I do try to put down something about the methods and the main findings at minimum. It also helps to write it as if you were explaining it to a classmate so that you don’t use shorthand that won’t make sense to you later.

I couldn’t resist using a new software tool. I’m using Scrivener, a Mac-only application for writers. I like that it is designed for re-organizing and tagging which is what I’ll do when I have a better handle on how I want to organize the project. For now I can just write whatever comes to mind. Well-organized text files would probably work just as well.

And so the student, like the industrious bee, will fly about through all the authors’ gardens and light on every small flower of rhetoric, everywhere collecting some honey that he may carry off to his own hive. Since there is such a great abundance of subjects in these, a complete gleaning is not possible, and he will be sure to select the most important and adapt them to the pattern of his work. There are some which can be adapted not only for different, but even for opposite uses, and therefore should be noted down in several places. For example, if you should be treating the incurable cupidity of a miser, you would rightly adapt the fable of Charybdis. Likewise, if you were discussing insatiable gluttony, or the inexhaustible lust of a woman, the same fable would certainly be appropriate.(Translated by Rix and King)

I was just about to write up my experiences with my new ScanSnap S500M when I found this review via 43folders. I’m very happy with this product and would highly recommend it for folks who want to scan lots of documents, but I was a bit jealous of this reviewer’s claim to have zipped right through large piles of documents.

When I first started using it, my scanner had a bit of a tendency to jam on multiple pages, so I broke up some larger documents into smaller chunks. It seems to handle multiple pages much better now, but it’s easy to stitch them back together using Automator and the Combine PDFs workflow if you need to.

The software tries to automatically rotate the documents properly, but it’s not 100% accurate, so when I stitch together the pieces of a long document I’m sometimes left with different orientations. Again, it’s an easy to fix with Acrobat’s built in rotate you can rotate “all portrait pages” so it’s one simple step there as well. (The full version of Acrobat comes with the scanner.)

Then I just hit “Start OCR” in Acrobat and my documents are searchable and out of the way.

The thing that’s holding up my scanning project is not about the scanner, it’s about organizing stuff.

On the paper side of things I sorted the printouts from the photocopies. I want to check that I still actually have the electronic version of the printouts so that’s sitting in a big stack. I’m making good progress scanning the photocopies, but then there’s the issue of matching PDF to citation.

I’m in the process of switching from EndNote to Zotero and I’m still learning the tool. I’m thinking about buying DevonThink but it doesn’t have built in citation management from what I understand, and I’m not sure it’s worth the price.

It’s true, I should have gotten that book from the library. I just slimmed down my Amazon “wish list” to books I’ve read and want for reference or books I want to take my time with like Team of Rivals. If I really like It’s All Too Much I suppose I’ll eventually give it away.

By the way, Amazon lets you keep multiple wish lists, so I’ve been using one called “Gifts for Library.”

I think I would use this even if I used a program with something like the Symbol menu. It’s proved to be much faster, just F12, copy, click on the document, paste. I like the notepad widget over the standard notes because it doesn’t take any screen real-estate (a precious commodity on a 12″ powerbook).

About 4-6 weeks ago when I was coming to understand how long my thesis would end up becoming I got a bit nervous. I thought “I’ve written 50 pages and I’m nowhere near done. This can’t be right.” It was right, though. My first draft was 79 pages (double spaced).

I would have thought writing a longer piece wouldn’t be terribly different than a shorter one, but there were particular challenges. The main one was that I often felt lost, in need of an overview. Fortunately Omni Outliner helped quite a bit with that. I had an outline that first served as a holding place for writing ideas and quotes. Once the ideas were written out in Pages, I used key ideas from each paragraph or so as a detailed outline. It was somewhat difficult to maintain the two documents, and honestly I didn’t think I’d stick with it, but it really made it much easier to spot redundancies or reorganize ideas. I think it will also be quite useful during my defense if I want to find a particular passage on the fly during the discussion.

Right now I’m copyediting and incorporating feedback. My defense is set for August 10th The end is in sight.

The thing I’m worried about right now is that maybe my method is too much to complete properly in the time frame I have. I’m proposing preliminary interviews that will help develop a survey and concurrently doing a content analysis. I’ve got a lot more experience doing interviews and participant observation, but I think this project calls for the survey and content analysis & I’d like to broaden my bag of tricks so to speak.

The other worry is if I’ve covered all the relevant areas of literature – or rather, planned to do so. It’s an impossible task of course, but I’ll just have to live with some ambiguity and ask my advisor, committee, fellow students, and everyone else I meet along the way I suppose. I’ll get that on my next actions list I suppose.

I’m getting some feedback Monday from my advisor so after I finish grading speeches for Thursday I should be back on track.

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