The New Orleans Research Collaborative aims to
• Connect people interested in New Orleans scholarship
• Simplify the process of scholarly collaboration
• Share resources and ideas through easy access
• Archive materials, especially those lost in public and private archives after Katrina
• Learn from new-found colleagues located in New Orleans and around the world
We can be contacted at nolaresearchorg@gmail.com.
Current and Future Initiatives
Collaborative Bibliographies. Collaborators are using the platform to capture bibliographic references to source material relevant to a variety of New Orleans-related subjects. Our first thematic communities include: Hurricanes, Music, Race, Tourism, Urban Studies.
Zotero Commons. While institutions are able to digitize, catalog, and make available online
scholarly content, individual scholars are not as fortunate. Even those who have digitized their materials usually are not able to make their resources easily searchable and sharable. Our project is a pilot test group for the upcoming “Zotero Commons,” where any scholar may donate and access sharable documents contributed by a wide array of researchers through Zotero to the Internet Archive (www.archive.org).
Classroom Research Collaboration. Using Zotero and Omeka, students will be able to gain first-hand experience at conducting collaborative online research; illustrating their results for a public audience; and engaging with scholars beyond their classroom.
Licensing
New Orleans Research Collaborative Bibliographies and Database by http://nolaresearch.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
It is based on the work at zotero.org.
Project History
Leslie Harris, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University, began this project as a Hurricane Katrina Resource Portal, in collaboration with the Emory University Library, and supported by a 2006-2007 Emory Faculty/Library Partnership Grant. In 2009, Dr. Connie Moon Sehat, Senior Research Fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, joined the project in order to bring to the project a stronger focus on the digital humanities. Melding the tools of social media and traditional scholarship, the re-imagined New Orleans Research Collaborative will dynamically maintain the annotated research materials of a growing network of participants, allowing them to make their materials accessible to the public—academic and general—for evaluation and engagement.
Financial support for the New Orleans Research Collaborative is provided by the Emory Research Collaboration in the Humanities Initiative, which is funded through Emory University’s Presidential Woodruff Fund and the Office of the Provost.