nicomachus.net

This post is based on a series of workshops I am developing for humanities graduate students and faculty at the University of California, Davis. While some of what I do in the workshops resembles training on a particular program, I find program- or app-specific workshops a bit rudimentary.

That is, they run the risk of becoming what amounts to a digital trade school, when what is needed is something more closely approximating fluency in another language: the language of digital environments. Software will evolve and better apps will replace the ones we use today, so it is less useful to know one program very well and more useful to achieve a level of comfort navigating digital tools for oneself. That said, throughout this post, my principles are repeatedly best exemplified within the context of one program: Evernote.

1. Think of your computer less as the place where all your data lives and more as the thing that gives you access to your data.

** All hard drives crash** Do not think that yours is special and somehow won’t stop working one day. Therefore, you need a backup routine. Dropbox may be the simplest program to use to get started; or I recommend Carbonite for full hard drive, online backup.

Off-site storage is more secure in the long run, since there is a copy outside of your home in the event of catastrophe (fire, theft, EMP). I remember pre-internet stories about graduate students who would print out their in-progress dissertations every week and mail copies to out-of-town friends just to have their own distributed backup. New, digital storage systems make it a lot easier to have that same piece of mind. Just make sure that whatever system you use also makes it easy for you to get access to your stored files when you need them. Since humanities scholarship is mostly text, and text files are rather light (compared to images or video files), the free 2GB Dropbox account may be all you need to back up your most critical work.

Plus, online storage services often offer features that make it easier for you to do your work, even without a catastrophic demonstration of their value. For example, online access to your backed-up files means you have nearly universal access to your work. Both Evernote and Dropbox have websites that allow you to access your files whether you are on your computer or someone else’s.  Evernote’s iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, and Palm apps along with the Dropbox iPhone app mean that you can carry your dissertation around in your pocket. And, some online storage services offer additional features like OCR, pattern detection, and even audio transcription. (Here I am thinking of Google Docs, Evernote, Picasa, Voice2Note.)

2. Let your computer (do some of the) work for you; metadata is your friend.

Metadata is just information about your stuff. If we develop the habit of describing our stuff, and then attach these descriptions to our notes, our files, and even the books and articles that we read, then we are slowly building a searchable index of our own stuff, via editable metadata.

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Tag everything. Think of tags as keywords that describe something about the note, the audio file, the pdf, the article, the photo, or whatever it is to which you are adding a description. Think of tags less as categories or folders and more as the code words in your own personal index.

• Categories, like folders, are a first level of organization. Something (a document, a note, an image) can be in only one folder at a time, and therefore can be in only one category.
• Documents, images, pdfs, articles, notes can all have as many tags as you want. And items in separate folders can be tagged with the same word or phrase.
• This comes in handy when, after you have tagged several notes in Evernote or several book citations in EndNote, you can then search by Tags to find what you’re looking for.
• Use tags to describe an article in a way the author might not. For example, Albert Camus rejected the label existentialist. An article he wrote might, therefore, never use the term. But using tags, I can apply the term to his work so that when searching for articles or short stories under the rubric of existentialism, his works will show up.

Clip articles to read later using Evernote; if you install the Evernote clip tools {Chrome and Firefox extensions}, it’s even easier. Use EndNote or Zotero to quickly grab citation information (and depending on the source library, maybe even an abstract or other summary text) for any scholarly text you are reading.

Ideas for your workflow: store the précis that you write about books and articles in Evernote, drop pdfs into Evernote, export citations into EndNote, upload images (including scans) of text to Google Docs.

Why would you do all this?

Evernote and Google Docs perform OCR by default, which yields searchable text from what was just an image file. The more you store in Evernote, the more useful searching becomes, because at some point, you forget what you have written or what notes you have taken. Often, we find an article or reference in the middle of a web-surfing or database-browsing spree. We’ll never be able to replicate how we ended up finding this one particular article, so why not just grab it and store a copy of it on your computer? Evernote is essentially an easy-to-use personal database, which means that while the learning curve is less steep than database software (because of its intuitive interface), its utility curve may be about the same. That is, you may not see its true strengths until you’ve invested some time into it. And then, the more you invest, the more useful it becomes.

3. Learn to search, not just organize.

Keeping your work organized is a valuable skill, but at some point in your research, you are working on a project that is too large to hold in your head. There are too many citations, too many ideas for chapters, too many subtle differences in arguments. If you have been tagging information all along the way, then you have a way to search through your own stuff.

Spotlight (OS X), Google Desktop Search (Windows), Precipitate (Google Docs search plugin for Spotlight) all allow you to search your own computer, including Evernote files and Google Docs.

If you learn to tag your notes and bibliographic references, then you can search within them for just what you are looking for. You can use EndNote or Evernote to store the pdfs of articles downloaded from JSTOR or elsewhere, which gives you the ability to tag them as well as add meaningful text notes. I don’t know about you, but I am never going to remember that a pdf from JSTOR with the filename 3053803.pdf is an article on gender discrimination in the death penalty. The more simple search terms you learn (e.g. Boolean strings), the more effective you will be finding what you want, both on the web and within your own computer. Use Google’s Advanced Search page to teach yourself some of these techniques. The same techniques will work searching within Evernote. Technologists warn of the coming deluge of data (or “data tsunami” as Alan Blatecky of RENCI calls it). The more effectively you can search, the better prepared you will be for this developing problem.

4. Let these techniques and habits help you find patterns that you would not otherwise see.

This last principle speaks to an emergent utility, one that arises only after you have amassed quite a bit of information and developed the skills to look within it.

Much of scholarship is hard work and deliberation. But some of it is serendipity, which is related to how open you are to finding new ideas in your work or how open you are to seeing it from a new perspective. By becoming stronger at searching, you enhance your ability to find information that you wouldn’t find if you looked just on your own, whether you’re looking for information on the Internet, in an archive, or within your own notes.

If you find these four principles useful, feel free to share this with others by clicking the SHARE button below or save this page in your own Evernote account by clicking the CLIP button.