Yet another post recording a workflow so that I don’t forget what I decided to do!
This time I’ve had serious help from my brilliant friend and colleague Jenny Mackness, who generously shared with me the tools she uses (and how she uses them) in writing research articles, including PBworks, Word, Mendeley, and Evernote.
It was only as I investigated and tried these, thinking about her workflow and constantly reminding myself what task(s) I was trying to accomplish, that I realized something about doing research in the information age (or whatever the hell we’ll call this).
What we used to need to write research papers was:
1. bibliography cards for recording references (3 x 5)
2. note cards for recording one idea/note/quotation each (4 x 6)
3. notepads for outlining and brainstorming
4. more notepads for composition
5. typewriter/electronic typewriter/word processor/word-processing program on computer for formatting and final copy
Turns out the process hasn’t changed, just the technology. I think I’m going with:
1. Paperpile for bibliography
I’ve actually paid for this, and I rarely pay for anything. It’s a database where you either enter the bibliographic information or it figures it out from an uploaded PDF (which it actually uploads to Google Drive, not itself). You can annotate the PDF files and add notes to them, but I’ve found this only works well for recent articles. I’m using a lot of stuff from the 1880s, and those PDFs don’t do so well because the program does not OCR. The annotations and notes export, but not in a usable way. So I have quite a few articles where I likely won’t use the notes, but the highlighting is helpful. The best thing is that it integrates for footnoes in Google Docs. The other best thing is that it outputs bibliographies with multiple citation formats.
2. Google Keep for notecards
I’ve gone round and round on this, looking for something that tiles notecards on the screen, and makes them searchable. I tried Evernote again, and still don’t get how to see all the info at once. The main issue is integration between the notes and whatever program I use for composition. I looked at several other programs also, desperate to not go with Google. I know it’s likely Google Keep will disappear, since it’s “below the fold” on the Google menu, so this decision was influenced by #4, below.
3. PBworks for outlining
Jenny taught me that the old Peanut Butter Wiki is still around and handy. Here I can put research notes (not content, but process), library holdings lists, plans for articles, basic outlines, links to all the Google Docs (including the pdfs being used by Paperpile) and other stuff online that I might need.
4. Google Docs for composition
It’s the equivalent of those legal pads (I actually used letter-sized lined glued pads, and still do). Because of its integration with Paperpile, and the ease of writing from any of my four (!) computers, it’s the logical choice.
5. Word for formatting
It seems so bizarre that computing hasn’t saved a single step in the old research process, but it hasn’t. Word is crap at all the other processes here except composition, but I’d have to go all Microsoft to get another suite together, and, frankly, they wanted my cell phone number to give me that with OneNote and OneDrive (no). Several journals and conferences want submissions in .docx, and I’ve been using Word since before version 5.1a for Mac (the best version ever). Now if I could just get those citations from Paperpile to come through Google Docs in black instead of gray….
The biggest challenge will be backup (for the work, not for me, although that would be nice). PBworks is best at this – you can back up (export) the whole wiki in html with two clicks. Google, of course, does not want you backing up to your hard drive – it wants you cloud-dependent. So remembering to back up composition Docs as I go is a thing, but I managed it on my recent presentation so I think I can do it. Google Keep backup is awkward at best – you basically have to put them in a Doc and export to get anything usable. But at least a Doc can be exported as plain text.
So, now to work…
That the step between 1/2 (recording) and 3 (outlining) has to be done entirely in your head, seems to be unquestionable. Comparing this to step ‘mental arithmetic’, it is as if written multiplication (‘down 3 carry 1’) had not yet been invented. I know a tool for this step.
Hello Matthias! Thank you so much for commenting and yes – I’d even need to add some “inner mind” steps in between all of these, the sort of thing one does on long walks. I remember you created a mind-mapping tool, and I know Jenny uses it too. I think I used it for CCK08 and a couple of other things, but last night I began mapping on paper. I shall return to it now, if you’ll remind me how to obtain it?
The address is http://condensr.de/