Monday, February 14, 2011

This is how we do

Blog Pictures 091
Very well read houseplants
V Day at chez Construction was very chill--work for J, class, microfilm and a workshop on archives note taking for me.  J's presents--two houseplants I've been waaaaanting for a long time--are up on the book shelf that gets the most light.  

Then lots and lots of delivery Thai food (fried tofu and fried bananas in the same meal?  Yes please!) and a good day was had by all.  There may be some Super Mario in the near future as well. 

The archival notes workshop was a lot of repetition of things I've found out myself the hard way, but two professors showed how they file things on their computers to keep track of them, and that's got me thinking about the mess that is my own system.  Which was a system before I started doing a lot of archival work, but is now a smoking pile of ruin and too many photos.  Dr. Asiago wants a detailed primary bibliography of everything I've worked on so far and everything I know about but haven't seen, and it's been a huge pain to put together because I haven't kept a running central list of everything I've looked at.  So I suppose there will soon be posts about shuffling research files around on my computer or something equally boring.

I've also got a meeting with him tomorrow that I'm sort of dreading about the prospectust that won't die--rather than reading the newest draft and OKing it, he "wants to talk about it."  Which means that there's probably another draft in the near future as well.

2 comments:

  1. i'll be interested to hear about computer filing systems...as i feel like i've finally got a good system going for my exams and for gathering info from finding aids for planning research trips -- but not necessarily for organizing stuff at the next stage, namely, what i know about and what i've looked at, requested, etc. somehow i think zotero everywhere -- the standalone desktop version-- is going to help with that (it's in super early beta, which means the versions might not necessarily work together well, but there should be an official release soon...) good luck with the prospectus "talk."

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  2. Thanks for the good luck.

    I thought I was doing pretty good with my exams filing and keeping what little archival and published primary research I was doing before straight. I never kept very good track of what I was looking at, because it was all mostly manuscript sources so there weren't multiple copies floating around, but the print sources kill me. And then there's all the scanned primary sources I've been downloading like crazy. I've tried Zotero and Refworks and didn't find them helpful last year, but I'm thinking of giving Zotero a try again. When I write up how I'm rearranging, I'll post about HC, ET, and RT's very daunting low tech organizing systems. They were very scary.

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