Sean Takats

Sean Takats

Recent posts

Zotero and AWS, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud (Part 1 of 2)

5 minute read

Zotero’s server infrastructure has evolved in countless ways since the project’s 2006 launch, but most of those changes are super boring and not worth remembering. Over the past two months, however, we moved the bulk of Zotero’s back end to Amazon Web Services, a step that I believe is uniquely noteworthy in the context of digital humanities projects and their long-term sustainability. In this post I describe the recent changes to Zotero’s architecture. In the next post I’ll discuss why these changes are important for the digital humanities. This story is long, but it has a moral, and also a van. But First, a Little History Initially operating on physical servers purchased by the Center for History and New Media...

Zotero Storage Goes Global

less than 1 minute read

Because I live under a rock (Vietnam), I only recently discovered the Google Charts API. When I saw that it supported maps, I thought it might be fun to plot the sales data for Zotero File Storage provided by the nonprofit corporation I started along with a bunch of other academics. Bear in mind that these maps only reflect the billing addresses associated with purchasers of Zotero storage. Zotero’s general user base is even more globally distributed and several orders of magnitude larger than the subset depicted here. Nonetheless the results are stunning, I think, and something that pleasantly reminds me of the last throes of a game of Risk. We have work to do in Africa and the Middle...

Test Your Digital Humanities Knowledge

1 minute read

I met up with my French colleague Marin Dacos today while he was in the middle of giving an exam on digital publishing to his humanities master’s students. While many U.S. graduate students (and professors) would balk at such a “factual” exam, I suspect that they would have a very tough time getting through it unscathed.1 How would you or your students fare with a test like this? I’ve translated the questions into English. You have ninety minutes. Go! Basic questions and definitions (13 points) In Wikipedia, what do “Diff” and “Edit war” mean? Name the XML formats useful for electronic publishing and specify their particularities. How does PageRank work? What are the advantages of this system? What are its...

Zotero and Open Access

2 minute read

Before the excitement surrounding last month’s Open Access Week fades completely — too late — I thought it might be appropriate to describe how and where Zotero intersects with OA. When people talk about Open Access, they typically mean free access to published, usually scholarly, content. It’s a concept that’s ideologically easy for most researchers to get behind because few of us reap any direct financial benefit from the majority of our publications, and we’re all very familiar with the annoying frictions introduced by gating access to content. Championing Open Access is kind of like advocating not clubbing baby seals: you’re unlikely to encounter much opposition. Publishers, of course, are always the villains in this narrative. They seek unseemly profits...

Vietnamese War Dead

4 minute read

Today is Veterans Day in the United States, Remembrance (or “Poppy”) Day in Commonwealth nations, and le Jour du Souvenir in France. In Vietnam, it’s not celebrated at all, but that wasn’t always the case. Unlike the United States’ vaguely-defined Veterans’ Day, in the places where the holiday is elsewhere celebrated it remains rooted in the specificity of the Great War, even as those memories to be recalled have virtually receded beyond the limits of the human lifespan. In France and elsewhere in Europe it’s the dead in particular that are the focus of the day’s attention, and one need not visit in November to witness its significance in historical memory. Once they move beyond the famous Normandy sites, visitors...