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Beyond the PDF
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Posted by Dominik Holenstein
Jan 18, 2011 at 08:47 AM
It looks like the preparation for a 1st April joke…
Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 20, 2011 at 04:22 PM
I think the effort to free scientific work from the constraints imposed upon it by the PDF format is commendable and is an entirely valid reason for a workshop. The PDF is perhaps suitable for business and legal purposes but very poor for consuming scientific information. I support the efforts to make these publications granular, so that one could perhaps do a search by just comparing the methodological sections of thousands of journal articles, without having to download them all and leaf through all the PDFs. Also, annotating, highlighting and then dealing with the annotations is not that easy with PDFs. At the moment one needs a whole range of devices and software to do this, involving several steps.
Ideally I’d like to read my papers on a tablet computer, add notes and highlight while reading them, and capture quotations and citations that could be added automatically to an outlining software. At the moment this is a convoluted process and unsatisfactory, not to mention that there is no way to aggregate scientific papers on the basis of their specific parts, at least not in my field (the social sciences). If all of the above could be done in just a single online platform that would hugely simplify and enhance scientific work.
At the moment I use Whizfolders “watch clipboard” function to capture passages from PDFs, which is OK, but I feel reluctant to buy a Windows-based tablet PC just for that. GoodReader looks nice on the iPad for PDF reading and annotation, but then there is still that business of synchronising the files with the desktop and then it can’t capture passages from PDFs as Whizfolders can. So a post-PDF, web-based environment would be ideal…
Posted by Derek Cornish
Jan 20, 2011 at 05:35 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>I think the effort to free scientific work from the constraints imposed upon it by the
>PDF format is commendable and is an entirely valid reason for a workshop. The PDF is
>perhaps suitable for business and legal purposes but very poor for consuming
>scientific information.
>
Dr Anders:
Thanks for taking this topic seriously. As a researchers, PDFs have been the bane of my life, and I’ve spent hour after fruitless hour over the past 10 years or so battling with the problem of getting information out of them efficiently. Admittedly things are a little easier now; but anything that offers to provide a more useful alternative should be commended not ridiculed.
DBC
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 20, 2011 at 09:00 PM
In this age of wikinomics the PDF seems like steam powered technology at best. However, I assume that it has flourished largely due to its convenience for intellectual rights management. That is probably the reason that major academic publishing houses support it, so that one can find most papers in PDF format in the first place.
When I first entered the university more than twenty years ago, I would have been eternally grateful for access to journals in PDF form. More recently, during my MBA experience, I wasn’t so impressed; I suppose that I expect much more nowadays, simply because I know that much more is possible.
I can think of at least one historical effort to provide a structured document format, facilitating knowledge organisation and retrieval, namely Doug Engelbart’s Hyperscope http://hyperscope.org/ see also http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/hyperscope.html I’m sure there have been others.
Posted by critStock
Jan 20, 2011 at 11:43 PM
@ Dr. Andus and Derek Cornish,
Has either of you tried working with pdfs within Citavi, which is newly available in English. It doesn’t solve every problem of working with pdfs, but it addresses quite a few: reference management, annotation of pdfs within the program, and the ability to organize and outline with your annotations (with the citations following the annotations and quotations on their travels). Worth a look, if you haven’t looked already. I’ve only just started using it myself, so I’d certainly be interested in chatting with others here who might be interested in Citavi.
Cheers,
David