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Introduction to CTP

Published onSep 29, 2021
Introduction to CTP
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Introduction

The Criminology Tracking Project (CTP) is a crowd-sourced social-tagging project running on free software (TagTeam) to capture criminology: its who, what, when, where, why, how (W5H) and their respective subtypes.1 CTP’s mission is (1) to create real-time alerts for that information and (2) organize it via “tagging” to enable easy searching and sharing. CTP publishes feeds for all newly tagged items and types of them. CTP is in a development phase but ready for use. It was launched by Criminology Open in 2021. CTP will be assigned an ISSN in 2022, if not before.

TagTeam

CTP runs on TagTeam,2 an open-source software program developed for the Open Access Tracking Project.3 TagTeam is now available for open, tag-based research projects on any topic. CTP takes advantage of that; the project hub is here. TagTeam stores all CTP tag records for deduping, export, preservation, modification, and search. TagTeam’s flexible search engine is a powerful way to stay on top of what’s happening and facilitate your research and teaching. And conversely, your research and “course/class prep” can be a powerful way to enhance CTP, for yourself and others, by tagging items not previously tagged or by improving existing tags. CTP supports user-defined tags as well as an evolving ontology or controlled vocabulary of project-approved tags. CTP takes full advantage of TagTeam to automate the conversion of deprecated tags to approved tags. The sum result is CTP helps criminology’s stakeholders stay on top of what’s happening, plus study and share what has happened in the past.

Feeds

CTP publishes feeds for all newly tagged items and types (e.g., W5H and their subtypes).4 All feeds are open access or “OA”: free of charge and free for reuse.5

Primary Feed

The primary feed contains all new items (new within the last six months) noticed and tagged by our taggers. The best way to stay on top of what’s happening in criminology is to follow the primary feed. It’s published in eight file formats to accommodate readers with different needs and preferences. The most popular abridged version of the primary feed is Twitter, and the most popular unabridged version is email.

Secondary Feeds

The secondary feeds are more specialized. CTP publishes a feed for each tag, for each search, and for each user-created boolean combination of any of the other CTP feeds. You can easily make a customized secondary feed to fit your precise interests. You can also make a feed of the items you recommend as the most important, or most worth reading, to share your judgments and expertise with others. Every feed has a unique and self-explanatory URL for easy sharing. For example, all items tagged with "crim.qualitative" are at the URL http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/ctp/tag/crim.qualitative.

Get Started as a Reader

To get started as a reader, go to the HTML version of the primary feed and start reading.6 It’s organized like a blog with the most recent items at the top. Bookmark it and visit whenever you want to catch up. You can also subscribe to the primary feed in many different formats, including RSS, Atom, JSON, Email, and Twitter. These subscriptions are OA.

Volunteer

CTP aims to comprehensively cover criminology. We can best do that with taggers covering all of its W5H.7 Please consider tagging for CTP and helping us recruit other taggers. CTP’s growth—in quantity and quality—reflects the work of taggers. If you are the kind of person who already keeps up with criminology, we need you. For more detail, see Why & How to Be a CTP Tagger. For other ways for volunteers to help CTP, beyond tagging, see the FAQ. For example, we need translations of the page you are on.8

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