Oh how I wish that I had a personal research secretary! I’ve been spending this weekend going through transcripts, untranscribed interviews, research notes, photos, and clippings for my research and the result is increasingly looking like a big mess. I’ve been planning to use some sort of QDA package for all of this when it comes time to coding and analysing—I am nowhere near there yet!—and would ideally like to begin to ‘park’ all of my stuff in one place and begin to work on it as I go along.

For my last couple of projects, including the work that I did with my supervisor on Business Improvement Associations, I used a wonderful open source Mac program called TAMS Analyser. It has a built-in transcribing tool, uses a transparent coding language (which seems to turn some people off) and is generally rock solid. But I fear that my reliance on PDFs, photos and other data will end of pushing me to use it and other software (Tinderbox….I’ve tried…I really have!). So I am now trying out Atlas Ti. It looks like it will do all that I need, though it may be a little too structured to use as a parking lot. But I do like the Google Earth integration! Will report back on this as I go.

I’m now in Quang Nam, trying to learn something about Tre Gai, among other things. Tre Gai is a local species of bamboo that is used primarily in the South of the country for some nice export quality furniture and home construction. There’s a lot of it in Quang Nai, and no some much in Quang Nam. One of the problems of Tre Gai is that it is a high quality bamboo—and seems to fetch a decent price—but is hard to gather and grows in small batches. Quite unlike Luong in Thanh Hoa, which is probably closer to a crop than an NTFP.

I’m also running into the most typical of difficulties when speaking with District officials here – when I ask about prices of bamboo, they simply respond that it is illegal to gather and sell in the District in order to protect the forest. Being illegal, of course, doesn’t stop a lot of traders, but makes them a little more difficult to contact.

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences have adopted an opt-out policy of open-access self archiving of all scholarship published by the university. This is perhaps the most important move in scholarly communication in decades. Very cool.

From [The Chronicle](http://chronicle.com/news/article/3943/harvard-faculty-adopts-open-access-requirement “Chronicle of Higher Education”)

Part of getting through a Ph.D. is deciding what you will use to get through the program. For some, all that they need are index cards and Microsoft Word. Others are more demanding: a glance at Kieran Healy’s beautiful but daunting list
is either inspiring or frightening. I spent most of my first year on my Mac, working with a combination of LaTex, Bookends, Mellel and Pages and Tinderbox with OmniOutliner for notes. Along with Mail.app, iCal and Safari, but workflow was pretty much set, with the occasional foray into Excel and Word. Now, there were two major problems that quickly became evident as the year went on. First was the sheer number of apps. I was always switching between them; and frankly, they did not play well with each other much of the time. Second, communicating with others–including collaborating on papers, commenting, etc.–forced a lot of exporting in and out of Word. My hard drive became cluttered with different file formats for different projects, including different formats for different stages of the same project. A mess indeed!

Second, I became increasingly nervous about the Mac-centric way of doing things. I have only one computer, and the labs at school all us Windows. Even processing LaTex is a no-go on most of the closed computers at the library. So in the case of a computer disaster, I would be left up the creek.

Well, a disaster hit yesterday when a certain little girl pulled my laptop onto the floor which seems to have wrecked the hard drive. Luckily, just a week earlier, I had 1) backed up everything onto CDs and 2) simplified my workflow to the use of Zotero, Microsoft Word, Excel and various Google Apps, which allows me to work away in the computer lab from a USB.

Now, I know that Microsoft Word is a kludge, but it works. I can work with others, do reasonable long papers, and newsletters as well. Zotero may be the best thing that ever happened to Firefox. While as a reference manager and notetaker, its not as flexible as my previous combos, its good enough and getting better. And it will work from a USB on any computer that can run Firefox. More on that in another post.

So the lesson learned is that the choice of workflow applications should not only take into account what the best at your given tasks, but also what will reduce risk and allow you to work smoothly in unexpected situations. I think that simplifying the number of applications used and the ways that they are used is key. Of course, the next step may be move wholly to plain text.