War on Entropy 1: software for your field notes
Those of you who are on the job might appreciate the recent round-up of software useful to anthropologists (and those of us who poach anthropological methods) over on the anthropology blog, Savage Minds. The post itself is an aggregation of software which was bandied about on the East Asian Anthropology Listserv. Be sure to check the comments, too. It is an interesting list, though it is somewhat skewed towards Windows and Mac users.
I have been looking for software to help me get my work organized. My own system is pretty unsophisticated– in the field I take notes in my locally-procured exercise books. When I first got started a few years back, I was keen on the Rite-in-the-Rain line of field books. However, after a chiding from a committee-member when I included water-proof notebooks as a line item in a proposal budget (at something like $14 each, they just looked fishy in the budget), I shifted to whatever notebooks I could find when I landed wherever I was going. Luckily for me, most of my note-taking currently takes place under houses rather than out in the rain.
I write up notes and brainstorm using a text editor, either Kate on Linux or NoteTabLight on Windows. I am neither a Kate nor a NoteTab advocate– I remain open to other programs. But they are both free, and I just like the cross-platform flexibility of text files.
One of my serious organizational problems right now is my PDF files. After 6 years of study, I have accumulated quite a mess of scientific literature in PDF format. It is, of course, scattered across several locations and with file names spanning several different conventions (as my naming system has changed over the years, I have not retroactively updated the names of older files). Searching for particular articles by title or author is often tricky, and by subject or key-word is nigh on impossible. So now I am looking for a program which will let me tag my PDFs so that I can keep them all in one place, and search by tag. A library manager, if you will. My cursory search has turned up little so far. If I come up with a program I like, I will post about it. If you know of one, I’d appreciate the tip so share it in the comments.
Sadly, my hard copy files suffer from the same problem; though, several moves between apartments and offices have probably left them in even worse condition. But, they are back home. So I cannot worry about them right now.
