.: POST
2008.05.11 Humanities Dissertation Project The Humanities Dissertation Project / 4
I wrote a while ago that computing blogs bore me. This is still true. But this is a project not of telling you, the reader, about new gadgets or my complaints about various forms of software. Instead, this is documentation. I am documenting the technical means by which I am constructing my dissertation in the Humanities (for the Department of English Language and Literature). So, more than anything, what I write here keeps track of the modifications I am making, installations I’m doing, etc., as I find something that works well for me.
But I am also humbly imagining a service that I am providing for people who realize that there must be a more comfortable and fulfilling way of producing academic work than within Microsoft Office. There is. But before I can go into greater detail, I have to explain that I, personally, imagine the academic process as made up of four steps:
- research
- collecting research
- drafting / writing
- submitting
Word, especially with collaboration with EndNote, tries to be the main player in all four steps. I think that kind of thinking is misguided. More importantly, it limits creativity, as the user gets frustrated with being only able to work within what Word expects.
We humanities students need to remember that there is no one tool that does everything for us, not even our brains. We should not be using Microsoft Word (or Pages) for everything we do.
My “day job” is working with computers for the Economics and Sociology departments, and I just installed a computer for an Economics professor that uses Mathematica, MATLAB, and Stata. And his installation is not unique–in the social sciences, they realize that different tools do different things well. To me, all three of those programs “do stuff with numbers,” yet to the professor, they clearly excel at separate tasks.
In the humanities, we need to internalize that “doing stuff with text” means different things depending on what we’re doing. So just like the Econ prof distributes his doing things with numbers among several programs (and we can include LyX and TeXShop to his specific process), we need to distribute our own doing things with text among several programs.
But before I return to the four steps in academic production above, I should include my sort of outlined boundaries of this project:
- I’m writing documentation only for Macs. I don’t hate PCs; I use one nearly every day, and one of the main reasons I want a new, fast Mac is so that I can run PC software on it via Parallels. But I’m writing my dissertation on a Mac. Steps 2 and 4 of the dissertation/research process (collecting research and submitting) are cross-platform (and free). But my steps 1 and 3 will be Mac-specific (and cost money).
- I’m trying to keep costs down. Microsoft Office is free for me, because of a University agreement, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to hand-build competition that costs money. But there are some benefits to spending money, and that goes into 3.
- I want to be able to find help easily. All four steps of the research project are backed by software with a very active user community doing stuff that is very similar to what I want to do. Word forums are full of people trying to get mail merges to work, or solving Blue Screens of Death, or doing any of the 2300839403 things that Word can also do. And this is, of course, true only for when answers to Word problems aren’t hidden behind for-pay firewalls.
Some of the software I’m using is maintained by a handful of people (or in the case of Scrivener and MultiMarkDown, just one person apiece), and I have their email addresses. My concerns go straight to them, not into a massive pool of complaint that must exist outside of Redmond.
- I want to be able to bail and configure easily. If a system stops being updated, I don’t want to be left out in the lurch. So I want to be working with, almost exclusively, open formats that, with known limitations, have been around for a long time. Similarly, I want to be able to configure things easily should something newer and better come about. This means I want to be able to define styles and configurations within text files, not within a bunch of buttons I have to click nested deep in submenus.
So now I can provide a basic computing framework for how I expect my personal academic process to look:
- Research. This will be done by reading and commenting by me, with the data ending up in a Personal Information Manager. I’m using, for that, DEVONthink Pro, which cost me under $40 with the instant educational discount. Obviously, other PIMs exist, such as Yojimbo, a Moleskine notebook (my original plan), or just regular note-cards. But I will be writing about DEVONthink when it comes time to solve problems with step 1 (so far I haven’t found any).
- Collecting Research. This is marshalling the information I already have. For this, I’m using Zotero, an extension for Firefox, as a bibliographic manager. This second step is sort of non-linear, as what data is in Zotero gets updated at the same time as new data enters into DEVONthink, but it is a separate process, so it gets its own step. Here one can use, again, note-cards, Sente, EndNote, or even RefWorks. Zotero, however, for me is light, fast, and it doesn’t make a lot of mistakes. It’s also free and exciting, and it will soon be portable—having access to my bibliography anywhere in the world is very tantalizing.
- Drafting/Writing. I’m not sure if this is the most important part of the process. It’s certainly not the least important. For now, I’m using Scrivener, which cost me under $40 with the educational discount.
Most of my writing lately is in TextEdit, but that is for short things, like this post. Something that is juggling several balls at once, like a dissertation proposal, works much better in Scrivener, which can let me see the intellectual structure of the document (the “outline”) right beside the document itself. Scrivener can also provide me with a wide open space where I can write without distraction (full-screen mode). In the proposal, where shifts occur on a paragraph basis, that is not as useful as I imagine it will be when I am actually writing the chapters.
I’m using Scrivener along with MultiMarkdown to generate usable, cleanish .tex files for step 4. MultiMarkdown is built into Scrivener, but since I know I will be making customizations to it, it is worth installing separately.
- Submitting. I want to submit only pdfs. I want to not have to worry about citations looking right. I want what I submit to work, period. I don’t want to worry about renumbering footnotes, or losing cross references. And I want it to look sharp. Here, I’m going to be using the MacTeX distribution of TeX, and I’m going to be using, more specifically, the XeLaTeX/XeTeX macros to generate my pdfs.
So now I can start my documenting process!
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4 COMMENTS
Joachim added these pithy words on Jul 08 08 at 20:28This is a very exciting and helpful project! I am using basically the same workflow, and you are doing all the hard work of figuring the details out for me, so thanks
While I also really am intrigued by Zotero, I am not quite convinced, that it really is easier in your workflow, since you (like me) use DTP for the “storing” of information and only use Zotero as a bib tool. Why not use BibDesk? It’s fantastic, versatile, free, and highly supported by a very active user and programmer base.
Joachim added these pithy words on Jul 10 08 at 10:36One more thing… I recently took another look at Ulysses and now that I have decided to go LaTeX, it seems to me that you might want to give this a good look as well. It has far less features then Scrivener, granted, but it seems to me that we have similar working-styles and needs and you might find that less is more here as well. The conversion to LaTeX is really more straightforward in my view. Just a thought.
m added these pithy words on Jul 13 08 at 21:49Joachim,
I just don’t particularly like BibDesk. It doesn’t feel like a useful program to me–this is entirely a style thing, though. Furthermore, I like Zotero’s ability to read my university’s library catalog webpage. It just feels faster–though the payoff is having to reformat a non-trivial amount every time I export.
I’ll check out Ulysses.
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