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Many of you have seen my wiki during the course, as I often linked to topic pages and the article notes that I took. I finally made a screencast documenting how I use all the different tools I've put together to manage information, using Jennifer Claro's blog post as an example :)
Hi Stian,
I just watched your screencast and all I can say is WOW!!! It’s FANTASTIC!! I had no idea all of this could be done. I need to do what you are doing!! My articles are a mess! All over the place, nothing central linking them together, no way of getting instant citations, etc. Your workflow demo seems like a miracle!
(ignore this question, I found the answer) 1. One big question: Can you create tags for text you have copied and pasted into your wiki? This for me would be an extremely useful feature. That way we could link ideas between articles, and this is so important in research. There must be a way! (Later: Never mind, Papers does it! I found this info in you YouTube video on Junior Researchr - a design proposal – also very very useful!!)
A couple more questions:
2. How did you get access to the Wiley online library using one click of a “my access” tab? I don’t know how to do that. It’s VERY useful!
3. I’m starting from scratch here. I’ll watch your demo several times but would appreciate any advice on how to get started. Do I need a Researchr account? DevonThink. Skim, and Tinderbox are also recommended?
4. You use both Papers and BibDesk? Should I get both? I have Papers (an older version, not 2.0) but haven’t used it recently.
I will get started on this right away. Honestly, this plan is revolutionary for me.
Thank you Stian!! I owe you one dinner in Hong Kong 
!!
Cheers, and thanks ever so much,
Jennifer
Hi Jennifer,
thanks a lot for all the enthusiasm, that's what makes it worth it to share and document what I do!
To clarify a few things:
there is absolutely no link between junior researchr and researchr. Junior researchr doesn't "exist", it's an illusion created by clever editing, the things we show aren't possible today (most of them).
Researchr exists (I use it every day). However there is no such thing as a researchr web service, you don't need any accounts, it's just a name for a bunch of different programs on your computer and scripts to tie it together.
And that's the tricky part, as I mention on the wiki page:
Some of you might read this far, and say - this looks really neat, I'd like to install it on my computer and start using it for my research. Unfortunately, given that this isn't one single program, but rather a combination of a bunch of programs, and scripts that integrate with those programs, it's impossible for me to create one simple installer which will let you jump right in and use this setup.
So why I am spending all this time documenting this? In my mind, there are two kinds of “target groups”. The first are tinkerers, who are comfortable with Ruby, the terminal, etc. All of my scripts are available, and I've made some effort to document them, as well as (perhaps more valuably) documenting some of the “neat ways of doing things” that took me a long time to find. I hope this will be useful to you.
Perhaps you want to try to replicate the entire setup - it would be quite a bit of work, but it's certainly possible. Perhaps you just want a certain component (say side-by-side editing in DokuWiki, or automatic import of Kindle annotations)? This should also be quite doable (and if people contact me and tell me that a certain component would be very useful, I might try to separate that out, document it, and make it easier for people to access just that functionality).
But to people who are not able to or willing to spend lot's of time looking over scripts and commands, I hope that this could still be interesting as a demo of what is possible. During a university class, I was part of a group that designed a “mockup” of an academic workflow that we called “junior researchr” (this is where I took the name from). What we showed in that video was not a functional workflow, but something we “simulated”. In this case, the system I am showing you is something that I am using every day for hours, and exactly how it works has been shaped intimately by how I think.
I think we all deserve much more powerful tools for thinking and managing knowledge, and this is my “stab” at it. I am also fascinated by the relationship between how we grapple with ideas individually, and how we can do so in groups (I wrote about this here), and the one thing my system is missing is a social network. I don't want to open my wiki up to editing, but I'd love lot's of others to write about articles on blogs and wikis, and to be able to very easily discover those posts, and share our ideas.
However, given that we are meeting in HK, I could certainly give it a stab to install this on your computer (I am assuming you are using a Mac). That would be the first time, and would be a great exercise for me to see how difficult it is to transfer it to somebody else's environment.
The three programs involved are BibDesk, Skim and DokuWiki (and some of my scripts are tied into Chrome as a webbrowser for DokuWiki). I don't use Papers at all. (It looks very slick, but it's far from as scriptable and powerful as BibDesk).
As for MyAccess, that's really easy: http://reganmian.net/blog/2006/03/31/bookmarklet-for-myaccess-uoft-libraries/ --- I wrote this in 2006, and have used it so much. I really wanted to share it with other UofT students, but never found a good way. I wrote to the library, but I don't think they even bothered to get back to me :( (This doesn't work for all services, but it works for many)
As for tagging, what I would do is use the clipping function to take text from an article page (or anywhere) and insert into a topical page (for example "Knowledge Building"). When it inserts the text, it also adds a link to where the text came from.
You can also link to pages, and on those pages you can automatically display a list of all pages that link to this page, so the KB article could show a list of all articles that link to the KB page. That's a form of "tagging" in a way.
Stian
Hi Everyone,
This is just a comment on Stian's booklet for MyAccess. It works like a charm, and I highly recommend that all OISE students use it. It's a click and drag to your toolbar, that's all! Just go to Stian's blog post.
Now I don't have to open up my UT library account to access articles I indeed have access to. Google Scholar is so much faster than the UT library website, and with this booklet I no longer have to copy and paste article titles I find in Scholar into my UT library website to get them.
Awesome!!
Thanks Stian, you are making my research life much easier!
Cheers,
Jennifer
P.S. - Stian, it works with SpringerLink now too!
Hey, great! Let me know if you have any ideas on how to share this info with more UofT students :)
Hi folks,
Trying to catch up after not even being able to lurk for a bit. Wow, you have all been busy--I'm impressed.
Stian, your MyAccess sounds like the LibX project, http://libx.org/. LibX for Firefox and IE has Google Scholar integration and rightclick searching in GS, library catalogs, etc. LibX for Chrome is in beta, and a bit simpler right now. You might see if UofT already has one, and if it doesn't, make one for them and let the librarians know. That's how we got ours!
Lots of stuff on Cloudworks (at my home institution).
I Tweeted twice, will continue to do so, reaching out to my overlapping communities in the corporate govenance / corporate responsiblity / responsible investing / sustainability worlds. Let's see what comes back.
Meanwhile, we could consider university programs "Food Courts", right--at least, that's where the students are, the pipeline of practice. Like Harvard Ed School's Technology Innovation and Education (TIE) program: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/academics/masters/tie/description.html
Speaking of which, here's a Twitter group (small) for TIE alum, that's curated by one of my former classmates there, Conor Shankman: https://twitter.com/#!/ForwardInertia/hgse-tie
Others?
Marcy.
