“Keep a diary.” That was one of the most common advices I got from more experiences friends and wise supervisors before I set out to do research. It could be a personal diary or a more work-related journal of ideas for future project. Anything where I could write down things that occurred to me while I spent hours stairing at manuscripts… This advice was further strenghtened when I read Joan Bolker’s Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day, in which she advises students to keep a diary related to their research. Being a computer geek, I immediately thought that to be useful, such a diary needed to be searcheable electronically. Something a little fancier yet more practical than Word. Along came MacJournal, a nifty little program that allows one to organize information under multiple journals and entries:
On the left side you can see the journals and within those, the entries. There doesn’t see to be a size limit – some of my entries are several pages-long.
One can also have a quick look at all the entries available in a journal and can access them through a hyperlink:
Up until recently, I had been using this program for basically two things: to write random data that doesn’t fit in my database and to keep a personal diary of my visits to the archive. After a discovered an easy upload option to wordpress (and also to blogger & other blogging platforms), I started using it also to write blogs when I’m not online.
I’m now thinking it might work as a tool to organize my notes once I start writing my dissertation. It lends itself well to the old method of subject cards – I can have each chapter as a journal and the different subjects treated in the chapter as entries. I’m quite attracted to how fast MacJournal searches through all the entries and how easily the entries can be printed or exported as pdf. Another bonus is that I can import text from other programs – Word for example – as either an entry or as part of a pre-existing entry. Does anybody envision any drawbacks?
Here I imported a file (bibliography.doc) as a new entry:
You are far more organized than I was with all of this (and far more technologically savvy!). I kept a simple word file that I wrote in each day. In the end, I found that a few of my observations while researching made it into the dissertation.
Do you know if there is a similar program for pcs? Since UTEP gave me a laptop, I have a PC now, although I later learned that I could have pushed for a mac!
hey Dana! not sure but there must be something for pcs… I think there is something called MS Notes but I’m not sure if it’s similar; I just remember seeing it at the U of T bookstore…
too bad about not being able to have a mac though; it must suck after so many years with your trusty ibook!
btw, how did you manage your notes when you were writing your dissertation?
I actually printed everything out in hard copies, organized them by notary or by year for the court cases in folders. I have stand-up files that I kept on my desk to refer to as I was writing.
I still like working with hard copies and usually write out quite detailed outlines by hand for each project I’m working on. I do the actual writing in word, but everything else is paper. I think part of the reason for this is because I didn’t get my first computer until I was more than half-way done my undergraduate degree, so still work best this way.
but how did you organize your notes for each chapter? did you have cards on different subjects or did you just write scattered notes in a notebook?
I’ve tried the subject-card system when I wrote my honours thesis and many of my papers and I’ve found that it greatly helped the writing process. I mean, all I had to do was order the cards, and sort of write it out. So, I’ve been trying to automate that process somehow so I could search through. I tried scribe but ended up just making cards on word and then printing them out and sorting them. Now I’m thinking that the thesis will create SO many cards that it’s probably best to have a better system. Thus the macjournal or scribe idea…
Well, first I went through all of my document notes and basically coded them by hand. Grouping all those that dealt with widows, donzellas etc. And then I grouped them by dowry size or dowry type etc. For the court records, I used a number of different variables. Basically, I did what a good database software would do, entirely by hand!!! Because I was doing a lot of quantitative research, but also qualitative, this was the best solution I had. I couldn’t find a database that would work with what I wanted to explore, so chose this method.
A colleague here in Psychology is going to give me a database program that I think will work but I can’t remember the name of it right now.
Dana – go through a little tutorial for FileMaker Pro. It’s a VERY good database program and you could build your own database to analyse whatever kind of data you have in no time at all. I had never built a database, completely failed in my attempts to even change fields in an Access database, but I got FileMaker and an intro to FileMaker book and within half an hour I had a very nice looking database that I created by modifying a template… It’s fast, it’s reliable and powerful. If you design on paper what are the fields you want, it takes no time at all.
Ann W. was using Scribe for her thesis and enjoyed it a lot. It’s free and made by a historian so it has lots of useful fields although it’s more geared to ppl who work with modern sources…
I have been meaning to use Filemaker for a long time. I can use some of my start-up money to buy it through the university! Hmmm… something to contemplate and work on in the next few weeks.
you should really get it, if you can!! It’s well worth it!! You should also download scribe (available for free), which seems to be very good and was created by a historian using Filemaker Pro… I might use it to organize my notes when I start writing the thesis…