the site. You can find out about the latest news from HASTAC members and use this site to post your own news. As long as you abide by the mission of HASTAC and the social rules of any interactive site, you can contribute freely. You can have an RSS feed of Needle directly to your homepage.

HASTAC (?haystack?: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). You become a HASTAC member simply by registering to the site, which takes about three minutes. The registration form asks no rude questions. As a HASTAC member, you will receive no more than three or four emails a month of upcoming news and events. You will, however, be entitled to post news of your conferences or events or jobs or new book or your opinions (in the blog feature) on Needle. HASTAC is a virtual organization, a network of networks. Should you wish to sponsor a HASTAC event, contact us via the site and we can work out details. Mainly, you conceive of, organize, and fund your event. We help you get out the word by advertising it (for no cost) to the HASTAC network. That makes it a HASTAC co-sponsorship and makes you an institutional member. We never sell our mailing lists?and we know, from the astonishing success of the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition, that we have formed one of the most effective networks anywhere for digital media and learning and the humanistic implications and applications of technology. Share and share alike. All our events use Creative Commons licensing.