Every academic year, the HDYDI (How Do You Do (It)?) event on research data workflows signals the start of the Digital Scholarship Module. Through a series of sessions and (mini-)workshops, Artes Research aims to guide students through the complexities of scholarship in the digital age, from Open Science to Research Data Management and beyond.

At the HDYDI kick-off event, we invite three researchers from the Faculty of Arts to open the black box of their research workflows. By sharing the practical tools, decisions, and challenges that shape their day‑to‑day work, they aim to offer the first-year PhD researchers a realistic insight into what digital scholarship can look like across disciplines. We hope these behind‑the‑scenes glimpses help you discover approaches that can inform your own research journey!

Tim Debroyer: From Paper to Digital Source

The first speaker, Tim Debroyer, is a third-year PhD candidate at the Cultural History since 1750 research group. Under the supervision of Joris Vandendriessche and Kaat Wils, Tim is studying the evolution of 20th-century Belgian patient organisations as an overlooked link in the development of the modern welfare state. This involves examining their oral history as well as archival and published sources.

The focus of Tim’s talk is on the latter – periodicals specifically form one of the most important sources of information for his project. Faced with thousands of pages early on in his research project, he had to make strategic decisions: what to photograph, how to photograph it, and which digital methods were worth the investment.

Taking BVS Nieuws, the periodical of a diabetes association founded in the 1940s, as an example, Tim explains that he ended up manually photographing the entire series of journals so as to allow for a more thorough discourse analysis. This experience taught him some “tricks” which might be useful to others looking to photograph large amounts of text. Firstly, he used a classic camera in order to avoid the post-processing which smartphones tend to apply, and which can harm OCR quality. Secondly, he made sure to always photograph beyond the edges of the page to make it easier for the OCR software to recognize the boundaries. Thirdly, since taking pictures in the library was quite hectic, Tim always made notes of what he was doing: for instance, what stood out in the issues and what was missing – this made it much easier to return to the sources later on in his trajectory.

Once he properly organized the resulting pictures in folders per issue or volume with short, meaningful names, Tim set to extract the text using OCR (Optical Text Recognition) tools in order to enable keyword searches and quantitative analysis. (This is a labor-intensive step, he cautions, so make sure that it makes sense for your methodology before adopting it yourself.) Numerous scanning apps and online tools exist – Tesseract, Google Cloud Vision and Transkribus (for handwritten text) are great options for the more technically minded – but Tim made use of ABBYY FineReader, a commonly used OCR tool that is very performant and user-friendly. It is a commercial tool, but computers with ABBYY licenses are available at the Maurits Sabbe Library and Agora, so researchers looking to digitize a limited number of sources are free to go there without having to purchase their own license. ABBYY FineReader allows for image pre-processing (e.g. fixing lighting, straightening and cropping pictures), supports various languages, recognizes images in sources as well, and offers various formats for exporting (including .txt files). Tim was quite satisfied with the quality of the OCR’d texts: take good pictures, he says, and ABBYY will deliver good results!

To conclude, Tim shows how he processed the resulting text files in AntConc, a free concordance tool that’s often used for text mining. It allows for large-scale word searching and analysis, can provide keyword frequencies and information about relations to other words, and can easily compare different corpora. (Tim provides a small tip for those looking to explore AntConc: keep a stopword list of high-frequency words with little thematic content that the tool can filter out of its analysis.)

Of course, every researcher has to figure out what workflow suits them, but Tim importantly highlights that you should think about what you want to achieve before investing in digital methods. Consider the nature of your research project, the characteristics of your source corpus, the methodologies you use (discourse analysis, quantitative analysis, network & visual analysis) and let these things decide how you will process and study your sources. At the same time, don’t be afraid to try out new tools that might work well for you!

Of course, the quality of ABBYY FineReader’s OCR results depends on the quality of the input images.

Lauren Ottaviani: Mapping and Analyzing Women’s Magazine Archives

Our second speaker is Lauren Ottaviani, fourth-year PhD candidate in English Literature. Lauren’s project, supervised by Elke D’hoker, focuses on the representation of the women’s suffrage movement in two conservative, middlebrow periodicals dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries: The Woman at Home and Lady of the House. In doing so, the research seeks to consider the interaction between suffrage and domestic ideals at the turn of the twentieth century.

Similarly to Tim, then, Lauren also works with a large corpus of periodicals; and just as we saw with Tim, many of the magazines’ issues – which tend to be quite lengthy – remained as yet undigitized. The complexity of her materials meant that Lauren had to decide early on how to approach data management efficiently. In the end, a combination of three tools informed her research workflow.

Firstly, early on, she shifted from using Word for note-taking to using the free open-source tool Obsidian instead. As Lauren says, Obsidian (which was covered in last year’s HDYDI session as well) has the same ease of use that a program like Word offers, but you’ll actually be able to find your note again! With its added functionality, Obsidian allowed her to create a relational database of notes categorized by date, theme, or type, so as to keep track of any stories worth revisiting. Through tags and linked notes, Lauren could keep track of authorship, include direct links to the digitized magazine pages, and even uncover recurring anonymous authors. It’s also just a great tool for conference notes and miscellaneous admin.

Secondly, Lauren made use of the storage that’s provided by KU Leuven on OneDrive for Business. Currently, OneDrive is no longer recommended as a primary storage solution for research data at the university,¹ but it does have some useful features – and it proved particularly handy for Lauren’s use case. Using the OneDrive smartphone app, she took pictures of interesting articles in the periodicals she was studying and placed those in her pre-organized folder structure. In contrast to Tim, Lauren did not think full OCR of her corpus was worth the time investment or really relevant to her research questions, but this smaller-scale scanning process (which resulted in perfectly legible captures) worked great for her methodology.

Thirdly and finally, Lauren also adopted Nodegoat as part of her workflow, mainly for its “mapping” potential. That is, Nodegoat is a database tool, but it also offers built-in network visualization capabilities, which Lauren used to map out different entries – i.e. letters from the magazines’ correspondence columns – tagged with geolocations. The resulting visualization allowed her to track where readers lived, what the magazines’ geographical reach was, and how their readership expanded over time – elements that were central to her analysis of the periodicals’ circulation.

Using a combination of these three tools, Lauren was able to create a structured, well-organized database out of a vast, undigitized corpus; and even though her approach differed quite substantially from that of Tim, both illustrate how the right tools, used well, help make large-scale periodical research manageable.

Using Nodegoat, Lauren was able to map out the readership of the periodicals she’s studying.

Sinem Bilican: Managing Multimodal Data in Healthcare Research

Sinem Bilican is the last speaker: as a PhD candidate at the Research Unit Translation & Interpreting Studies, she is part of the interdisciplinary research project Managing Language Barriers in Unplanned Care (MaLBUC). With the help of her supervisor Heidi Salaets, Sinem studies linguistic diversity and multilingual communication in healthcare practices with the goal of laying bare overlooked communication barriers. As such, her project involves collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine, and we can reasonably expect very different data types from what we saw in Tim’s and Lauren’s presentations.

Indeed, the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the research project – which encompasses ethnographic observations as well as a large-scale survey and interviews – necessitates the implementation of clear research data management practices. Sinem works with extensive field notes, images, video and audio recordings, questionnaires, and other survey data: a lot of materials to manage, to be sure!

Sinem begins by outlining the tools involved in her daily research workflow. Zotero is a usual suspect here, and one which we see in many researchers’ workflows as a handy reference manager as well as a note-taking and annotation tool. OneDrive, meanwhile, enables Sinem to exchange data, drafts and other documents transparently between team members; whereas for a related larger-scale project, the team opted for the ease of use of Teams and SharePoint (which is a recommended storage solution at the Faculty of Arts). Finally, Obsidian is mentioned again, and Sinem stresses its convenience for taking both academic and miscellaneous notes.

Next, Sinem presents some of the tools she used during the data collection phase of her research project. Interestingly, the first tool she talks about is an actual physical tool: a Livescribe pen. This smart pen with a built-in recorder synchronizes handwritten notes with audio, allowing Sinem to easily reconstruct interviews and medical consultations she attended² – after a day of fieldwork, you can just plug it into your laptop and have everything appear in the Livescribe app. For the surveys, Sinem uses REDCap, which is commonly used in the Biomedical Sciences: it is a highly secure, KU Leuven-authenticated tool that can automatically generate full survey reports. It is, as Sinem points out, also quite a technical tool, but the university provides comprehensive support for users.

The last tool Sinem considers takes us from data collection to research dissemination – namely, Canva. Canva is a user-friendly, web-based design platform that’s great for making posters, visuals, and any other materials you might need to present your research. It allows for image upscaling, QR-code generation, and even themed PowerPoint slide decks. Sinem’s enthusiasm for Canva is infectious – and fittingly, she used it to create her HDYDI presentation as well!

By combining these tools, Sinem is able to navigate a complex, interdisciplinary project that involves varied datasets with clarity and structure; and while her workflow differs markedly from those of Tim and Lauren, it likewise shows how thoughtful tool choices can make even the most challenging research environments manageable.

REDCap proved a useful tool for Sinem’s research data workflow.

Across all three presentations, the workflows we saw revealed both overlaps and differences, but the shared message was clear: the best workflow is the one that genuinely works for your project. Let these examples inspire you, try out the tools that seem useful, and keep what supports your work. With a bit of exploration, you may find a data workflow that not only suits your project, but strengthens it!

1. As explained in the university’s storage solution FAQ, there are a number of reasons why OneDrive is no longer recommended as a primary solution for long-term research data storage; most significantly the fact that data stored on OneDrive servers is inaccessible to KU Leuven, which goes against RDM policy (principle II). This means that any data that you’ve kept on OneDrive is erased as soon as you leave the university for any reason, and recovering files is a difficult and costly procedure. ︎
2. Of course, these recordings were made with informed consent of all involved. ︎

Each year the Artes Research team offers the opportunity for students to do an internship with our team. During spring 2025, Helin Toprak, a student in the Advanced Master in Digital Humanities, joined us.

The Artes Research team frequently (co-)organizes training opportunities and collects training resources for researchers at the Faculty of Arts. Helin’s internship focused on this aspect of our work. During her three months with us, she developed resources on a variety of tools we find useful for our researchers. Helin created tutorials showcasing the functionalities of OpenRefine, and two Knight Lab tools, Timeline JS, and StoryMap JS.

OpenRefine is a tool that is useful for nearly all researchers who work with structured data and computational methods. An aspect of the research data workflow that is crucial in the beginning stages is data cleaning and transformation. OpenRefine is a free open-source web-based tool that allows users to do just that. During her internship, Helin created a tutorial to help researchers get started with this tool. The tutorial is designed for users who have no experience with OpenRefine and are looking to learn about the features and explore its uses.

The other two resources that Helin created focus on two tools from the Knight Lab suite. Timeline JS is an open-source tool developed to help users create interactive timelines. This is an accessible tool that anyone can use. The web-based tool just requires data that users put into a Google spreadsheet, then it’s ready to go with multiple options for customization. Advanced features allow those with more expertise to use their JSON skills to further customize their output.

StoryMap JS is also a free web-based tool developed by Knight Lab. This tool is designed to be highly visual. Users can add images and text to maps, allowing them to create a story or illustrate certain events or situations that might be relevant to their research topics. This tool is equally as accessible as Timeline JS and can be customized to fit a researcher’s needs and style.

To learn about these two tools as well as OpenRefine, you can have a look at the resources that Helin created during her internship. They are accessible via the following Zenodo record (make sure to look through all the documents in the record for each separate resource):

• Toprak, H. R. (2025, July 16). Materials for KU Leuven Libraries – Artes Research. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15982530

We would like to thank Helin for her great work during her internship! She was a pleasure to have as an intern, and we wish her all the best in her career after graduating from the Advanced Master in Digital Humanities!

OpenAlex is a database of academic authors, institutions and publications. Since its launch in January 2022, OpenAlex has received a lot of attention as an alternative to commercial research databases such as Web of Science or Scopus that would better meet academic needs and values. OpenAlex is based on a multitude of sources across all fields of science and languages, and on a global scale. A user can search by author, institution and research output, and select specifically by type of output (article, book, dataset, preprint, editorial, etc.), citations, publication date or availability in Open Access. The starting point for OpenAlex was the dataset of the discontinued Microsoft Academic Graph (which was the second largest academic search engine after Google Scholar), which was enriched and refined – a process that is still ongoing – to be able to be used as an alternative to commercial research databases for all kinds of searches and/or bibliometric analyses.

The OpenAlex data – which is shared under an open licence, namely Creative Commons Zero (CC0) – is available in three ways: via an online user interface (i.e. ‘OpenAlex Web’), via data snapshots (which enable you to save a copy of the OpenAlex database locally – as is at the time of download) and via the OpenAlex API. Use of OpenAlex Web, the data snapshots and the OpenAlex API is free of charge. There is a paid service which accomodates intensive use and offers additional support, but the free version suffices for the typical individual user.

The (lack of) cost, as well as the open philosophy behind it, is something that sets OpenAlex aside from commercial products like Web of Science and Scopus. These are expensive products and a recent study even shows that the companies behind these use specific sales strategies that maximise profits but come at the expense of the academic community. What is more, OpenAlex is lauded for its completeness and inclusivity. Web of Science and Scopus are selective databases, based on a curated set of sources (which has been criticized in the past for being too focused on particular disciplines, as well as specific languages, regions and publication types); whereas OpenAlex tries to be as complete as possible and is therefore not only more representative for disciplines like humanities, but also for the state of research in various languages on a global scale.

Quite a large number of studies analysing the quality and (dis)advantages of OpenAlex have been produced recently. The status quaestionis is:

• If one wants to get as complete a picture as possible of the research output of an author or of an institution as a whole (all scientific disciplines, all languages, all publication types), it is advisable to use OpenAlex.
• If one wants to map the OA availability of research output, it is advisable to use OpenAlex.
• For specific bibliometric analyses, it may be advisable to use Web of Science or Scopus due to the selectivity of the database and the (for the time being at least) relative superiority of the metadata, provided that one is aware of the limitations (e.g. in terms of scientific discipline, publication type and language).
• When compiling systematic reviews, it depends on the exact objective. If one wants to map scholarly literature on a particular topic as completely as possible, it is advisable to use OpenAlex; if, on the other hand, one wants to obtain a selection of scholarly literature that is representative of mainstream researchin Western Europe and North America, it is advisable to use Web of Science or Scopus for certain scientific disciplines (for other disciplines, no database is suitable for this purpose).

Every academic year, the HDYDI (How Do You Do It?) event on research data workflows signals the start of the Digital Scholarship Module. Through a series of sessions and (mini-)workshops, Artes Research aims to guide students through the complexities of scholarship in the digital age, from Open Science to Research Data Management and beyond. At the HDYDI kick-off event, three researchers from the Faculty of Arts lift the curtain on their own research workflow and offer a behind-the-scenes look at the ways in which they approach their research, the data they engage with, and the tools they use in doing so. The goal of this session is to provide examples of more advanced workflows for the first-year PhD researchers as they embark on their own research journey. Hopefully this recap of the session can spark some inspiration for you!

Seb Verlinden – Using Obsidian as a note-taking tool for literature

The first speaker, Seb Verlinden, is a second-year PhD candidate in medieval history. Under the supervision of Maïka De Keyzer and Bart Vanmontfort, Seb is studying the long-term landscape changes – mainly in the form of gradual desertification – that characterize the Campine region, one of the driest areas in Belgium. Particular focus is on the impact of eighteenth-century drainage in the region.

Seb’s talk concerns an issue that all researchers can relate to, regardless of the relative complexity of their project – that of taking notes. It is true, as Seb highlights, that every researcher has their own unique workflow, often relying on a combination of tools that makes sense for them (in his case, QGIS, FileMaker Pro, MAXQDA, and spreadsheet software). But at the heart of any research process is the need to organize one’s thoughts, and this is where note-taking apps can make a real difference. So, what are some of the options out there?

Zotero is a possible solution – one we’ve already discussed elsewhere on this blog. As a reference manager first and foremost, Zotero has the potential to become a researcher’s living library, a knowledge base covering all relevant literature. It also has great capabilities for annotating PDFs, especially with its new 7.0 update. What you’re missing in the context of note-taking, however, is the big picture. Seb aptly points out that using Zotero to make notes is like putting post-its in books: you have no real overarching structure, and no way to easily link notes across books.

Other tools are likewise flawed. Lots of researchers use Microsoft Word to take notes, even though it is primarily tailored to mid-length longform text. As a result, it is easy to lose track of notes, unless you’re willing to navigate multiple files; and it tends to grow slow and cumbersome, since it is occupied with layout. It is, simply put, unintuitive for this purpose.

This is why Seb puts forward another solution, one that he believes to be faster, better automated, and easier to use: Obsidian. A widely supported and free tool, Obsidian does have its advantages: in contrast to both Microsoft Word and Zotero, it uses open-source file formats (.md or Markdown files, written in an accessible markup language) and it is full-text searchable and provides a structured overview of notes. Moreover, it offers a versatile workspace, allowing you to go as simple or as complex as you like – especially with the addition of supported plugins. One such plugin, in fact, allows your Obsidian environment to easily interoperate with your Zotero library (including references, bibliographies, and PDF annotations), which is particularly useful.

Seb ends his talk by highlighting another key benefit in using Obsidian. By introducing links in your notes, it is possible to cross-reference other notes within your system with minimal user effort; and through the use of tags, you can generate another layer of structure. Obsidian then uses this information to visualize the relations between your different notes, automatically creating a network of clusters that correspond to certain topics of interest. This way, it expands the possibilities of the data without the need for the researcher to make any real effort – a great reason to think about using Obsidian for your own note-taking needs!

Laura Soffiantini – Managing linguistic and historical data. A PhD workflow using FileMaker

Laura Soffiantini is the second speaker: as a PhD researcher at the Cultural Studies Research Group, she is currently analyzing the geographical representation of Greece in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. With the help of her supervisor Margherita Fantoli, Laura intends to shed new light on the way in which Greece was perceived in Flavian-era Rome. In order to do so, she has to manage a varied mix of linked data – textual, linguistic, and historical – as part of her daily routine.

Grappling with 37 books of a classical encyclopedia, and dealing with data in different formats and with different qualities (actual text, numeric coordinates, symbols, etc.), Laura realized the importance of proper Research Data Management. It enables aggregating, manipulating, analyzing, and comparing your data more efficiently throughout – and even beyond – the research process. Indeed, a challenge faced by many researchers is the retrieval of data collected or processed at an earlier time, with the aim of relating it to “new” data. In this context, Laura provides a look at her own research workflow.

The primary strategy in managing your data, she remarks, is to structure it. By adding structure to your data, you can parse it more easily and return to it without issues, even in later phases of your project. Software like Obsidian is indispensable for this purpose, but it’s also good to think about using tabular formats like .csv (an open plain text format) as a way to organize your data. A useful tool put forward here is pandas, a Python library designed to help manage and analyze data derived from such .csv files. That might sound technical, but Laura ensures us that – even if you have no background in programming – pandas is a very accessible and convenient tool in handling tabular files.

Having thought about what data she worked with (an essential step for every researcher), Laura adopted an initial workflow in three parts. She first started out with .json files containing Pliny’s text, which she converted into tabular .csv files, adding data related to the lemmatization of the corpus, part-of-speech tagging, and references to book and chapter positions. Subsequently, she thought about grouping this data into different categories, which she assigned to different columns – such that there is a column titled “book_chapter”, one titled “lemma”, and so on. Finally, Laura assigned identifiers to the information contained in these files; she explains she wasn’t aware of the importance of such identifiers at the start of the project, but now realizes they form a crucial part of keeping tabular data.

As a result, Laura ended up with multiple .csv files, which she then related to each other using FileMaker (with the expert assistance of Mark Depauw and Tom Gheldof). One table, for instance, contains a list of all the Latin words used (the tokens, e.g. urbs) alongside their identifier, book number, lemma, and possible identifier linked to the Trismegistos database of ancient texts. Another contains the lemma along with its part-of-speech tag (e.g. proper noun) and meaning (e.g. “city”). By linking the different files through the use of identifiers – the keys to the data – Laura made a relational database easily managed and organized through FileMaker. The resulting dataset is at the core of her research project.

The main takeaway Laura wants to leave us with is that it is important to create an environment in which you can efficiently collect, store, manipulate, and analyze your data. This should not come at the cost of traditional approaches and methodologies – in fact, you can add to them to create a better workflow as a whole!

Zakaria El Houbba – Obsidian as part of the research workflow

The third and final speaker is Zakaria El Houbba, third-year PhD candidate in Arabic Studies. Zakaria’s project, supervised by Arjan Post, focuses on the pre-modern relation between Islamic jurisprudence and Sufism, and in particular on the way in which these two strands are united in the figure of Aḥmad Zarrūq. In doing so, the research aims to come to a theory of applied legal epistemology in Zarrūq’s Sufism.

By discussing his own workflow in detail, Zakaria intends to highlight a number of key takeaways revolving around the idea of the “second brain”. Because we are so deeply involved with knowledge gathering on a daily basis, and constantly receive input from various sources (whether academic or not), we run the risk of being overwhelmed by a flood of information. When you use software to carry that burden for you, you can save your own brainpower for actual critical thinking rather than secondary tasks like categorizing information. This way, you’re effectively constructing what’s referred to as a second brain.

In this context, Zakaria also makes use of Obsidian, though he approaches it from a very different angle than Seb. Zakaria doesn’t actually enter all of his notes into Obsidian – he first uses an app like Microsoft OneNote as a “vault” to record random, non-processed thoughts, which he periodically goes through to think about how they fit in his project. He then sorts these thoughts and puts them in corresponding folders (relating to certain projects, classes, issues, etc.) in order to process them properly in Obsidian. Zakaria emphasizes that it’s fine to keep it simple and take it slow, focusing on what you specifically need from the note-taking environment so as not to get overwhelmed by all the options and information.

There are more tools Zakaria uses in his workflow – in fact, he says, there is a constant conversation between himself, Obsidian, Zotero, and ChatGPT. He uses Zotero to make notes and highlight text when reading articles, which he imports into Obsidian and categorizes using tags. Afterwards, he copies those highlights from Obsidian into ChatGPT, asking it to take up the role of copy editor and summarize the text. The resulting summary, which he critically revises, is then given a place in Obsidian once again.

Next to the powerful visualization capabilities discussed by Seb, Zakaria explains that Obsidian can also be used to create subpages within notes to explain terms and concepts, provide brief biographies of important figures, and so on. These “subnotes” can be linked back to in other notes as well, resulting in a kind of personalized Wikipedia for your research topic. This can also be helpful when you’re following classes on a certain topic or revising your own teaching material!

Finally, speaking of teaching material, Zakaria points us to a couple of helpful AI tools that can be used to process video files, such as recorded lectures or talks – whether you attended them or gave them yourself. One such tool is NoteGPT, which essentially functions as a transcriber and summarizer of recordings. You can revise and copy the resulting transcriptions and summaries into Obsidian as well, further expanding the scope of your second brain. Brisk Teaching serves a similar purpose as NoteGPT, but can also be used to turn a video into a PowerPoint presentation, which can be very convenient and time-saving. By thus constructing a workflow, gradually accumulating relevant information through different tools, it becomes much easier to manage your research.

The workflows of the presenters reveal both similarities and differences, but there’s one thing all three can agree on – what’s important is to find a workflow that works for you. To that end, take inspiration from some of the tools and processes described here, but always make sure they support your specific research methods. This was emphasized in the questions as well: don’t feel pressured to adopt a tool like Obsidian, but try it out and see if it accommodates your needs. Who knows, you might uncover a more efficient workflow or see your data from a new perspective.

Happy holidays from the Artes Research team, and may your data be blessed in the year to come!

During her time as postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Arts, Houda Lamqaddam prepared introductory materials for data visualization. You can find them on the DH@rts website. Have fun exploring these materials!

A short description of the material by Houda herself: 

Introduction to information visualization techniques for humanistic scholarship

https://zenodo.org/record/7734200: This series is an introduction to the fundamentals of information visualization, particularly as it concerns humanistic scholarship. The series consists of four chapters that cover the following topics: (1) Why visualize?, (2) Getting to data, (3) Choosing and creating a visualization, and (4) Do’s and don’ts of designing data visualizations.  In each chapter, we define fundamental concepts, share examples, simple tips, and additional resources for more in-depth explorations.

Tableau Tutorial

 https://zenodo.org/record/7733937: In this tutorial, we see how we can use the tool Tableau to create visualizations going from simple line charts to complex dashboards. We use a step-by-step approach, starting from uploading and formatting the data to creating linked dashboards. We also provide additional links to external resources and forums that can help you build your Tableau knowledge.

Observable notebook 

https://observablehq.com/d/7827a6a46922e25a: This interactive Observable notebook shows you how you can use a live notebook and Javascript code to develop simple – yet powerful – visualizations of your data. You can run each cell in the notebook, or create your own account to develop custom visualizations that best support your research needs. 

Are you looking for an easy way to organize your research data in a database without worrying about data loss? Do you want to build logical relationships between your data but don’t want to delve into programming languages? Then Baserow might offer the solution you need!

Why build your database in Baserow

Baserow makes it possible to create an online database without any technical experience. It has the look and feel of an excel spreadsheet so it is very intuitive to navigate. However, it goes beyond a mere spreadsheet as it offers database capabilities allowing you to organize and analyze your data in a relational way. Just as any other relational database, it allows you to link fields (or columns to use spreadsheet jargon) over different tables ensuring data consistency and lets you choose from different types of predefined fields making it possible to easily store and structure various types of data (e.g. images, dates, checkboxes, etc.). Moreover, Baserow is very collaborative: you can easily work together in real-time, with every change immediately visible to all.

Important to mention as well is that the servers of Baserow are stored in Europe (Amsterdam), meaning that it can be GDPR compliant and may be appropriate to store personal data. (Before storing personal data on any new tool, submit an amendment to your existing PRET dossier).

How to get started

On the Baserow website there is a lot of information available that will make you familiar with the platform. You can find everything you need to know to get started here, and this blog post guides you through the process also.

Baserow is still very new but is developing rapidly, with new features being released constantly. So if you notice that there is still a feature missing, chances are high that Baserow is already developing it. You can also browse the forum to check out which feature requests are in the pipeline. The forum is also a great way to ask a question or submit your own request, I can say from personal experience that the Baserow team will get back to you very quickly!

Apart from the forum, Baserow also maintains a nice blog where you can find an overview of the latest updates and interesting articles, e.g. about database use in general such as whether you should choose a spreadsheet or database for you next project or which alternatives to excel are out there.

Pricing

And the good news is, you can use the hosted version on the Baserow website completely for free! The free plan should be sufficient if you are looking to build a simple database. In case you would need more advanced features or more data storage, you can go for their premium or advanced plan (see pricing information).

Some interesting features highlighted

Since I personally use Baserow quite a lot, I wanted to highlight some good-to-know features (obviously this is in no way an extensive overview of all that Baserow has to offer):

• Views: Baserow allows you to create different views of a table. This way, you can look at your data in multiple ways which might lead to new perspectives. In the free plan you have three options: the grid view (basically like a spreadsheet), the gallery view (which organizes your data in cards), or as a form (that is automatically created based on your data and can then be customized further).
• Sharing: you can share the view of one of your tables more broadly, either by creating a shareable link or embedding your table in e.g. a website. This way, others will be able to consult your data, without the fear of them messing anything up as they won’t have any editing rights.
• Snapshots: thanks to the snapshot feature you can make a full copy of your database. This way you could restore your database to that point in time later and you are protected against accidental loss.

I should also mention one downside: when you use the hosted web version you can only access Baserow through your browser, there is no desktop app available.

Even though Baserow is still in its early stages, it is already very promising and really accessible, even when you have never built a database before. Try it out and see for yourself!

Recap Zotero workshop

On the 16^th of June the Artes Research team joined forces with the research support services from the Faculty of Law to help PhD researchers get started with Zotero, a free online reference manager. The session was a success with an attendance of around 30 researchers, who were all eager to dive into the world of reference management.

*Please note, these materials were created based on version 6 of the Zotero software; the interface received a major update with version 7. While the interface looks different, Zotero 7 still has the same features as previous versions, however, some plug-ins may no longer be supported.

We kicked off the workshop with an introduction to the basic functionalities of Zotero. Nele Noppe of the Artes Research team shared her knowledge on the various ways to gather references to a personal Zotero library, gave an in-depth explanation on how to organize a library with tags, folders and collections and zoomed in on several topics such as the integration of Zotero in Word which allows you to create in-text citations, footnotes and bibliographies among other things. Of particular interest was the analysis of Zotero plugins.  Zotero has a very wide range of plugins that add extra functionality and connect Zotero with other software and platforms. As there are numerous plugins, we have made a list of plugin recommendations with a short explanation of their use, which we have included in this post (see below).

This was followed by an introduction to Juris-M by Patrick Allo from the Faculty of Law. Juris-M is a Zotero offshoot with extra features for law research and multilingual bibliographies.

During the next part, the participants had the chance to bring this new information into practice.  Everyone was assigned to a breakout room with a group leader. During the next hour Leah Budke, Nele Noppe, Patrick Allo and Rebecca Burke guided their group through some basic exercises in Zotero.  In preparation for this workshop, the researchers had been asked to gather a few sources to experiment with. These sources were used to test out the functionalities of Zotero, including how to import a reference with the Zotero browser plugin, how to create a bibliography, and more.

If you weren’t able to attend the workshop, you can still consult the documentation provided by Nele Noppe. Her presentation is available on Zenodo here. We also have a few blogposts on how to get started with Zotero. Here you can find part 1 and part 2. Keep an eye out on the blog for future Zotero workshops or check out the Kubic classroom sessions.

Plugin recommendations

Plugin recommendations from Nele Noppe and Patrick Allo 

• For everyone: ZotFile, which adds all sorts of handy PDF functionality to Zotero. If you notice that a PDF-related feature described in the presentation linked above doesn’t seem to appear in your Zotero, it’s probably because you don’t have ZotFile installed yet. 
• For those who work with a lot of PDFs that are not searchable because the PDF pages are just images, not text you can select: Zotero OCR, which performs optical character recognition on PDFs to make them searchable. Setup has a number of technical steps, but the instructions are very clear. 
• If you do your writing in a program that isn’t Microsoft Word: Zotero word processor plugins to cite Zotero items from a range of other programs.  
• If your writing program isn’t covered by a plugin: First, double-check the list of plugins to make sure there’s nothing that covers your situation. If there’s nothing, you can still use the plugin RTF/ODF Scan for Zotero to create a workaround and connect your favorite writing program with your Zotero library. 
• For those who currently have a big library of PDFs in a manual folder-based system and want to switch to Zotero: Zotero Folder Import 
• To quickly start bringing order to a Zotero library: Zotero Storage Scanner looks for missing attachments and duplicate items. 
• For people who want to use Zotero for note-taking: Better Notes has useful functionality for organizing your notes and visualizing connections between them.
• For those who want to apply simple but inspiring data visualizations to their Zotero library: Zotero Voyant Export connects Zotero with the Voyant visualization software. 
• If you work in LaTeX: Better BibTex for Zotero is for you. The plugin also enables integration with some additional writing programs, though we haven’t tested this.  

If you are a regular visitor to our blog, you might have noticed that The Scholarly Tales is a blog hosted by Humanities Commons (HC). We, at Artes research, actively promote the use of innovative, non-profit and community-led platforms such as HC and work to bring them to the attention of our readers and researchers. In this blogpost we will take you through the different aspects of the Humanities Commons platform and explain what it can offer you.

Humanities Commons labels itself as a “network for people working in the humanities,” but apart from enabling academic networking, HC also encompasses an Open Access repository, a webhosting structure, and a platform for collaborative work. Humanities Commons is dedicated to openness, which is evident in the fact that the platform is open to anyone, regardless of field, language, institutional affiliation, or form of employment. It is completely Open Access, Open Source and non-profit, in contrast to other academic networking platforms such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, which do have commercial objectives and often have an aggressive advertisement strategy. At Humanities Commons you can rest assured that any content or information you contribute to the platform will never be used for commercial ends.

Humanities Commons as a scholarly network

The first step to begin using Humanities Commons is to create an account. Registration is easy: you can either link your profile with existing accounts from other applications such as Google or Twitter or you can make a completely new HC account. When you have officially joined the Commons, you can start building your profile. All your activity on HC will be linked here: your groups, your shared work, your websites, etc. The next step is to find colleagues and discover new like-minded researchers by browsing through and joining different groups or by creating your own group. Joining groups allows you to easily interact and collaborate with scholars who share common interests. If you create your own group, it is useful to know that you have the option to make the group either public, private, or hidden. All groups allow each member access to group discussion boards with e-mail notifications, shared calendar, file sharing, and collaborative documents.

HC stimulates communication between its members by making connections. Some ways you can do this include following other users to keep up-to-date with their work or by starting a private chat or using the @tag . Interacting in this more personal way is great for asking questions, getting feedback from colleagues on your work, and promoting events and publications.

Humanities Commons as an Open Access repository

The repository of HC is called the Commons Open Repository Exchange, or CORE. CORE offers users the possibility of archiving a copy of their work and sharing it with the world in Open Access. The content can be accessed and downloaded by anyone, even if they have not registered for an account.

You can upload a variety of materials to CORE – whether it’s a published paper, a syllabus, a blog post, an interview, a work in progress, a data set, or even audio or video files (there are some guidelines on file types and file size). Every type of research output can have an impact, so all different types of materials are accepted.

Works deposited to CORE are covered by the Humanities Commons Terms of Service, which offers protection against misuse. You can, however, publish your work under a Creative Commons (CC) license of your choosing. This will allow reuse of your work in accordance with the stipulations of the chosen CC license.

Every item you upload is given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that serves as a permanent identifier. DOIs provide persistent, citable metadata for scholarly and creative works, including gray literature such as blog posts, syllabi, data sets, presentations, and video and audio files.

The repository offers numerous methods of discoverability. All materials uploaded to CORE are indexed by Google, Google Scholar, SHARE, Altmetric, and BASE-OA. Since you can notify the members of any of your Humanities Commons groups when you have uploaded new material to CORE, you can easily bring your work to the attention of a relevant potential readership.

Lastly, CORE also provides long-term storage of your work since the files deposited in CORE are stored in the Columbia University Libraries’ long-term digital preservation storage system.

Humanities commons as a webhost

When you have registered with Humanities Commons, you can also start a blog or a site through their platform to boost your online presence, get feedback, or simply share information. Because of their emphasis on openness, sites on the Commons are by default open to anyone but, if necessary, you can restrict access.

Humanities Commons allows two types of sites: group sites and personal sites. Group sites are created by the administrator of a group who then determines the role of each of the other members.

Sites are built with WordPress, a popular Content Management System (CMS) that many are already familiar with. HC offers templates and plugins to personalize your site. The guides and extensive FAQ section navigate you through the different steps of creating your own online presence with ease. However, if you would encounter any difficulties or have any questions about starting your own WordPress website or blog, do get in touch with us! We would be happy to share some tips and tricks!

Humanities Commons is a user-friendly platform with a high emphasis on openness. Contrary to other scholarly networking sites, it is not focused on making profit through the exploitation of user data. The primary goal of Humanities Commons is to offer a space for researchers to connect and to share and archive scholarly work. It is a great alternative to other scholarly networking sites and is also a perfect way to support Open Access ideals while disseminating your research and building your online scholarly presence.

*Please note, these materials were created based on version 6 of the Zotero software; the interface received a major update with version 7. While the interface looks different, Zotero 7 still has the same features as previous versions, however, some plug-ins may no longer be supported.

A few weeks ago we announced a new series that would help you get set up in Zotero, a free reference manager that enables you to collect, organize, cite and share research. As a follow-up to the first blogpost, we will take you through the next steps on how to collect and organize references in Zotero.

Collecting references

There are many ways to gather references in Zotero. We will explain the three main possibilities to do this in the desktop app.

1. The first possible way to add a reference is to enter it manually. This will probably feel familiar for those who are not used to working with a reference manager, but it can be more time-consuming than the other options. To add a reference manually, click on ‘New item’ () > choose the type of reference you want to add > manually fill in all the information in the right-hand pane. If you have a file on your computer, you can also add the reference via drag and drop to Zotero.
2. The easiest way to add a reference is via an identifier. Zotero can search for relevant information online via identifiers such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), an International Standard Book Number (ISBN), or others. You can locate this information on the title page of an academic article or, for a book, on the back cover next to the barcode or on the page with the copyright information. Additionally, ISBN numbers are available on publishers’ websites or anywhere e-books are sold. Click on ‘add item(s) by identifier’()> type or paste the identifier > press enter. All the metadata is automatically added to the reference. This is a quicker and often more exhaustive way of adding a reference compared to adding it manually. A handy default feature is that Zotero automatically downloads any attachments it finds online. If an article is Open Access, Zotero will download the pdf. The blue dot next to the reference indicates there is a file attached. To open the file, click on the reference and the link will appear. If you prefer to save your PDF files in a different location, you can disable the automatic download feature in the general preferences menu.
3. The third way to add a reference to Zotero is by using the Zotero connector. Zotero can pull citation metadata about sources directly from web pages into the Zotero desktop app. If you have downloaded the Zotero connector, you should find the Zotero button in your browser (often in the top right corner). It should say ‘Save to Zotero’. Click on the icon and the reference will appear in your Library. This works with academic publications and other types of sources, including standalone PDFs, websites and social media. Zotero will also add the pdf or a web page snapshot to the reference as an attachment.

As you get more familiar with Zotero you will learn of more advanced ways to add references via structured data formats such as BibTex. Want to know how to do this? Keep an eye on our blog because there is a good chance a future blogpost will guide you through it!

Organizing references

All the references you collect will be saved in your Library. To keep your research structured and clear, Zotero offers multiple ways to organize your references.

1. The first is by creating Collections or folders. Click on ‘New collection () and give the collection a name. To view which collections a given reference is in, you can select the reference in the main viewing pane, then push the control key (Windows), the option key (Mac) or the alt key (Linux), and the relevant collections will be highlighted. Any references that have not been subdivided into a collection will appear in ‘Unfiled items’. Sometimes you might accidentally add the same reference to Zotero multiple times. If this happens, you will be able to locate these references in the tab called ‘Duplicate Items’. If you want, you can choose to merge your duplicates here. By managing duplicate items, you are able to ensure that the Zotero plug-in for Word will function properly and your bibliographies will be correctly formatted and accurate. Additionally, it prevents any confusion when using the note function for taking research notes.
2. Tags are a useful way to assign keywords to a reference and group them together. Select a reference > go to the ‘Tags’ tab on in the right pane > click ‘Add’. An item can have as many tags as necessary. Tags appear in de bottom left pane. If you click on a tag, you will see all the references connected with this tag. By default, tags will also be assigned when you import references into Zotero, but this feature can be disabled in the general preferences if you prefer working with your own customized tagging system. If you want to go one step further, you can also color-code your tags by right clicking on a tag in the tag pane in the bottom left and then selecting ‘Assign color’. The color you assign to a tag will show up to the left of the reference when viewing your references in the main panel. You can also see the color-coded tags when viewing the tags for a particular reference.
3. You can link different references together with the related references This can be used to indicate which references are cited by that item. Click on the reference > go to the tab ‘Related’ in the right pane > ‘Add’ > choose the reference you want to link with > click ‘ok’.
4. The ‘Notes’ feature allows you to add a text note as an attachment to a reference. Select the reference > go to the ‘Notes’ tab > Add > type out your note. Notes can also be added by right clicking the reference in the main viewing pane and selecting ‘add note’ or by clicking the note button () on the top center menu. If you use the note feature to take research notes, it is helpful to know that these research notes can be exported in PDF form. To do so, right click on the reference in the main viewing panel and select ‘Generate report from item’. This will give you an overview of the reference including the full reference information, the tags you have assigned (if any), and the notes you have taken that are connected to this item. This is not only an excellent feature if you prefer to work both digitally and in analog form, but also if you would like to take periodic back-ups of the research notes you have created in the Zotero platform.

Do you want to experiment with collecting and gathering references in Zotero? We have the perfect place for that! Visit our own Zotero group: the Artes Digital Scholarship Community! We have created a Sandbox folder for you to experiment to your heart’s content. This group is packed with information on digital scholarship, and we post regular updates on new resources. You are very welcome to join the community or browse through the information we have collected.

*Please note, these materials were created based on version 6 of the Zotero software; the interface received a major update with version 7. While the interface looks different, Zotero 7 still has the same features as previous versions, however, some plug-ins may no longer be supported.

Would you like to download information about your sources with the click of a button instead of painstakingly typing out bibliographic data? Would you like to automagically insert correct references into your publications in any citation style? Would you like to focus on writing your articles, chapters, books, and so on, and never, ever craft a references section by hand again?

As a reference manager Zotero can (and maybe even should) become one of your primary tools. Not only is it free, it’s also easy to use. Zotero helps you collect, organize, cite and share research. Since its creation in 2006, Zotero has become one of the most widely used citation management tools and is supported in more than thirty languages.

Never heard of it? No need to panic. We’re here to explain how you can set up Zotero yourself and dive into the wonderful world of reference management. This post is the first in a series that will help you to get to know the many options Zotero offers to support your research process and to better manage your research data.

Getting started

1. Register

Register for a free Zotero account here. This will allow you to sync and access your library from anywhere, back up all your attached files, and join groups like our own Artes Digital Scholarship Community.

2. Download

Zotero offers a web application as well as a desktop application. We advise you to use the desktop application as it provides more options than the web version. You can download the desktop application from the Zotero download page. Download the Zotero connector as well, as it automatically senses different types of content as you browse the web and allows you to save those resources, including relevant metadata, to Zotero with a single click.

3. Synchronize

After you complete the set-up, open the Zotero desktop application. Go to Edit > Preferences > Sync and enter your Zotero account details. You can choose which libraries you want to sync. By default, Zotero will sync your local data with the Zotero servers whenever changes are made. This will enable you to work with your data from any computer with Zotero installed.

4. Optional: Join a group

Within Zotero you can create or join groups. As a member or owner of a group you can collaborate remotely with project members or colleagues within related areas (publicly or privately), set up web-based bibliographies for classes you teach, and so much more.  It’s a great way to discover other people with similar interests and the sources they are citing. If you want to join a Zotero group, log in to the Zotero website, search for groups here or go to the group URL, and click on the ‘Join’ button. Depending on the group setup, you will be admitted automatically or after a group admin approves the request.

A great starting point is the Artes Digital Scholarship Community. This Zotero group  is packed with resources on digital scholarship for KU Leuven researchers, students, and staff, curated by the KU Leuven Libraries Artes research team.  When you join, you can add your own resources, see the content of attachments, and search this group right from your own Zotero desktop application. If you’re not a group member, you can still browse and search the content of the group.

As you can imagine, this post was just the tip of the iceberg on Zotero. Keep an eye on our blog for an upcoming post on how to gather and process references!

Welcome to another overview of new digital scholarschip resources added to the Artes Digital Scholarship Community on Zotero (learn more about this group and join with your Zotero account to get the group’s resources right in Zotero on your desktop). It’s a brief one; we’re currently reading a lot of excellent data management plans from new PhD researchers, which will be their own blog post sometime in February.

In this edition: a fantastic new open access resource on data management in linguistics, unfortunate mishaps in publication and data management, more Zotero tips, and a long read for the weekend about the practicalities of supporting open access publishing at KU Leuven.

Welcome to another summary of new digital scholarschip resources added to the Artes Digital Scholarship Community on Zotero (learn more about this group and join with your Zotero account to get the group’s resources right in Zotero on your desktop).

In this edition: reference management tips and tricks, essential reading for those starting out with research on social media or other user-generated content online, a guide to organising and supporting citizen science projects, musings about the role of software in research, a warning shot for researchers who keep data on Google services (sorry), and for inspiration, a very lovely and fascinating visualization of character relationships in The Witcher:

• Want to start using a reference manager like Zotero, but worried about laboriously transferring every single reference in the long list of sources that you’ve been keeping in Word or elsewhere? AnyStyle converts a list of references into a structured format that can be imported by reference managers and other programs: Keil, S. (n.d.). AnyStyle.io. Retrieved December 23, 2021, from https://anystyle.io/
• We always recommend using a reference manager like Zotero to automatically generate bibliographies for your articles and ensure that your references section is complete and correct. If you haven’t used a reference manager, however, you can still use Recite to automatically check whether your in-text citations match your list of references: 4cite Labs. (n.d.). Recite: APA and Harvard citations checked instantly. Retrieved December 23, 2021, from https://reciteworks.com/
• A humorous interlude on reproducibility: Ben Golub. (2021, December 24). Economics paper with secret data be like https://t.co/wmUk2N4lrZ [Tweet]. @ben_golub. https://twitter.com/ben_golub/status/1474213075268128772
• A great summary of what researchers should keep in mind when using data from social media in their projects: Centre for Data, Culture, and Society. (2021). Social media research: Ethical guidance for researchers at the University of Edinburgh. The University of Edinburgh. https://www.cdcs.ed.ac.uk/files/2021-09/Social_Media_Ethics.pdf
• A basic and essential guide to the ethical considerations that come with researching online materials: franzke, aline shakti, Bechmann, A., Zimmer, M., Ess, C., the, & Association of Internet Researchers. (n.d.). Internet Research: Ethical Guidelines 3.0. Retrieved January 10, 2022, from https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf
• A practical guide designed to assist those organising and participating in a citizen science project to get the most out of the experience: Group, L. C. S. W. (2021). Citizen Science Skilling for Library Staff, Researchers, and the Public. LIBER Citizen Science Working Group. https://doi.org/10.25815/hf0m-2a57
• An engaging example of network analysis and data visualization applied to textual data from the popular “Witcher” novels: Janosov, M. (2021, December 23). A Network Map of The Witcher. Nightingale. https://nightingaledvs.com/a-network-map-of-the-witcher
• On the crucial role of software in research, which is difficult to recognize within the traditional academic publication model: Jay, C., Haines, R., & Katz, D. S. (2021). Software Must be Recognised as an Important Output of Scholarly Research. International Journal of Digital Curation, 16(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v16i1.745
• And finally, a scary reminder that external cloud services exert sometimes unexpected amounts of control over the data posted there, and that scholarly data on cloud services is in danger if it’s flagged as a “potential policy violation”: Khalili, J. (2021, December 15). Google Drive could soon start locking your files. TechRadar. https://www.techradar.com/news/google-drive-could-soon-start-locking-your-personal-files

Starting this week, we’ll be posting regular summaries of new digital scholarschip resources that were added to the Artes Digital Scholarship Community on Zotero (learn more about this group and join with your Zotero account to get the group’s resources right in Zotero on your desktop).

In this inaugural edition, we have some great project management tips that are really about research data management (RDM), ways of using RSS feeds to keep track of updates on a website, how to export comments from Word files to turn them into structured data, ruminations on the influence of the coronavirus pandemic on scholarship, and more.

The Programming Historian is an OA journal that publishes novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. Every lesson is published in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

What does it offer you?

The Programming Historian offers the ability to teach yourself new skills within the world of the digital humanities.  Every tutorial is rigorously peer reviewed to make sure it is accessible to newcomers and is judged by external reviewers.  The process also gives scholars the option to learn from each other as the peer review is conceived as a collaborative and productive process.  The Programming Historian publishes all contributions according to the concept of Gold Open Access which means a lesson is freely available without having to pay a subscription fee or experiencing any other restriction on access. Furthermore, authors do not need to pay a publishing fee (Article Processing Charge or APC).  Every submission is published under a Creative commons ‘CC-BY’ license so that anyone can republish the work, as long as they cite the author correctly. As The Programming Historian is a strong believer of giving everyone the ability to benefit from the tutorials, lessons make use of open source programming languages and software as much as possible.  This way, everyone has access to the necessary software, even without an extensive research budget.

How can you contribute?

Though writing a new lesson is the best way to actively engage with the digital humanities community through The Programming Historian, it’s not the only way you can contribute.  Their policy tries to offer the greatest possible level of participation.  You can join the editorial board to edit lessons or, if you’re fluent in one of the languages they offer, you are invited to get in touch about translating.  Even simple feedback is very welcome.

The Programming Historian is an international project driven by volunteers and supported by individual and institutional supporters.  KU Leuven Libraries Artes funds the project through the institutional partnership program.

The project

Arabic Collections Online (ACO) is an online library specialized in providing Open Access to Arabic books and manuscripts in several scientific domains. ACO started its digitization project with the aim of providing free and global access to Arabic language content, which is currently not widely available. The project already offers access to over 16.000 volumes, however the goal of the project is to digitize 23.000 Arabic volumes. The topics range from philosophy and religion to political sciences and technology, and include both volumes from the classical Islamic period as well as more recent volumes.

Functionalities and use

The web pages are designed symmetrically, where the left side of the page is written in Latin script (i.e. English or transliteration) and the right side offers the same functionalities in Arabic. The search functions are likewise designed to facilitate queries on multiple levels (such as title, author, subject, place of publication, etc.) in English, Arabic transliteration and Arabic scripture. Under the header ‘search’, the website includes some search tips for the use of transliteration. The ACO project applies the Library of Congress transliteration system.

The ACO website is definitely a useful tool for researchers who are looking for specific Arabic source materials, as well as for students who want to gain a quick overview of the variety of digitized Arabic sources.

Questions about this database can be directed to the subject specialist Eastern Studies.