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Research & Teach With CTP

Published onSep 25, 2021
Research & Teach With CTP
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Introduction

If you are researching or teaching (an aspect of) criminology, CTP can help you.1 After our development phase, our taggers will have almost certainly tagged works relevant to your work. The tag records are stored in TagTeam for boolean searching. But don’t just be a user—be a contributor, too. If you tag relevant works not already tagged, you will make CTP more comprehensive, which will help researchers and teachers.

Search CTP for Relevant Work

CTP stores every item ever tagged for it and has a powerful search engine. You can run CTP searches even if you do not have a TagTeam account or, if you do, not logged in. The search engine covers all CTP tag records back to the launch of the project in 2021. We are also tagging items retroactively, and the search engine indexes them as well. (Tagging more items retroactively is another way you can help; more below.) To learn the ropes of the powerful TagTeam search engine, see the TagTeam FAQ or the section on searching in the TagTeam manual. Basically, you can: search tags, keywords, or both in the same search; run phrase searches, wildcard searches, or boolean searches; bookmark any search, create a new feed from the results of any search, or add the results of any search to a remix feed combining many different CTP feeds.

Tag the Works You Find

CTP is crowd-sourced—so join the crowd! CTP depends on the many-eyeballs principle—so lend us your eyeballs! If you notice and tag things that other users have not, you will make CTP more useful. As you find works relevant to your research, teaching, or more broadly, tag them. It just takes a few seconds. For this, you will need to become an CTP tagger; how to do is below. If you are working with a team, get your teammates to tag for the project, too. We hope that many of the items relevant to your research or teaching have already been tagged. In those cases, make sure they were well-tagged, and add any missing tags. This tagging will help you find the tagged items again; help others who subscribe to the tag feeds; and, help those who search CTP.

Back to the Future

When certain tags are important to your research or teaching, make them retroactively comprehensive. For example, if you are (becoming) an expert in qualitative criminology, you would aim to find many of the relevant people (e.g., researchers), outputs (e.g., articles, videos), places (e.g., qualitativecriminology.com), and branches (e.g., theories and methods)—old and new. If you tag them as you encounter them, you are making the crim.qualitative retroactively comprehensive.

Share Links to Relevant Tag Libraries

Every CTP tag automatically comes with a unique library (with an associated URL) and published feed. Hence, when CTP taggers have been good about tagging work on criminology’s W5H2 and their respective subtypes, these tag libraries will be very comprehensive. Sharing the URL is a fast way to share a comprehensive, growing collection of items on that criminology niche. For example:

Find or Create the Best Tags for You

First, see the CTP list of project-approved tags. Post our development phase, some or all of your interests might already have project tags. Second, if some aspect of your topic does not yet have a CTP tag, make up a good one. CTP supports user-defined tags. Tell us about your tag and its intended use. We might adopt it as an official project-approved tag. Or consult with us and we can help you come up with a good one to complement existing CTP tags, or we can help you figure out whether CTP already has a tag for a certain meaning. See the FAQ on how to tell whether a given tag is already in use. Feel free to create idiosyncratic tags for your research or teaching. For example, if you are named Zozo and you are writing a dissertation, feel free to introduce a tag like zozo-diss, or oa.zozo-diss. Or for that matter, zozo-diss-subtopic1zozo-diss-subtopic2, and so on. Not all CTP tags need be useful or even intelligible to other users.

Publicize Your Work

When your research outputs or course materials are ready to share, put them online (with a unique URL) and then tag them for CTP. This will publicize them to the whole criminology community. It will also make them discoverable to future researchers and teachers who run CTP searches. Do not only tag your published articles, for example, but also preprints, theses, dissertations, slide decks, blog posts, wiki pages, datasets, code, et cetera. If you were not already a CTP tagger during your research or “course prep,” you will need to become a tagger to tag your outputs and materials.

Create a Recommendation Feed

If you are an expert on (an aspect of) criminology then you know of a large and rapidly growing number of developments.3 We hope they are all being tagged for CTP, perhaps with your help. But if you would like to go beyond ordinary tagging by highlighting the items you regard as most important, you can create a special feed for your recommendations. It gives you a way to share your expertise, spread your influence, and help readers cope with information overload.

On What?

You could recommend items broadly on an aspect of criminology. You could recommend items that you discover on your own or items already discovered and tagged by others. To take advantage of the “criminology tracking” done by other taggers, subscribe to the CTP primary feed (all the new items), or the CTP full feed (all the items, new and old). When you come across an item you want to recommend, just add your own recommendation tag (e.g., crim.janedoe) and the item will enter your recommendation feed.

By Who?

You can make recommendations as an individual or as a group. Any entity could share its expertise or perspective by creating a recommendation feed in its own name: a project, working group, publisher, library, university, scholarly society, foundation, non-profit organization, et cetera. Here are four ways to make it work for a group:

  1. The group designates one member to tag the works the group recommends.

  2. Two to all members of the group tag recommended works, and create a remix feed combining their separate recommendation feeds.

  3. The group shares a single TagTeam account and login.

  4. If the group recommendation tag is group-rec, and members of the group have usernames User1, User2, and User3, then create a boolean search of "group-rec AND (User1 OR User2 OR User3)" and share the unique URL for that boolean search.

How To Create a Recommendation Feed

Creating a recommendation feel simply involves applying a special tag to the items you want to share. For example, if your username is Zozo, then you might pick zozo-rec as your recommendation tag. Then share the URL for the feed of items you personally tag with zozo-rec.4 In this case, that would be http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/ctp/user/zozo/tag/zozo-rec. For more general information, see our FAQ entry on how to deep-link to all items tagged with a given tag by a given tagger.

How To Share Your Feed and Get Credit

Once you create your recommendation feed, share the URL widely (e.g., on your profile pages, on your blog, on social media, in your email signature). Recruit readers to follow your feed, and amplify your impact. By default TagTeam makes every feed available in HTML, RSS, Atom, and JSONP. If those are not enough for you, then use online tools to convert the RSS feed to an email feed, Twitter feed, Google+ feed, and so on. These feeds have built-in attribution (i.e., credit), so if it is your recommendation feed then readers will know it is yours.5

Cite CTP

If you use CTP in your research or teaching, please cite it. As more people learn of CTP then more people will tag for it, increasing its comprehensiveness and usefulness. You can cite the whole project (using our homepage URL, https://trackcriminology.com) or specific tag libraries. For example, if you write an article on crime in England, cite and link to the CTP tag library for crim.england. Your citation could mention that that the CTP tag library will include real-time updates even after your article is published. It could also mention that the CTP library is crowd-sourced, and that readers can make it more comprehensive by tagging for CTP. In the same way, link to CTP tag libraries on certain aspects criminology from Wikipedia articles, blog posts, email discussions, and social-media messages on the same things.

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