Modern academic work is centered on our computers; data storage and analysis, writing, research, reference libraries, and often collaboration with our peers all require working computers.

It is for this reason that keeping good backups is paramount to success as an academic.

There are a number of techniques for keeping good backups as an academic.  I want to not have to think about them at all,  and my history in the IT world makes me want redundancy for the most important items.  Since I got to spend this weekend restoring due to a fried power supply killing a motherboard, I wanted to share some of the variety of things I do to make sure my work is safe.

Secondary/External hard drives:  Just because your machine only came with one does not mean you can’t install more.  And they aren’t expensive or hard to install either; if you can plug something into a USB port, you can add 1 Terabyte of external storage for $87.00.

Once the secondary drive is in, you can use a free piece of software such as Syncback and configure it to back up all of your documents to your external drive on a regular basis.  Lifehacker has an excellent explanation of how to backup your hard drive using Syncback.

A secondary drive accomplishes two things; first, it provides a backup of your drive and second, it is easy to move to a new system when the old one breathes its last breath (as mine did this weekend).

However, I’m paranoid.  What happens if my house burns down?  Or my computer is physically stolen?  Or I take multiple power spikes and both drives get fried?  These things are less likely, but not impossible.  For that reason, I also use off-site backups.

I use  Jungledisk for my off-site backup software.  Jungledisk makes use of Amazon’s S3 or other network storage solutions to back up my drives automatically.  The result is an invisible background backup solution for all your data to a remote location.  A few clicks and it has begun its restore.

I picked Jungledisk because Amazon S3 is very reasonably priced and I wanted to back up, well, everything.  Moreover Jungledisk gives me web access to every file I have backed up, so that I can get items when I’m not at home.  If, however, you only want to back up some key stuff (your writing, lecture notes, but NOT data or downloaded PDFs of research articles) there are a couple of free ways to do that.

• Mozy is an online backup service that gives you 2G of space at no cost.  You can, of course, buy more.  To my knowledge you can’t get to the files except through the Mozy backup tool.
• Dropbox is actually more of a file syncing tool; you can put your key items into your drop box and it will sync them to as many computers as you want.  I am currently doing this for my OneNote notebooks and my lectures in process.  Dropbox also provides web access to those files, so that I can get to them from anywhere.

I use Dropbox because I like it’s immediacy and web access for my most crucial files.  However pre-Jungledisk I used Mozy’s free service for my key files and was very happy with it.

One last important thing; if you are using Zotero for reference management, be sure to check out the version 2.0 beta.  I have had no problems with it, and love it’s ability to sync my files and library.  I use it with my Jungledisk account to keep copies of attached PDFs.

In the end the least productive thing you can do is re-do all your work because of a technology glitch.  Making sure you have extra copies of everything is one of the most important, productive things you can do.

Another grad student recently asked me about how to network with potential collaborators or committee members. These were people she had met either through course work, contacts, or conferences, and who she wanted to keep in contact with. At least two were people she was considering for her committee.

I don’t think that networking as a student is all that much different from networking as a working professional. Everyone has crunch times, everyone likes to talk about themselves/their work, and no one wants you to waste their time unless you have something to offer.  Let me address each of these points in a bit more detail.

Everyone has crunch times

One thing to remember is that academic time isn’t like normal time.

• Everyone gets slammed around finals, be it due to grading, or finishing things up
• Producing our “work product” (research and ultimately journal articles) takes months

It is not uncommon for conversations to get set aside mid-stream and picked up months later. Just because you didn’t get a chance to contact the person due to finals doesn’t mean they will think anything of an email 3 months later. They were just as busy.

This means two things to you.  First, that you have a common bond in all that end-of-semester/end-of-project stress, and it makes a great opener.  Second, they are used to this kind of stop-and-go intermittent conversation.  You still need to be polite, apologize for the delay, etc., but as long as you aren’t doing that with EVERY message it is unlikely to  be seen as a big deal.  Apologize and move on.

Everyone likes to talk about themselves and their work

If you have ideas for specific collaborative projects, these ideas are usually the best way to approach the person. “I was thinking about doing an experiment on concept x and know that is one of your areas of expertise. Could we get together to talk though my idea so that I can get your feedback?” Once there, if they seem amenable, the idea seems solid, and you both seem to have time, you can broach the subject of either collaborating or of them mentoring you on the project.  However by asking their advice you are implicitly appealing to their ego, and more likely to get a positive response.  Notice also that you aren’t asking up front for a huge commitment; just a conversation and sounding board.

If you don’t have specific ideas, then talk to them about their latest research. Make sure you have something interesting to say other than just gushing; a question for clarification about what they said, a question about something (carefully phrased) that you think might have been overlooked, or just what led them to think about the problem in this way. Meeting over coffee for this kind of discussion is great and keeps you in their mind.

If their field is tangential to yours and you see something related to their field in one of your journals, you can forward them the reference with a “Don’t know if you saw this, but it touches on your field at a, b, and c points.” Keeping up with the literature is hard for everyone, so as long as you aren’t spamming them or sending them obvious stuff it can be a great way to keep you in their thoughts when there isn’t a specific project and to show them your interest.

Have something to offer them

You need to bring something to the table, be it project ideas, introductions to people that might be able to help them, new research references, or just, within reason, positive but thorough attention to their latest work.  Once you show them what you can offer they will remember you in a more positive light.

Part of the PhD process is becoming that person’s peer, and to do so you have to carry your own weight on projects. Students who fawn and say “I really want to work with you” but don’t have a specific idea are perceived as “not ready yet”. Students who are independent but seeking guidance get lots of it and develop long-term relationships that are more equitable and advantagious for everyone.  This is particularly important in the case of people who might end up on your committee, as independence and your own ideas are key signals of a student who is ready to be a peer.

Put yourself out there

In the end though you just have to put yourself out there. If you don’t start the conversation, it won’t happen.  Most academics enjoy talking about their work and don’t mind working with eager, competant students.  Be one of those and the rest will come together.

One of the most challenging parts of being an academic is keeping up with all the new literature that comes out. We live in a publish-or-perish world, and that means the most active academics are putting out several new articles per year that we need to at least be aware of.

You may know already that a lot of journal publishers allow you to sign up for an email or RSS feed of that journal’s table of contents.  Unfortunately you have to set those up one by one, and that process can be quite tedious.

Enter TicTOCs, a service that provides access to a wide range of RSS feeds for journal tables of contents.  You can choose the journals you are interested in, export the list to an OPML file and then import that into your RSS reader, subscribing to the table of contents for all the journals you chose.  When a new issue is released, the table of contents appears in your reader and you can review it for any articles or authors that are important to your work.

This process was seamless in Google Reader.  I picked a bunch of journals, exported and imported, and less than 2 minutes later began seeing journal tables of contents appear in my reader.

The service doesn’t provide you with access to the journals themselves, only the tables of contents, so once you find an article of interest you will still need to go to your university library site to get the article.  The journal list is also limited; Sage, ProQuest and a few others participate, but many of the big publishers do not.  Nonetheless TicTOCs spead up the process of getting subscribed to the relevant journals and saved me time finding them all one by one.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about my own decision process between OneNote and Evernote;  To skip to the end, the result for me was OneNote.  Interestingly, Lifehacker started a thread asking people which tool they prefer.  More interesting than the poll is the comments.  Here are some comments that jumped out at me:

• Evernote is great if you are organizing lots of OTHER people’s content.
• OneNote is great if you are the one generating the content and need to organize it

• Evernote is a clear winner if you work at a lot of different locations or on a number of different platforms.   It has a number of mobile platforms so that you can take notes and add items on the go.
• OneNote is intimately integrated with Office, making working with it a no-brainer.  It is also tightly integrated with Outlook for tasks, calendar, and email.

Honestly, I’m still moving forward with OneNote.  I am also considering getting it for my machine at work, so that I can get very familiar with the app by using it in both places.    But I can also see how an undergrad or a more web-oriented project might work better in Evernote.

Over the time I have been writing here I have talked about a number of different technology experiments regarding making myself more productive.  Some have been successful, while others haven’t.  Time for an updated on some of what I’ve tried.

A voice recorder and Dragon Naturally Speaking for note taking while reading:

The experiment: I would speak into a voice recorder, summarizing what I was reading as I read it.  Then when I was done I would plug the voice recorder in to my computer, download the recording and use Dragon to convert it to text that I could then keep as searchable notes.

The result: Basically unsuccessful.  It worked, but I learned a few things in the process.

1. Dragon has a lot of great editing capabilities, but you need to be speaking as it converts in order to correct the errors it makes.  Working off a recording requires very accurate speech.
2. I don’t speak accurately enough to make this work.  I ramble, I am not succinct about my notes, and I make errors that Dragon doesn’t know what to do with.  I found that I was taking as much time to edit the results as I would have spent had I just typed them in initially.
3. The writing process does force you to organize your thoughts in a way that speaking doesn’t.  This is part of why my notes were so rambling and incoherent.
4. Any background noise at all made it hard for Dragon to convert the speech to text.  Since I read with classical music on (old habit; keeps me focused locally instead of hearing every noise throughout the house) the recordings I was making were less than clear, making Dragon perform even worse.

I do intend to work with Dragon more as an “in front of the computer transcription” tool, although I’m not ready for that yet.

Zotero

The experiment:  A new way of tracking my references, which are extensive, and spitting bibliographies into documents.

The results:  Resounding Success!  With one exception, Zotero can automatically suck in references as I search (entering far more information about a reference than I would manually) and spit it out into a very wide variety of formats.  (The exception is HWWilsonWeb sites, such as Education Full Text, which uses a non-standard metadata format.  Zotero is working on it.)

I was able to import my EndNote references and have more than doubled the size without a single hint of a performance problem.  Their latest versions offer ways to use a single library from multiple computers, addressing the only real limit I had found with the product.  I uninstalled EndNote, if that tells you anything.

Ongoing Experiments

I still have two experiments going on.

Bamboo tablet to hand-write notes: I just got the tablet a week ago and am still working with this.  So far I have discovered that too many years of typing has caused my handwriting to go into the toilet.  It is taking some practice to get used to writing on the tablet, and right now it is slower than typing.  It is possible that this will end up being something I use to overlay my typed notes with arrows, circles, connections, etc.

OneNote: This is working out well so far; It has yet to not be able to do anything I have wanted, although there are a few key tests yet to perform.  I am specifically concerned about tagging capabilities and the ability to search based on tags, but need to get more data into it before I will be able to truly test this out.

There are three items on my “just starting to be tested” list:

• gtdagenda.com – an application for implementing gtd online.  It includes the capability of both calendar events and scheduled items like classes, has a concept of a goal above projects, which means that the goal can be completing my dissertation but I can break down the projects better, and so far appears to be the best web-based gtd implementation I have seen so far.  However I haven’t had a chance to put a lot into it, so it needs a lot more testing before I can recommend it.
• WikidPad – a wiki software that runs locally on your machine (so backups are your own business and as good as you make them; mine are very good).  Most interestingly is that if you type a word with more than one capital letter in it it will automatically link that to other places where that same word appears.  This makes linking between different documents REALLY easy.  Worth more exploration, particularly if tagging in OneNote is too weak for what I need.
• scholarz.net – recommended in a comment, this is an online service that lets you organize your references, add notes to them and create document outlines/shells.  It also adds a social networking/community aspect, since you can collaborate and share your reference library.  It is being developed by a group of academics in Germany, and is interesting so far.  I like that it is being developed by “practitioners” rather than IT geeks who think they know what is needed.  For that reason alone, I need to spend more time with it and give it a good hard look.

Of course, there are technologies that I use that have become so integrated I hardly think about them anymore:

• Jungledisk and Amazon S3 for backups, since losing my work would set me back years
• Firefox for browsing, along with a wide variety of plug-ins
• A label printer, file folders and hanging files for organizing paper
• Gmail, Gcal, Greader, etc.  Also Gmail Backup, a program to download your Gmail periodically to files on your hard drive that can be backed up in case of a problem.
• Microsoft Office (primarily because it is everywhere I work, teach, and learn)
• SPSS (because my advisor uses it and can be more helpful if I do)
• The usual assortment of lifehacker-suggested software for things like antivirus, malware protection, etc.

Did I miss anything?  Once some of these evaluations are complete I’ll post an updated summary.  In the meantime, drop me a comment if you think know of a good productivity enhancing tool for an academic that you think I might find useful!

Lifehacker had a pointer to an article from New York Times technology guy David Pogue on how he stays organized.  He rejects Inbox Zero (the idea of emptying your inbox constantly and using GTD-like decision making to send email to your lists) and, instead, uses his inbox as a to-do list.

It was refreshing to hear someone else admit it.  I can’t seem to break that habit either.  I have tried, but found myself with too many places to look for what I needed to do next.

Having said that, I have fine tuned the art of using my inbox as a to do list.  Gmail does some of this for me, but at the day job we are locked into Outlook so I have to do it manually.  Specifically:

• Only one reference to each task in the inbox.  If there are 50 messages, keep just the last one in the inbox.  The rest go to the folder that they will end up in when the effort is complete.  (This is where gmail’s threading is hugely helpful.)
• Keep the inbox down to one screen with no need to scroll.  If it has to go onto a second screen, it is time to do some clean up and catch up.
• It’s ok to leave something in the inbox pending more information to make a decision, but try not to leave anything in there just out of avoidance.  If all the information to make a decision is available, do it.  Same goes for avoiding writing hard responses; pull of the band-aid and get on with your day.
• The 2-minute rule still applies; if you takes less than two minutes, just do it.
• Gmail specific: Use multiple inboxes to sort different types of activities while still having them all visible on a single screen.  For example, I often send myself things to read later when I have some time.  I label those items @READING and archive them.  They then appear in the secondary inbox on my screen so that I don’t lose them, but they also don’t keep me from finding things I need to address sooner.  This could also be done for all mail related to a blog in order to batch process responses, approving comments, and keeping up with administrative tasks.

Inbox Zero is a great system if you using GTD fully and looking at your lists regularly, but that isn’t me.  However there is a place between zero and thousands of messages in the inbox that can be very productive, and that is where I am trying to live.

It makes sense for a dissertation writer to start with the literature review;  It forces you to think about your topic holistically and understand the context of the area of study you are entering and helps to clarify your thinking about both your question and your methods.  But what is it really and how is it judged?

In theory your dissertation is a new and original contribution to scholarly knowledge.  That means no one has done it before.  In practice, that can be pretty subtle (for example no one has done it for this group before, or using this method, or from this theoretical perspective).  Nonetheless you need to place your research in the context of the broader conversation about this topic.  Just because no one has done exactly what you have before doesn’t mean that they aren’t talking about it.  The literature review is where you do that, and at its most general is just a summary of the conversation to date.  However in doctoral education it is never quite that simple.

Finding the literature is often the easy part.  In fact, it’s veray easy to find way too much.  The big commercial library databases are a good place to start looking, including listings of recent dissertations.  (As a side note I am finding that reading a couple of dissertations has helped me to get a handle on the expectations and tone.  Even tangentially related dissertations have helped with this.)  Once you find a few relevant documents, their bibliographies are the next step in the chain.  Many fields prefer you start from great canonical articles. These can be used with a tool like Web of Science to back-track everyone who has cited that article up to the present day and make finding the state of the subject quite easy.  A little time with a reference librarian to fine tune your search terms and learn some of these more obscure tools is time well spent.

But it had never been clearly articulated to me what made a literature review good.  In reviewing a journal article recently I discovered what made one bad: one paragraph per study, summarizing the population, methods and findings, with no consolidation or theme.  In effect it was an annotated bibliography, and it was awful (not to mention painful to read).  As my adviser once told me, a literature review should have an argument; a common thread that not only explains what has come before but helps you tell the reader why your work is important and why your conclusions matter.

An article provided by a friend in my reading group has given me a much better understanding of the elements of a good literature review.

This chart* summarizes what I think are an excellent set of criteria for judging a literature review.  It also sets the bar quite high as far as what a student needs to accomplish.

The first item on the list is Coverage, and this requires some explaination.  It is very easy to undersearch (not find everything), oversearch (find everything and include it even when it makes no sense, is out of date or repetative), or fail to truly think about why you are including something.  The items you include should be purposeful and well thought out; not just there to prove that you’ve read everything regardless.  Moreover you MUST keep up with the literature as your research progresses.  The lit review is the first chapter you work on, but it should also be the last one you look at before you turn the dissertation in.

Synthesis is the second category and is what seperates a scholar from an undergrad; any undergrad can regurgitate a list of articles, but it takes a more sophisticated approach to look at the broader picture, find the commonalities and differences, and call out the gaps.

Methodology was a new one for me.  The authors argue that a good review looks at both the main methodologies used in the area, but also evaluates them, looks for gaps and proposes potential new approaches.  In a perfect world the new approach should be precisely what you are doing in your dissertation.

Significance is an interesting one in education.  We produce PhDs (thought to be more research oriented) and EdDs (thought to be more practice oriented).  Some would argue that this should result in different criteria for the literature review, although the authors of the chart disagree.  I would suggest that all doctoral students need to understand both, but that the balance (60% scholarly / 40% practical or vice versa) could change depending on the degree and the topic.

The last category is Rhetoric, which relates back to my adviser’s comments.  The quality of the writing needs to be clear, organized and integrated with the rest of the document.

As I am reading, I am trying to keep these ideas in my mind.  As I read abstracts I am trying to place the topic within the broader academic conversation, and using that placement to decide whether I am going to read the entire article or skip this.  I am using tagging to help with synthesis and methodology, and for now am not eliminating any articles I find.  Later I intend to trim and note why, but feel that I need that big picture first. By knowing what a good literature review looks like first I hope to be able to produce one.

* Boote, D. N.  P., & Beile, P. L. (2005). Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation. Educational Researcher, 34(6), 3-15.

There were a few comments that got caught in the move, but brought up valid points that I wanted to address.

Brum wrote:

I tried the tablet and it did not work for me. I think it is more important to get all your data and (immediate) thoughts into one database. I use the Evernote software to do this. I scan all readings into PDF and pile all the snippets and ideas into EN, tag them and retag them with hierarchical tags until the structure of the paper emerges. EN can do handwriting as well, but I rarely use it now. The ability to take a note from PDF or add new idea with confidence that I find it later is the important thing (no more thousands of doc files or OneNote sheets); handwriting isn’t.

I’d be interested in hearing more about how you are using tags.  I created ones for key subject areas of the literature review as well as methodology, but I would be amazed if the tags stay as they are now.  My biggest current Onenote worry is that its tagging capabilities won’t be up to the task.

The tablet showed up today, so once I install it I will be able to experiment with how much handwriting works.  But that leads me to another thought…   Jeremy wrote:

This has been one of the areas I’ve struggled with and haven’t come to a good conclusion. A question: Does Onenote allow a link/embedding to a PDF file of the article? A strength of Zotero is the ability to drop a PDF into it which copies the PDF into the Zotero library allowing an easy backup.

In general I think I’m futzing too much with my system and just need to press forward.

Onenote does allow you to link to a PDF document, although I still do that into Zotero.  The goal of Onenote is really to create a consolidated place for my notes that can be searched and organized in a way that I can find them again.

However it was this last sentance that really resonated with me.  It’s so very easy to keep playing with the system and avoid actually using it.  I’ve been known to do that with GTD implementations, and I am quite obviously doing it with the tablet.

Finding that balance between futzing and improving a system is critical;  In the end, it’s about putting something in place that you will use and building the habits to make it useful.  For me, that means setting a hard deadline.  After this week I’m going to use what I have for a month and then revisit it.  I might change at that point, or I might not.  But to move forward, there has to be an end to the planning and a start to the work.  That will be Saturday.

After having a few bad experiences with godaddy’s quick blogcast software, I’ve moved this blog to wordpress.  I’ve redirected protoscholar.com to the new address, so most users shouldn’t see much of a change.  The price of this change was all the comments, because when I imported them on wordpress all the spam came with it. 3,987 pieces of spam.  Since there were maybe 50 legitimate comments, I decided to delete them all rather than try to sort it all out.  Thanks for hanging in there with me…

One idea I did pick up from my writing group was the idea of writing notes while reading.  She wrote them in the margins, which won’t work for me because they aren’t searchable, but I understand the immediacy of picking up a pen and writing something down.  However I have absolutely no intention of  buying another computer (tablet laptop) to support this effort.

So I am going to try a technology experiment.  First, I will be (*DEEP BREATH*) upgrading this machine to Vista.  Then I will be installing a Wacom Bamboo Graphics Tablet on which I can write my notes directly into Onenote.  If this works and I find myself using it a lot I may explore a tablet PC in the future, but this is an inexpensive way to get the functionality (hand write and the computer can read it) without spending $1000 on a new computer.