#  Collaborative Research Tool 

 



   ![Collaborative Research Tool](/sites/g/files/omnuum11266/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/pitf/files/crt.preview.png?itok=xYy1gFaT) 

 

PITFs developed an online collaborative research tool that allowed students to work in teams to analyze primary sources and to create sets of searchable online notecards. Students used social computing-style tagging to annotate the cards. The Collaborative Research Tool was built using the Cake PHP framework. The user interface was updated and refined, and a larger data set of source materials was imported into the application in 2009.

### Teaching Challenge:

Typically, evidence about things is broadly distributed across a huge range of sources and thinly deposited within a given source. For that reason, this research tool facilitated a ‘sifting’ approach wherein each researcher worked rapidly through a given text or source, noting or copying out passages that were relevant to the subject at hand.

Sort### Faculty/Instructor(s):

Professor Dan Smail



### Fellow(s):

Clare Gillis, Emily Wilson, Aaron Gibralter, Ryan Oberbey



### School, Library, Museum:

[Arts and Sciences](/school/arts-and-sciences)



### Project Deliverable:

An online bibliographic and notecard database tool



### Tools and/or Technologies:

PHP, Ruby, MySQL, HTML



### Course(s)/Discipline(s):

History 1122: Persons and Things in Medieval Europe, History 80b: Persons and Things in Medieval Europe



### Year Created:

2006









 



 

 See also:- [ Arts and Sciences ](/affiliation/arts-and-sciences)
- [ Data Sets ](/project-tags/data-sets)
- [ Database ](/project-tags/database)
- [ Research ](/project-tags/research)
- [ Project ](/project-0)