The Tech of Diss

Here are the various applications I’ve been using in the process of researching and (gradually) writing my dissertation. I’ll offer a summary of how I’ve been using each application and its relative merits and shortcomings.

Microsoft Word

Yeah, it’s not particularly sexy, and I’m generally loath to submit to the Borg, but Word is the dominant word processor, Apple long ago gave up on the AppleWorks suite (which was never so robust as Office), and it gets the job done. Plus, I’ve used Word way more than any other single application in the research phase, and it’s only going to continue in the same direction as I actually write the damn thing.

For lack of a better method, I’ve improvised a Word-based system for compiling my research. Every day in the archive, I created a new Word document for each carton or folder I used. I’d create a sort of master reference at the top of the document, listing the archive, collection, fond, carton, etc. Then I’d add a reference for each document I used within the carton, followed by full text (if I was using a sufficiently short portion of the document and/or didn’t want to pay for a photocopy at the equivalent of 25 cents a page), translated text (if I used full text), and notes on whatever was significant in the document. I’d repeat the process below for each additional document in the carton. This meant some of my Word files could end up with a few documents (though more often than not there’d only be one document of interest in a carton, since a lot of different and unrelated materials could be in the same carton), and in turn could run several pages. It’s not the best method for keeping things organized and searchable, but it worked. More important, I didn’t really have any other software for organizing references and sources when I started to do my research, so I devised the Word system as a default, reasoning that at least any work I did in Word would be fully exportable. Still, I wish I had devised a better system.

I must add, however, Word can be a pain in the ass when it comes to writing my dissertation. I use a lot of Slovak and Czech names and words, many of which have diacritical marks not native to English or other Western European languages. It’s not hard for me to input the special characters — I have my computer set up so I can toggle my keyboard layouts, and I’ve used the non-English keyboards so much that I have them committed to memory — but once I switch from the default U.S. keyboard to the Slovak or Czech layout, it seems to wreak havoc with certain things, most noticeably quotation marks. A lot of Central European languages (this includes German) often use quotation marks different from those we use in English. Mainly this means leading quotation marks aren’t inverted commas raised above the text baseline, but they’re more like reversed commas right on the text baseline. But when I toggle keyboard layouts, even switching back to English I tend to still get weird Central European quotation marks for the remainder of the document. This means the leading quotation marks suddenly drop down, and the closing quotation marks often face the wrong way. There are workarounds for this — I finally figured out the complicated three-key shift-option-left bracket keystroke combo for double quotation marks, and shift-option-right bracket for single quotation marks — but they’re a little inconvenient. Presumably there’s some way to fix this, but I haven’t figured it out. So, it makes Word a little inconvenient. And I should note that in older versions of Office (I think Office 2003), this never seemed to crop up as an issue for me.

Zotero

Zotero is the poor man’s grad student’s version of EndNote. It’s an open-source, Firefox-based reference tool that allows you to manage your citations, notes and other aspects of your research. Aside from the principal benefit of being a free download, Zotero also seemed like a good choice because it utilizes what it terms an “iTunes-style” system of managing your notes as collections and subcollections, sort of like playlists in iTunes. If nothing else, I knew I could handle that.

The big pain in the ass with Zotero, or at least with me using it, was that I didn’t decide to start using reference management software until about halfway through my research, which meant I had a substantial backlog of Word files stuffed with documents, references and notes that needed to be inputted into Zotero. I was able to use cut and paste, but it wasn’t a simple proposition, since I needed to input each piece of reference data — author, title, date, etc. — separately for the reference part to ever be functional.

One thing I like about Zotero is that I can tag notes and references, which means I can easily find all the notes and documents pertaining to, say, the Barnabite Commission. But this isn’t perfect. I wish Zotero had the functionality to automatically create collections or subcollections for each tag, sort of like a smart playlist in iTunes. Instead, it’s a bit more tedious — either having Zotero select every document with a certain tag, then creating a collection based on the search results, or dragging each document to the appropriate collection as I go. Once I caught up with the backlog and started inputting documents as I went, Zotero wasn’t too bad, and it was simple enough to drag documents to the appropriate collections. But this could be easier.

I also find Zotero a bit frustrating in its reference input fields. It works just fine for published sources like newspaper articles, books and so on, but it’s too limited for archival sources. There’s a one-line field for “location in archive,” and you can even tell Zotero what kind of source a reference is (document, newspaper article, book, etc.). But it’d be useful to be able to customize the reference fields. Even though I’ll probably ultimately be able to limit the citation to a single line in the dissertation (once I’ve provided a key to the shorthand in the beginning), until I have the citation shorthand system worked out, I’d still like to be able to have more data to ensure I have enough of a citation to locate the document. As it is, I end up putting the parts of the reference that don’t fit that single field in the “extra” field.

As it is, I’m doubting I’ll actually end up using Zotero to do the footnotes and other citations in Word when I actually write the dissertation. It’s supposed to be fully compatible with Word for this purpose, and there are some more robust features in reference software like this than just using Word’s rudimentary footnoting. Still, I’m a little leery, and I’m not sure it’ll come out quite right, given the compromises I’ve had to make in inputting my sources.

OmniOutliner

OK, so I’ve only used this once, and I have no real assessment of it. But from the very preliminary experience I have with it, I think this will be far preferable to making an outline in Word, which always carries its own pitfalls.

iPhoto

I take a lot of pictures in my research. Mostly it’s just because its a quick and inexpensive way for me to copy documents and articles in some archives and libraries without having to lug things to a photocopier, or have some archivist make copies, or paying 25 cents a page. Before we left for Europe, we bought a new Canon digital camera (it’s some sort of PowerShot Digital Elph, but I couldn’t tell you the model number), I think it’s 7.2 megapixels, and it works great for taking pictures of documents. I turn on the macros, make sure I have the full page in view and shoot the picture. I can’t say the exact number of photos I’ve taken, but a conservative estimate would probably be 4,000-5,000.

Managing these photos is a bit of a pain. I import photos to my computer by plugging the camera’s cable into my USB port, and I import them directly into my iPhoto library. This has plenty of drawbacks, which others far more knowledgeable about such things could explain at length, but the most visible ones to me are that the photos are huge files (I easily have 10 GB or more of dissertation photos), and iPhoto isn’t really the best program for organizing and searching pictures.

So, like so much else with my dissertation, I improvise. Essentially, I import the photos (usually before I return whatever materials I shot), then I copy and paste the reference information in the title field for each photo in iPhoto. I also group all the photos from a particular document as a single “event,” so I have some idea where one document ends and another begins.

But iPhoto is far from perfect. For one thing, my references don’t really work that great as titles, and often I don’t really get anything more than maybe knowing which carton a photo came from. For another, for all my efforts to create events for keeping documents separate, when I place the photos in an album (I used an album for each newspaper or journal, and for each archive), iPhoto doesn’t place the events in the album, just the component photos. So even though the photos are still in order, there’s a bit of a slog to find documents. Again, I’m sure there were probably better workarounds for this, but I have the most rudimentary knowledge of iPhoto, and I didn’t know a better way, whether it was to use more advanced features of iPhoto, or another photo management program entirely.