I may have mentioned, possibly with a note of terror in my voice, that I’m preparing for my qualifying exams. This involves a large amount of reading for nearly a year, followed by 72 hours of writing like the wind.
You see the problem here, right? As I come to the end of my year (Wilkie Collins’s Basil, it turns out, was the first one that month), I have very little recollection of what I read last June, and certainly couldn’t conjure up anything the least bit relevant to say about it while frantically churning out pages.
So … a huge amount of material and a need to quickly sort through it for relevant information? Why, it sounds like a job for Digital-Humanities-Person! Or, at least, for free tools and DH methods to make my life a little easier. Here are a few of the thing I’ve done, and some thoughts on whether I’d do it again:
Evernote: It syncs to all my devices, it keeps all my thoughts organized in discrete notes, and I can tag and color-code everything. I tell you, this on makes my little organization-loving heart go pit-a-pat. I give it all the stars for ease of use during the reading process, but I’m not so sure how it will work for recall when it comes to writing. I’m considering taking my final week before exams and putting everything I have in Evernote into a mind mapping program (TBD – any recommendations?), since I think the visual display may be of more use when I need to access all the notes in a hurry. I’m reserving final judgment on this one until I see how it performs under pressure.
Google Voice: If I need to get an idea pinned down, stat, and writing or typing aren’t options (my brain seems to work best during my commute), I call my home phone and leave myself a voicemail. A few years ago, we set up email notifications on our land line, since we kept missing important messages by forgetting to check voicemail. Now all voicemails come to my email inbox with both sound files and (often hilarious) transcriptions, and I don’t miss nearly as many dental appointments.
While this functions well for getting a thought preserved in a hurry – just set my cell on speaker and talk toward the passenger seat – the transcription leaves much to be desired. I knew it wouldn’t be great, but I though it might serve as a decent basis to cut and past into Evernote and then clean up where it failed. I defy any of you, however, to make sense of the message I left myself this morning:
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So, useful for recording, but I’m still transcribing by hand. This is actually a place where I might spend money as I progress to the diss, since I find it far easier to work through my ideas by talking them out, and something that can both capture and transcribe effectively would be worth the expense.
Kindle: It turns out, when you study things that are out of copyright, you can get most of them for free on Project Gutenberg, already nicely packaged as .mobi files. Grad students like free things, and the Kindle is just so handy! Toss it in my purse int he morning, and it doesn’t matter how many rabbit holes I go down during the day – any text I might need is either already there, or easy to email to myself and available in moments. Plus, I can highlight and make notes to my heart’s content without tedious retyping. What more could I want?
Well, better control of my data, of course – we all know the issues with Kindle ebooks. Beyond that, however, I have two major issues with this one: I can’t find a way to export my notes, so there may be a great deal of tedious retyping after all, which I truly don’t have time for. Even more damning, though – what do you suppose ebooks often don’t have?
Page numbers.
The problem of how to cite a single line from The Picture of Dorian Gray that I read in an ebook edition of the complete works of Oscar Wilde only occurred to me, I’m ashamed to say, a week ago. The MLA, thankfully, has anticipated me, so the problem is less one of logistics than it is an ethical quandary – even if the ebook itself was free, anyone wishing to follow up would need a Kindle in order to make sense of the locational numbering system it uses – not exactly the free access to information approach that I value in DH.
Perhaps, once my exams are over, I’ll do a follow-up on how all the tools and gadgets held up. And, while there’s still time left, any other brilliant ideas on exam prep out there?