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Academic research- what are the best tools and workflow techniques?
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Posted by Carrot
Nov 16, 2011 at 03:42 PM
Thanks for your replies.
Everyone?s comments and suggestions are very helpful and encouraging. I had not really thought about the advantages of having information duplicated to some degree. It seems that Bill raised a good point. - it encourages reflective thinking about the data.
In fact, the applications themselves have forced me to conceptualize my data in a certain way. For example, Freeplane mindmapping provided me with a good way to map out the belief system of the religious group that I am studying. I was even able take my laptop with me to the villages, and show my informants the ways I had categorized their beliefs, and ask them if my categories made sense or not.
I?m not sure how I would have done that with another tool like a tree-structure outliner. I don?t think it would work as well.
Pavi, thanks for your reply. I will look at your suggestion for using Zotero and UltraRecall. I wish I?d bought UltraRecall right at the beginning. It seems immensely flexible. I?m wondering if myBase can be substituted or if its too simple a tool. It seems very good at captureing webpages (includes access date and URL) TreeDBnotes is very nice, but it lacks a web-clipping tool and so this cripples its usefulness to some degree.
Dr. Andus, thank you for encouraging me to rethink my assumptions that there is a ?best tool? and ?best method?. Of course in hindsight I see that every project is different. But its very helpful to hear about the the methods used by others. No need to re-invent a well-established process.
The process you are using sounds quite similar to mine in fact. You are using VUE to model your arguments and workflow, while I am using Freeplane for those purposes. (I?d thought about VUE or Compendium, but found Freeplane easier to figure out). And I?m using 2 outliners, and AtlasTI for coding.
And I?m using a huge widescreen monitor as well, and always have open 2 outliners, AtlasTI, LibreOffice and Freeplane. I’ll mull over about everyone’s advice again and let it seep in :)
Thank you all very much for the discussions and suggestions here!
Posted by Pavi
Nov 16, 2011 at 03:59 PM
Hi Carrot,
I am also a more recent convert to Ultra Recall, and wish I had adopted it sooner. I was using Mybase and EPim, and previously testing many, many others including treebdnotes. UR can replace mybase and treedbnotes, although some features are not there (like password vault, but of course you can make your own). It is powerful, flexible, and can be used for many purposes.
It seems you already have a Mybase license - I am not sure if it can embed word files and export in a merged format as UR does (per my post in another thread). Also, customization using attributes and forms make UR customizable, and I am not sure about how to get this functionality in Mybase. However, these features might not be needed for your academic work. I have forms for things such as: article submission, passwords, account logins, doctors visits, correspondence, etc. as I use UR for personal, professional, GTD, research (with logical links back to the relevant folder in professional) and e-mail archives.
Basically, whatever setup you are comfortable with will work, but it might make you more efficient (minus the learning curve) to choose tools that suit your thinking processes and workflow better.
Best, /Pavi
Carrot wrote:
>
>Pavi, thanks for your
>reply. I will look at your suggestion for using Zotero and UltraRecall. I wish I?d
>bought UltraRecall right at the beginning. It seems immensely flexible. I?m
>wondering if myBase can be substituted or if its too simple a tool. It seems very good at
>captureing webpages (includes access date and URL) TreeDBnotes is very nice, but it
>lacks a web-clipping tool and so this cripples its usefulness to some degree.