Students: How to use this text

Each section in this book is broken down into an overview or discussion of the main concepts, and then followed up with skill-building exercises. The computational environment - provided via a Jupyter notebook- is running on someone else’s servers. When you close the browser, it shuts down.

Warning! The computational notebooks that we provide are running in the binder environment and will time out after ten minutes’ inactivity.

Your work can be saved to your own machine and reloaded into the environment later, or you can ‘push’ your changes to your own online repository of work (to learn how to push work to a Github repository, see the sections on Github & Version Control and Open Notebook Research & Scholarly Communication so you’ll be able to get your work and data out of the Jupyter Notebooks and onto space that you control). The best way to use this book is to make sure you have at least one hour blocked out to read through a section, and then two hours to go through the section again if you’re working on the exercises. We find that the work goes better if those blocks are interspersed with breaks every twenty minutes or so.

Do you notice that stripe down the side of the screen at the right? That’s a tool-bar for annotating the text, using a tool called Hypothes.is. If you highlight any text (go ahead, highlight that phrase right now by right-clicking and dragging your mouse!) a little pop-up will ask you if you want to annotate or highlight the text. If you choose annotate, a writing pane will open on the right. Using the Hypothesis tool requires a reader to create a login and account with Hypothesis, which is managed by the Hypothesis site, not us.

By default, such annotations are made public. Private annotations can only be viewed by the particular individual who made them. All annotations (both public and private) have their own unique URL and can be collated in various ways using the Hypothesis API (here’s an example). Please tag your annotation with odate to allow easy curating of the public annotations.

Please note that any public annotations can be read by any other reader. These can also be responded to, as well - which might make a great classroom activity! A class can create group annotations which are only visible to participants in that group (instructions here). Annotation is a tool for research; personal reaction to anything we’ve written in ODATE should be done via the reader’s blog while leaving an annotation on ODATE linking to the blog piece. Because the API or ‘application programming interface’ for Hypothesis allows one to retrieve annotations programmatically, there is a growing world of scripts and plugins for managing or retrieving those annotations. Kris Shaffer has created a Wordpress plugin to pull annotations to a new Wordpress post (details are linked here), which might be another great option for a class blog working through ODATE.

Over time, the parts of the text that are heavily annotated will look as if someone has gone over them with a yellow highlighter. You can use this to help guide your reading - perhaps that’s a part where many people had problems, or perhaps it’s a part that sparked a really interesting discussion! Group annotation like this promotes ‘active reading’, which means that you’re more likely to retain the discussion.

Finally, if you’d rather not read this as a web page, you can grab a pdf copy by pressing the download button above (the downwards-facing arrow icon) and printing out just the bits you want or need (warning; some of the layout might not translate well as pdf). If you’d rather read this text via an e-reader or iBooks or similar, the download link will also give you an ePub version. Individuals who use a screenreader or other assisted device might prefer to work with the pdf or epub versions. Please do let us know if there is any way we can make this text more accessible for users with particular needs. Since this text is fundamentally a series of plain-text files that we then manipulate to create these different outputs, it should be straightforward for us to adapt accordingly!