I have just received an email that really made my day! Coming from the EASA MediAnthro newsletters, I have got another of these really good news that make exhausted and saturated Ph.D. candidate hopeful again! Called Digital Research Tools, this educational Wiki collects references and up-to-date information on various freely available academic softwares out there. From blogging to quantitative or qualitative data analysis, it offers a comprehensive overview of softwares that could become handy at any points in a research.

Here is how the authors state the purpose of their Wiki:

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool’s features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.

Sounds interesting, isn’t it? I have immediately bookmarked it, registered to its feed and placed an RSS display widget on the upper part of the right column, so that visitors here can also get updated on the evolution of this website.

And here, Dan Cohen, Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Center for History and New Media, writes very convincingly about the importance of blogging for professors and graduate students. One of his major argument is that blog are the perfect plateform to share an “obsession”, that is a passion for a specific field of knowledge and that writing regularly helps you refine, not only your writing style, but also your expertise on a specific set of topics. He asks readers to spread the word about the necessity for scholar to share their work with a wide public, so here is my own contribution.