Kalani Craig

This post is part of a series about the digital tools I use to assist me in reading, writing, teaching and living.

This is perhaps the best example of finding a tool that fits your process.

Because without Scrivener, my writing would look like this:

Stage in my thought process: Two (Information Processing)

Where I use it: To write everything from blog posts (like this one) to my dissertation

What goes in it: The brilliant, articulate writing about topics extracted from catalogued, organized, sorted research in my custom Web app.

Why I chose it: I don’t write linearly, as clearly evidenced by the photo above. I write a few sentences about one topic which sparks an idea for another topic, which… (ad nauseam). Scrivener uses a corkboard-with-index-cards organizing principle. The “index cards,” which can contain as little as a sentence or as much as a chapter, can be put in any order. Move the index card, move the written material contained in the index card. Put a bunch of index cards in a folder, create a subsection. Put a bunch of subsection folders in an even higher-level folder, create a chapter. It’s like storyboarding, but for book-length writing projects.

This post is part of a series about the digital tools I use to assist me in reading, writing, teaching and living.

One of my most vivid recollections of the research project actually belongs to someone else’s past. The first week I was in grad school, my advisor showed me a 15-year-old collection of filed and labeled index cards, index cards that were the organizing principle behind her dissertation. My version of that index-card collection is a database, complete with a custom front-end Web application, which I use in combination with Zotero to organize my research.

Stage in my thought process: Two (Information Processing)

Where I use it: Storing, cataloging, and retrieving notes for use in studying, researching, teaching and footnoting. Secondary storage of secondary scholarly sources in Zotero, mostly for the bibliography formatting. Long-term storage and organization of notes exported from and originally taken in Skim.

What goes in it: Processed information applicable to academic research or pedagogy. That includes my own annotations and responses to the entirety of a source, along with annotations and responses to specific pages or sections of sources. These annotations are tagged by source, category and keyword, and the annotations on specific sections of sources also include page numbers for reference and recall purposes. I also collect lecture and discussion plans (with dates instead of page numbers) and notes that are geared toward future projects but based in already-read sources. I also include HTML-formatted Chicago-style citations for each source exported from Zotero.

Why I chose it: For me to feel as though I’m properly attending to my research and teaching goals, I need a system that organizes and tracks my thoughts within each project as well as pointing out the common threads between projects. My custom app does this with tags (like Evernote and Zotero), with citations (like EndNote and Zotero), and with parent-child relationships between notes (like Zotero). This system serves as a long-term storage and retrieval solution for all of the research and pedagogy information gathering. It ties together all of the information about all of my projects exported from Evernote and Skim via tags, but it also acts as a bibliography and citation tool in combination with Zotero.

Check out a sample of one of the “Tag” pages, with links to related sources, related in-source notes, and related tags:

Zotero and EndNote played a very important role in the development of this system. I’ve used both. I hated EndNote because it was miserable at importing and formatting citations, didn’t allow page-by-page note-taking, and crashed Word too often. I liked Zotero, but it didn’t fit my needs in quite the right ways. I couldn’t annotate my longer sources–primary or secondary, monograph or article–in enough detail or enough depth in Zotero. Zotero has gotten better at that, but it’s still too difficult to tie a single note about page 56 of a particular book to that book’s bibliographical listing in Zotero. I also had difficulty importing my annotations from Skim in ways that were useful for me. Finally, I wanted to be able to note-surf by using a list of related tags and related sources that were linked based on how often two tags applied to the same sources and to notes within those sources.

There are downsides to building your own tools, however. Zotero’s bibliographic formatting and ability to store PDFs in full is a big plus. EndNote’s integration with Word, however unstable, is a lovely idea. Combining custom code with Zotero was the key to a system that both tracks citations and allows me to properly organize my thoughts for research projects (though I still have to take the citations out of my system and put them into footnote form manually). Zotero holds the original documents and citation formats, my own programming keeps track of my responses to those documents on a page-by-page basis and ties the whole organizational system together.

This post is part of a series about the digital tools I use to assist me in reading, writing, teaching and living.

Skim (Mac OS only) is what Adobe Acrobat wants to be when it grows up, at least as a reading and annotation tool. While Acrobat Pro is hard to beat for OCR, PDF creation and optimization, it falls short in the realm of note-taking and annotation.

Stage in my thought process: One (Information Gathering)

Where I use it: Reading books and articles for research, including those digitized from the photography process.

What goes in it: My annotations on important sections in academic publications.

Why I chose it: Skim’s primary purpose is note-taking. Acrobat has note-taking options, but that’s not its primary goal, and the interface difference makes that very clear. Skim offers several different colors of highlighting, easy annotation, sticky notes, export formats and a number of search and filter features on notes that make it a clear winner.

This post is part of a series about the digital tools I use to assist me in reading, writing, teaching and living.

Combined with a 9×13 piece of 1/2″-thick plexiglas, my Canon SD1000 point-and-shoot camera becomes a lightning-fast scanner. A few pieces of software turn the images into digital documents, for those times when I need a portable digital version of an important source.

Stage in my thought process: One (Information Gathering)

Where I use it: Anywhere I see a paper document that needs to be digital for ease of access

What goes in it: Book excerpts, student assignments, receipts, archival documents I can’t take with me but need to refer to. Photoshop has a “Shadows and Highlights” adjustment tool that, coupled with batch processing, means photo-by-photo contrast adjustment without any actual work on my part. The icing on the cake: Acrobat’s OCR (optical character recognition) turn images with writing in them into text that can be copied, pasted, highlighted (for easy note-taking) and searched.

Why I chose it: Fewer back problems and easier access to my sources. I carry fewer books and therefore a lighter bag, and the sources I refer to on a regular basis are with me all the time, ripe for the picking and citing.

This post is part of a series about the digital tools I use to assist me in reading, writing, teaching and living.

Evernote’s tagline is “Remember everything,” and for good reason. This free service lets you save anything you come across, write, see, or think almost instantly. Tags categorize everything for ease of retrieval and synchronization across devices means you can get to your notes anywhere there’s Web access.

Stage in my thought process: One (Information Gathering)

Where I use it: Web surfing (a handy Firefox plug-in sends whole Web pages to Evernote) and out and about (for note-taking, reminders, etc.)

Why I chose it: Tags, synchronization, and handwriting recognition. Across platforms, at any computer within reach, I can save information to and get information from Evernote. It’s online, so it’s backed up. The tags allow fast, but very granular, categorization of information so I can immediately put personal stuff into permanent storage while still quickly organizing professional stuff for transfer into other archiving systems later. An OCR (optical character recognition) system that reads handwriting means any image with writing in it gets transformed into text that can be copied, pasted and searched.

What goes in it: My brain. More specifically, things I can’t be bothered to remember but might die or be fired if I can’t find again. Personal stuff (recipes, bills, shopping lists), anything I see online that’s related to professional development (blog posts about the job market or publication techniques, random information on research-oriented topics), stuff I want to read later but will likely forget otherwise.