Writing – Page 62 – a sibilant intake of breath

Thesis document organization strategies

A practical question to those who have walked the path of grad school before me: when working on a major research project, how did you take notes on books, articles, and the rest? How did you file those notes? Also, how did you file documents and photocopies that served as sources? All the archivist readers of this blog out there, now is your time to show your colours.

I will be using EndNote for citation purposes, largely to save myself from the need to deal with the formatting of hundreds of distinct footnotes (for substantive asides) and endnotes (for simple citation). While the EndNote program does have faculties for note organization, there are two problems. One is the clunky interface, which does not strike me as useful for much beyond the aforementioned auto-citing. The other is the fact that I can only access EndNote on the departmental terminal server; I do not have a copy of my own, but have to use it on a virtual desktop of Windows Server 2003. That said, acquiring my own copy of the program might prove a necessary expense, both for the thesis and subsequent research projects. I certainly wish I had been using it when I wrote the fish paper.

The first big choice for overall organization seems to be pen and paper versus electronic; though the variety of sources will always make the whole library somewhat hybrid, hopefully with 90% in the dominant medium and a well-sorted 10% in the other. I find taking notes on the computer likely to be overly distracting, though my handwritten notes can be far from elegant. At the same time, my computer files are generally both very well organized and easily searchable. As such, the ideal option might be to write notes by hand, then type and print them. Of course, there are time and financial limitations on that approach. The whole blog constellation is also a good organizational tool for me.

Perhaps most important, did anyone try a system that completely failed to work, and should be avoided? I expect the thesis to eventually involve hundreds of sources. Most of them will be books that I have access to but do not own, and journal articles which I can print or photocopy. I have a big hanging file box to sort such articles, and perhaps photocopied sections from books, but I need to devise a system to coordinate the hundreds of pages of my own notes that this project will ultimately rest upon.

Preferences, re: ponderings

A comment was posted earlier that has a certain resonance. While there is no greater online sin than blogging about blogging, I will trespass for a moment – always with the aim of pleasing you better, dear spectators. The comment:

You know, if you took the amount of time you spend on a week’s worth of these mediocre mumblings and used it to write one thing, it might be good?

This is a possibility I have wondered about myself. I feel a constant urge to write, but it may be better directed in a less haphazard direction. At the same time, about 100 people a day read the blog; I am willing to bet that is more people than will read my thesis, in total, between now and the end of humanity.

The issue, then, is not the medium, but the message. What would it be more socially useful to write? Before seeing that comment, I was going to write tonight’s post about metallurgy and the possibility that we are living in a ‘composite age.’ Hardly my area of expertise, and hardly an area of interest of most people who I know to be reading the blog.

The format of this blog is intentionally somewhat experimental, as well as somewhat scatterbrained. All told, I am skeptical about whether I can impose a pattern upon something as ephemeral as daily posts, but constructive criticism and suggestions about profitable directions to take would be most appreciated.

PS. We had our 30,000th visit today.

Early thesis fatigue

Most people in the program seem to be eyeing the thesis with a mixture of apprehension and regret. The difficulties of making an original contribution to an academic discipline are not to be underestimated. On the one hand, you can opt to find a distinct gap in the existing literature and fill it. The first problem with that is that you need to know the existing literature well. Secondly, you risk being pre-empted by someone else. Thirdly, it may not be a terribly interesting task to mechanically fill in a box that has essentially been defined by someone else.

An ambitious lot, most people in the program seem set on answering a big question. The biggest (like mine) are more a nebulous question-territory than a question itself. For this approach, the most demanding task is the generation of a precise question and an interesting argument. Everything beyond that is just argumentation and commentary, requiring effort but little vision.

Vision, indeed, is that essential commodity that everyone is seeking: whether in the pages of academic journals or those of novels, whether in the libraries of Oxford or the internship cubicles that line the corridors of power. May each of them find it, and thus have one more highly worthwhile achievement to file under the heading of ‘the Oxford M.Phil.’

Sweetness in the belly

Puccino’s coffee shop, off Cornmarket Street in Oxford, makes an effort to be a distinctive place. One way in which it does so: humorous little messages written on the sugar packets. You see one that says something pleasantly absurd, like “Sprinkle onto shoulders of enemy,” so you drop it in some obscure pocket. My standard style of pants have seven.

That’s fine – the packet becomes a lump in a place you never notice… Until you get patted down at airport security, Gatwick. Then, having a lump of white powder with such instructions becomes something of a liability. Good thing you can assuage their fears with relative ease, though the obvious means of doing so might be a bit bad for your teeth.

On pen varieties

For some time, I have been wondering about the difference between ballpoint and rollerball pens. They do, after all, seem quite similar in construction. Each uses a ball bearing (often made of tungsten carbide) as a mechanism to moderate the flow of ink from reservoir to paper.

As it turns out, the difference lies less with the mechanism than with the ink. Anyone who has ever accidentally broken open a Bic ballpoint pen knows that the ink inside is thick and goopy. This partly explains why ballpoint pens can be hesitant to start writing after a long period of non-use. Rollerball pens, by contrast, use a thinner, water-based ink. It is more vulnerable to smudging that ballpoint ink, but less likely to leave a spot where you begin writing. They also feel smoother to use, though not as much so as fountain pens, since you are still exerting the effort to make the ball turn, despite friction.

Generally, I use a four-colour Bic pen to take notes and mark up things that I am reading. I have developed a system over the years that lets me find specific things and kinds of things in books and articles I have read much more quickly than by skimming unmarked versions. The flexibility of the four colours makes up for how the pen is somewhat thick and inelegant in the appearance of the text it produces. For letters, I use a fountain pen, in hope of making them more legible to my much frustrated correspondents (I never really learned how to print, much less handwrite, in a clear manner. It is generally legible enough, but certainly not elegant.) When writing to myself, or trying to make my writing look as good as it can, I generally use my better Cross ballpoint pen, or a rollerball.

What do other people use, and why?

Bloggers within my program

[Update: 14 October 2006] Entry redacted

A small request for those commenting

I would be much obliged if, when commenting, you would call yourself something other than ‘Anonymous.’ Anything at all that distinguishes you from other commenter who don’t want to leave names, aliases, or initials would be wonderful. At present, threads with multiple commenters, all called ‘Anonymous’, are likely to become rather difficult to understand.

With regards to the need to provide an email address, this is to help prevent spam comments. Using your real email address, will over, time reduce the probability of your comment getting eaten as spam. That said, I do have the ability to see which email addresses people have listed. If you really don’t want me to know who you are, you can always use something like “nottelling@history.ox.ac.uk” or whatever strikes your fancy. Doing so will somewhat increase the probability of your comment being marked as spam, but if you aren’t doing anything else dodgy – like linking to virus laden websites – you should be fine regardless. The system is also clever enough to learn, over time, that comments from a particular computer are safe.

I very much enjoy getting comments and engaging in discussion here. Along with other roles, the blog is a device through which I hope to refine ideas and positions, on the basis of intelligent criticism. As such, all substantive contributions are appreciated.

As always, any technical problems with the blog should be reported on the bug thread.

Summer days

With nine days left before I go to Dublin, I am pondering how the time can best be spent, and what sort of spurs I might use to ensure that most of it is used productively. At the very least, I should finish the latest tranche of work for Dr. Hurrell, as well as the bits of thesis reading I am in the process of completing already. More ambitiously, it would be nice to finally finish with the eternal fish paper. I need to de-scale and clean it: removing more than 20% of the total words, while rebalancing a few things. Working with it is much like trying to handle a piece of machinery in the dark that was once very familiar to you, but now continuously surprises you a bit with things that are not where you remember them being, sections with purposes that elude your comprehension, and a general loss of intuitive understanding.

As I am sure more seasoned veterans of the grad school experience could have told me in advance, life is rather less productive overall when it isn’t particularly structured. The absence of the need to discuss readings at particular times tends to make them languish on your shelves. Likewise, the absence of any deadline for the completion of research or papers tends to leave the ideas lingering in dusty corners of the hard drive or the brain. This is the basic reason why the protagonist of Good Will Hunting is wrong to chastise people for spending money on graduate education when they could just use the local library for free. The problem isn’t fundamentally one of information access, but rather of human motivation.

Today, I also wrote a batch of messages to people who I have, at one time or another, had substantial contact with, but with whom I now exchange very little information. Such people have at least temporarily become as constellations in my personal firmament. Indeed, I very often find myself imagining their response to a particular project and idea, then altering my own positions and actions on the basis of their simulated contribution. Exchanging a letter with them every month or so is probably an excellent accompaniment for that process; it will, at the very least, keep them from drifting too far off themselves, as I keep writing lines for them to speak.

PS. Mica has a new music video up. People are encouraged to discuss it on his blog. In many ways, it is unlike anything he has made before.

PPS. While my digital camera is off in dust rehab, I am operating off the stock of photos I have taken previously. Apologies if they are not particularly topical, current, or interesting.

Strange and annoying WordPress bug

I am abandoning the What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor that is built into WordPress (they call it the ‘visual rich editor’). It has the extremely nasty habit of randomly inserting literally hundreds of [em] tags and [/em] tags into pages with complex formatting, such as my academic C.V. Usually, it closes every tag that it randomly opens, so the formatting isn’t visibly affected. As soon as you try to change some small thing, however, everything goes insane. Going back through and fixing all of these mangled pages is a big pain.

WordPress also has serious trouble dealing with [p] tags and line breaks.

I hope the cause behind this was identified in the recent bug hunt and will not trouble people after the next major release.

Spelling, grammar, and public writing

Talking to people about some of the essay editing I have been doing, in various capacities, I find that there are two general positions when it comes to grammatical and typographical errors. Most people fit pretty squarely into one or the other group, and a fair amount of animosity seems to fly between the two. Normally, my impulse is to call for restraint in in the prosecution of such campaigns. In this case, however, I think the argument in favour of the second position is quite clear-cut.

The first group feels that the important thing is just making clear what you mean. Misspelling a proper name, using the wrong homonym (its v. it’s), and similar errors are not of great consequence, because anyone can tell what you meant. I have some sympathy for this view, particularly because it can lay some claim to being anti-exclusionary. English is a weird language and it is hard to learn. A lot can be said for tolerating those who are in the process of doing so. The internet and other venues are richer for their contributions, and it is unreasonable to expect perfect use of language from those who are still getting used to it. Indeed, I would be extremely hard pressed to write a perfect post or comment in French.

At the same time, those who are capable of writing proper English have little excuse not to do so, whether online or in a different context. The second group – to which I belong – sees writing properly as a duty the writer owes to their audience. To just throw unedited text at people is disrespectful, because it shows that you don’t care enough about them to present them with something polished. I am not talking here about Joyce or e.e. cummings bending the rules – that is the privilege of anyone who knows them well enough to toy with them. A style deliberately different from standard English is not comparable to carelessly written English. I am talking about those people who can’t be bothered to check their spelling and read over what they wrote to make sure it accords with the basic conventions of English grammar. With built-in spellchecking and nearly effortless editing fundamental to modern word processing, there is really no excuse.

A secondary benefit is that taking the time to re-read what you’ve composed lets you better make sure that you aren’t about to put something malformed or uninformed into a public place, where it may embarrass you to many people, and where it may be hard to remove.