“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: