West Ham and the Lower Lea River



“Digital History” for Undergraduates

This guide is adapted from William Turkel’s ‘Going Digital in Two Hours’ website []. In it, I will show you some very neat research and citation tools that should make your life easier when doing a research paper for any of your humanities courses.

If you have any questions when you’re trying to set this up on your own system, let me know or drop by my office hours (probably best if it’s a tricky question). I’m pretty good at Windows and OS X systems, but have little Linux experience.

STEP ONE: Download and Install Firefox

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Why Firefox? Firefox is both free and open source (which means that anybody can use or alter the program’s code). You will probably find it quicker than Internet Explorer. Most importantly, however, you can download extensions. These improve your browser, and can make it a specialized research tool and bibliography manager. You could spend literally hundreds of dollars on these tools commercially, but here you can get them for free.

BROWSE to and click on the ‘Download Firefox’ button. It will automatically detect your operating system. It should be under 20MB.

STEP TWO: Add New Search Engines to Firefox to Integrate with the Library

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This is a neat step. Once you have opened up Firefox, you will notice that you have a ‘Google’ search option in the upper right corner. We can add Worldcat, which will integrate with library search engines.

BROWSE to , scroll to the bottom of the page, and click on ‘Install Firefox Search extension.’ You should restart your browser. Now, you can use Worldcat by selecting it as your search engine in the bar (click the google logo, and replace it with Worldcat). Try searching for a book, such as ‘Craig Heron Booze.’ You will find the book there. Once you click on it, you have links to York’s library. You also will have links to nearby libraries: be it Toronto Public Library, the University of Toronto library, or maybe your home city’s library as well. This can save you a trip to York or help you get a book that is in demand. In my opinion, this is a better search engine than York University’s.

You can also add a dictionary search engine at .

Another option is to add York own library Firefox Add-on:

York’s Library has some more tools and ideas here:

STEP THREE: Install DEEPER WEB

This is seriously cool if you are using google to find something specific. It is very easy to set up. Just BROWSE to , click ‘Add to Firefox.’ After rebooting, you will now find when you use GOOGLE you will have a sidebar that appears. It is hard to describe, so I will show you in class. Try checking it out, though.

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STEP FOUR: Lean to use Google Scholar and Google Books (Jim’s addition)

There are a number of good search engines available thought the Library Website () that focus on historical sources, but I increasingly start by using Google to search for papers and books on a topic. You need to be creative using Google searches and it is a good idea to include some of the methods you learn from Deeper Web. The best method sometimes is to start with a famous book or article on the topic that you could find in the textbook and then search the books that cite this source.

For example, a classic book on the social history of East London in the second half of the nineteenth century is Gareth Stedman Jones’s Outcast London. If we search Google Scholar for Outcast London and then click Cited by, we can search all the books that have referenced Outcast London in the past 40 years.

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STEP Five: Install Zotero and Integrate it with your Word Processor

In my opinion, this is the coolest thing you will find in Firefox. I wish I had known about this earlier. In short, it will do your footnotes for you, properly, with short-forms and ibid., and automatically reformat them if you add footnotes in between.

BROWSE to , click on ‘download.’ When you have to reboot your browser, do so. You will now have zotero running at the bottom. When you go to a website about a book (either through York library or Amazon.ca), you will now see a little book icon in your web browser address line.

Click it, and you’ve added a book to your Zotero database. This is a good way to collect a list of books, journal articles, etc. You can actually add notes about them, and begin building a comprehensive research database.

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Most handily, though, you can now link this into Word or OpenOffice.

CLOSE Word or OpenOffice. BROWSE to . Download your plug-in. This will be done by clicking on either ‘Install the Word for Windows Plugin,’ or the ‘Install the Word for Mac Plugin.’ Mac users will have to download an additional file, by clicking on ‘install PythonExt from .’

If you are confused, please watch this video:

But you will have an INSERT CITATION BUTTON or MENU, which you can now click to add a footnote. It will bring up a list of your books and articles. You click on this work, and it will generate a citation. The first time you use it, it should ask you what citation style you want. For this course, select ‘Chicago Style.’

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Note in the screen above, that you can type in the page number! You may need to rejig the first citation of any book slightly, but subsequent ones will show up in either proper short form or as ibid if they directly follow the previous one.

It will also automatically generate a bibliography.

This is useful as you can use Zotero as your central notekeeping database. It also saves to the ‘CLOUD,’ or the internet. This means that you can use Zotero on multiple computers and your data should remain the same if you are logged in.

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