Look mom! I’m crowdsourcing!
So, here’s the deal: I have to give a short presentation next week on web apps and software that will make life easier for people doing a dissertation in English. There are some obvious things I’d recommend – Dropbox, Evernote, Scrivener/PageFour – but I wanted to see if anyone out there had some recommendations for services or software they think would help with the following things:
- Organizing notes/random ideas. Though Zotero is great for aggregating ‘official’ academic research, is there a better solution than Evernote for collecting, storing and making searchable all the little scraps and ideas that one collects over the course of a large written project? The thing about Evernote is that it’s a little clunky performance-wise and this’ll likely turn off a group of people who can be a bit wary of technology as it is.
- Writing long documents that contain multiple revisions. I think Scrivener is the ideal here but, in addition to the fact that I run Windows, the Mac/PC split is at least 50/50 in the department, if not 30/70. PageFour is the Windows option, but I was really hoping for free (and less ugly). Even MS Word tips for long-form documents would help.
- And well, anything else, really. If there are other apps/software you think would be of use to grad students in the humanities, I’d love to hear about them. Essentially, the key things to doing a diss in English are gathering a large amount of scattered information, responding to and interpreting it (often in fragments) and then organizing that into a large, frequently updated document that takes a year or two to write.
Free is good, as is foolproof. Any help would be much appreciated!
Advertisement
#1 by Jef on January 15, 2010 - 1:18 pm
Not sure if this fits your purposes (organization and revision), but I do know a lot of writers/academics who make use of Scribd for publishing and sending out, getting feedback, finding similar works, etc.: http://www.scribd.com/about
#2 by Tim Carmody on January 15, 2010 - 1:42 pm
I use a lot of things. The most important for me is probably Yep, which I use to organize PDFs. I also infrequently use Papers.
Bento is a nice database app that I’ve mostly used for the job market the past two years. Also good for CFPs.
A calendar is essential.
I really like MS’s note-taking app in the 2007 office suite, which isn’t in the Mac version.
EndNote is a great alternative to Zotero, particularly if you’ve got the cash and do most of your research off the web.
I infrequently use OmniOutliner, but I like it. James Fallows did a good roundup of outlining apps a while back. .
#3 by Nav on January 17, 2010 - 10:28 pm
Goddamit, I really need to pick up the pace on these responses. But thank you! Those are super helpful (though Endnote is waaaay too expensive for us poor Canucks).
Will let you know what the response is like.
#4 by Melissa on January 19, 2010 - 1:05 pm
RefWorks is an old classic with the WriteNCite add-on for Word. OneNote is interesting, although a bit unwieldy at times and expensive if you’re not an Office 2007 user already.
#5 by Nav on January 19, 2010 - 5:09 pm
Thanks Melissa! I was looking at OneNote and was trying to figure out whether that was better than Evernote. Evernote is free though, so I think I’ll roll with that. I think the general idea is basically to say “look, there’s all this cool stuff that may help you” and then have people see if anything works for them.
From what Prof Creet has said, apparently Zotero is preferable to RefWorks. I’m not sure why, since using them requires doing research. And who wants to do *that*? Ahem.
#6 by Melissa on January 20, 2010 - 9:23 pm
Not meeee!
#7 by Melissa on January 22, 2010 - 2:59 pm
I heard your presentation went really well. Congrats! I’ll definitely be bookmarking this for post-comps, when I’ll actually make better use of it.
#8 by Heather on January 24, 2010 - 5:53 pm
Zotero is better than refworks because it is easier to manage. Using refworks requires a seminar (almost) and zotero has free video tutorials. It is also open-source and run by a non-profit committed to the development of such software tools.
I recommend SCRIBE built with Filemaker (Filemaker is awesome, but costs a pretty penny). It’s tailored to the needs of a history student – but it’s free and pretty awesome.
Hope that helps a little.