The following is reposting of an entry I contributed to the THATCamp New England blog: I am excited to have the opportunity to join THATCamp New England this November and look forward to learning from everyone I meet there. I was asked to post an entry here about the issues that I hope will be [...]
I have a bibliographic database in Zotero. The citation information is easy to scrape from web databases such as my own library, Amazon, and the many journal databases that I use. It is convenient to be able to tag and organize my sources and can use Zotero to format footnotes and bibliographies for my dissertation [...]
Though I continue to enjoy using the excellent software Scrivener to compose my dissertation, I am still unhappy with my note taking strategies and how I collect and organize this information digitally. After writing several postings on what I wish existed in terms of a software solution for doing research for a book or dissertation [...]
During my field research in Korea, Taiwan, and China I carried around a hefty camera with me to archives and libraries. On those fortunate occasions when I was allowed to use it, I snapped nice high-contrast “text mode” photos of everything from handwritten documents, mimeographed newspapers, pages of books, and thousands of pictures of microfilm [...]
I recently broke down and got an iPad. I use it mostly for reading PDFs on the run, watching movies, taking notes (with external bluetooth keyboard), and studying my daily flashcards. After trying (and writing reviews of) many different flashcard programs over the years, and even designing some of my own many years ago, I [...]
I am deeply frustrated with the sometimes closed atmosphere in academic life. I feel a profound discomfort when I encounter students and scholars who are paranoid that their research ideas will be stolen, that their sources will be discovered and, shock and horror, will be used by someone else. I’m simply incapable of sympathizing with [...]
In the last of three postings I wrote on note taking for the dissertation about a year ago, I proposed a kind of a note taking software that would allow researchers to link the huge gap between our notes on individual sources and that which we do when outlining and structuring large writing projects. I [...]
In the first of three postings on this topic I explained that I have become increasingly concerned that there exists a vast and empty middle layer of organization between the various primary sources, notes, and ‘notes on notes’ I have on the one hand, and my dissertation outline. I have felt the need to develop [...]
Tagged dissertation, History, research, writingIn addition to my Muninn blog, I occasionally make contributions at the various Frog in a Well blogs, the East Asia Libraries and Archives wiki, some programming weblogs at Fool’s Workshop, and create various scripts and other creations. I have a Friendfeed profile but I don’t really like leaving this sort of thing to third [...]
The Problem: Let us say you have a list of Chinese words or single Chinese characters in a file. There are a lot of them. You want some easy and fast way of getting the pinyin and English definitions of that list of words or single characters and you want this in a format that [...]