Steven Johnson has a good essay on Boinboing detailing how he goes about writing a book, which is basically: reasearch like crazy, then sit down and write. One of the tools he mentions is Devonthink, which I’ve never used, and can’t because I don’t own a Mac.In the comments, someone posted a link to Windows alternatives, which is nice, but, like many people, I find myself working on different computers in different locations. I work mainly in Linux, but sometimes I boot into Windows on my laptop. I also occasionally have to use someone else’s computer. My research materials are terribly disorganized, residing in a folder in a file cabinet, a pile on the desk, a stack of books, snippets of text files scattered throughout my file system.So, the question is: is there a good research/writing tool that is platform independent, or, better, web-based?
I think Zotero has some promise. I used it a bit on my desktop, but didn’t delve too deeply. Some have suggested Evernote or Google Notebook. I like Evernote because it captures everything and you can use tags. I have begun uploading pdfs of articles I am using, but I could probably use it more extenisvely. Delicious might be another way to go. The one thing everyone talks about re Devonthink is a search function that finds connections, which the tools I’ve mentioned don’t have (I don’t think). Is there a way to get around this? Does anyone know any other tools, or ways in which I can use the tools I have?
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Unit Structures – Steven Johnson on Research and Writing // Jan 28, 2009 at 4:22 pm
[...] Via Erik Marhsall, an essay by Steven Johnson on his research and writing techniques. Steven is a brilliant writer; it is interesting and humanizing to see the extent to which he uses technology. I use BibDesk is a manner similar to how Johnson uses Devonthink, but I think I would benefit from the more unstructured approach in Devonthink. Any readers use it? The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text — and each little snippet I just drop into Devonthink with no organization other than a citation of where it came from. This goes on for months and months; I read in a completely unplanned and exploratory way (increasingly online, thanks to Google Books and other sources) and just drag anything that seems at all interesting into Devonthink. [...]
As you say the Firefox extension Zotero is good for collecting online research materials, including material for which you need a login to see (via Athens etc). An upcoming version will sync across computers, but for now I just keep the database file in a Dropbox folder and point the various Zotero installs at it. That works fine as long as you remember to run Zotero on one computer at a time. It’s a great cross-platform data gathering tool anyway (I use it on Linux and Mac primarily).