The first semester of year two in college was nearing its end. With the completion of many courses, I was able to release some of my stress by relaxing, working on the Digital Humanities project and going back to work daily. During the semester, I felt swamped and constricted as the workload was heavy with eight courses. However, out of all those classes, Digital Humanities made me excited and was engaging. I looked forward to every class to learn more about the tools briefly introduced in the previous blog. I had an interactive, fun time with my classmates and lecturers.

As stated in the first blog, Visualizing Caribbean Literature Encounters: Progress Report 1: – we learned about Wax, Jekyll and Github. However, I have forgotten to mention the main and most important tool in working on the project. That tool was Zotero. Zotero is a free and easy to use tool that helps one to collect, organize, cite and share research or data. Zotero enables one to synchronize data across devices and collaborate with others. Zotero is an open source tool that was developed by an independent nonprofit organization that helps users to stay in control of their own data.

Zotero can be used via the web or on the app. When Zotero was first introduced, I was curious as to how it would be utilized in collecting data for the project. After downloading Zotero, creating an account, joining my class group and exploring the features, I began to have a grasp on it. After one session of my Digital Humanities class, I understood it and the task assigned in the project. All of the students were required to collect articles and work within their designated years and place them into the folder they had created for themselves, under the shared group. In addition, if any other years were found in the search for one’s data, it should be placed in that year. This collaborative research process was fun and quite enjoyable. Now, I have the tool Zotero for life, along with the knowledge and experience gained.