A meandering mind…

As mentioned in the previous post there would be a number of posts relating to this theme of Building Blocks to Success. The theme of this post is controlling Chaos. The previous post dealt with as can be seen by scrolling down, project planning and management of tasks. This is about preparing and managing material for these projects and tasks. Anyone can make grand plans, but to follow them through requires you to control chaos. Which wherein lies the challenge!

The challenge facing any one using a computer or digital resource of any kind is organising it. Anyone as has become increasingly obvious in the last number of years can get access to and use a computer. What we do with it is important. As this blogs purpose was to assist and demonstrate progress through my thesis that is the theme I shall pursue although i think it has applications much broader then just academia.

SENTE: One of the biggest problems I have faced is the rapidly growing and already expansive collection of PDF’s and Digital reproductions of books that I have. I have scans from books I need, PDF’s from resources such as Jstor and entire books downloaded, gratefully, from googlebooks. I was faced with over 15gigs of files. Which most would agree is extensive at this point in a long project. I have committed anything I have hard copies of to a digital soft copy format mainly for the proverbial in case. Pages go missing, get damaged etc. This means I have a degree of control and reproduction.

The problem this created was organising such material which must be over 50 digital files. So I went in search of some tool for creating bibliographies out of these on my computer. I must be entirely honest here, I found Sente and it did EXACTLY what I wanted so really I stopped looking. It was easy to use, interacts with Microsoft Word for Mac and Pages (The MAC word processor) which was a problem with Zotero I was able to drag and drop references into Pages and Word with ease. It allowed me to tweak bibliography referencing to suit it exactly to how I needed them to appear for my work without damaging initial references. Also it was able to search the documents itself for source information and provide the bibliography references itself or once you input some helpful hints it would find the rest from the web offering a number of options for you to choose. I had a digital library. Established and running pretty fast. It was an incredibly useful tool for organising and managing the extensive PDF collection I had gathered to myself.

While no strict bibliography tool for books what I’ve started doing is taking images of books online saving them as PDF’s and attaching relevant bibliographic references to them allowing me to reference all the books I’m using, not just my PDF’s. I’ve these seperated into different libraries on the Sente interface itself, namely a PDF Library divided by material content e.g. Patristic Fathers, Apocrypha, Journal Articles and then a final library of Books. Which I’ve found to be a very quick easy process to do!

Another useful feature of this has been that I can add comments in and highlight sections of text and tag it for semantic markup of a sort. It has made keeping my sources in the digital format much easier. Making work with digital material much easier and to some degree more productive, or certainly more efficient.

SKIM: Similar to Sente this tool allows me to annotate  PDF files and allowing me to add in my own text and commentary to a particular PDF which is very useful indeed. This application is also free. And one worth exploring as a good resource for a PDF study tool as it can be an asset to be able to add in commentaries. Although I’ve not used it much since getting Sente it is still a very useful addition to the academic tool box, especially as its free and Sente is not. It also cuts down on complicated paper trails of hand taken notes making organising, tracing and filing your documents with notes attached much easier.

MACSWORD: This, admittedly has limited use and even more limited application but is something that has been extremely useful to me. It’s Bible software, and as I said isn’t useful to everyone. For my Thesis research on the Magi I have had to quote extensively from the Bible as it is my ultimate primary source for the particular area of research that I’m doing. And while not of use to everyone it does have a PC Version available, called ESword.

The Bible as a book is rather big as many know and can be difficult to use if not familiar with it. With MACSword I have been able to make a detailed bookmarking system where I can find all the sections I am using most with ease. I can also have several comparable translations of the text available, including Greek, Latin, English and Aramaic which is useful for comparing structures of composition and individual words and how they are translated from one back to the other etc. The good thing about this software is that it is totally free! All the modules available are all also free and include Strongs Concordance while not the most expansive is certainly one of credibility and respect. A screencast of a how to use is available also for those struggling with it. Referencing the software is easy too as each bible module that is installed is attached to an actual book with full bibliographic references, such as KJV, Clementine Vulgate, NKJV etc.. It’s a wonderful resource and has been instrumental in ease of quoting from the bible as well as management of this fundamental part of my research.

ZOTERO: Here is something I do not like. And what prompted me to search for applications such as Sente and other bibliography tools. It is limited to FireFox, something else I do not like. This may just be coming as a Mac user but it’s not as it’s a limitation for Windows users too. But for Windows users there are plugins available for Microsoft Word that is not available or what is available but is not compatible with Mac Microsoft Word, which is most frustrating.

My browser of choice up until recently has been Safari, I’ve stopped using it due to a lag and delay when opening a new tab which annoys me greatly. I’ve jumped on the Google Chrome ship for Mac and it’s a wonderful browser, fast simple and uncomplicated and customizable! Which is something of a novelty for Mac Interface. The point being everyone has a favourite browser, Firefox is not mine which means the ease of using this tool means I am using a browser I find cumbersome and not to my taste as it’s out of my comfort zone. For a PC user I understand fully the benefits such an application would give.

So had the plugin for Zotero been available it would have been a useful tool for me also, but it’s not and the creation of any such bibliography using the tool would be time wasted for me. So I’ve resorted to other tools, Sente, as already mentioned. It was a case of needs must!