To read.
Scholars and practitioners: How do you read? (Not “how do you recognize shapes and turn them into meaning,” although that’s plenty interesting in its own right.)
I pretty much gave up reading for pleasure some time in high school (probably right around the time I was forced to read The Grapes of Wrath); I’ve probably read a dozen novels in the last thirteen or fourteen years. Now I read internet crap (news, essentially) and technical material, things found online and most easily consumed via LCD screen.
Except, for some reason, research papers. I can’t read research online. It doesn’t sink into my brain in any meaningful way unless I kill a tree and curl up with a stapled, 2-up duplexed printed copy and a highlighter or two. (I haven’t yet figured out why this is; perhaps my technique is broken—see below.)
And yet there are plenty of lovely PDF readers for the Mac: Skim (which I do use for LaTeX preview), Papers (winner of an Apple Design Award), and so forth. Clearly some people are able to consume journal articles and conference proceedings electronically, else there would be no demand for such tools.
So I ask: How do you consume your research or other non-reference technical material? Online or offline? More to the point: is there some refinement to my reading technique that will allow me to use a different medium (ideally, an electronic copy plus PDF annotation)? Or am I doomed to my pulpy ways?
5 Responses to “To read.”
Research papers, distributed as PDF for publication, are not optimized for on-screen consumption. They are certainly not optimized for my X40 screen. So, in-depth reading of papers is generally done in dead-tree format. However, if I’m just looking to get a quick handle on something, I’ll read it on screen. For understanding more complex stuff, it is helpful to have the paper on which one can take notes, think out cases, sketch out the design.
What do you use for personal annotation/note-taking/thinking of online resources? del.icio.us doesn’t have fine great granularity. I wasn’t impressed with the UI of Google Notebooks the last time I checked. Crit by Ka-Ping Yee was the best tool I saw for that but the public service is down and I haven’t played with the source.
comment posted at 9:46 am on 26 Mar 2008
For capturing new links, I use del.icio.us (e.g. the intersection of research and @toread), but I agree that it’s far from ideal. Its best feature is that it is wherever I am, including on my two Macs and my iPhone.
For longer-term archival storage & organization I use BibDesk; its native file format is BibTeX, which is a huge win for me in general. I’ve currently got it set up to file PDFs, too, so I now have a ~/Bibliography folder with folders for year and PDFs named after cite keys. More at your question, though: I use BibDesk’s tags and notes features to organize and annotate where possible (and when I think of it).
This isn’t so good for arbitrary bits of thoughtstuff, however, so I’m also finally knuckling under & exploring personal wiki options (top of the list: VoodooPad). I haven’t gotten very far with this, yet, so it’s too early to tell if it’ll help me find information or lose it.
comment posted at 10:37 am on 26 Mar 2008
Like you: dead trees, duplex, mechanical pencil in hand.
I actually read papers about the annotation of scholarly papers a while back — amusingly recursive. Cathy Marshall has written some interesting ones.
comment posted at 11:04 am on 26 Mar 2008
Dead trees all the way, unfortunately.
I am also interested in the personal wiki options. I have a lot of ideas in this space, but it’s not a very high priority. An emacs mode might be the shortest path to success…
comment posted at 7:08 am on 27 Mar 2008
I think I have to resort to paper whenever I need to remember anything. If I’m looking up a fact here or there, I’ll search and skim online. But my recall depends on context…where was I sitting, what did it sound/smell like, and where was it on the page? Online reading totally abstracts the notion of “page”, so it makes it really hard to spatially place (and subsequently retrieve) bits of information. A round trip through the page->eye->brain->arm->highlighter->page loop helps, too.
comment posted at 2:00 am on 30 Mar 2008