I wanted to briefly answer a few questions I’ve been getting in response to my series on DevonThink [1] [2] [3].

Files in DT

Many people have asked how I store files in DT. My general principle is to store archive material directly in the database, but to index (i.e. link externally to) PDFs of journal articles, which I store in the “Attachments” folder in Bookends (my preferred citation management software). You can do this by clicking and dragging a PDF into the database while holding Cmd+ option. This makes the article searchable within DT without duplicating it in both applications.

Web bookmarks

I don’t tend to use the RSS or web bookmarking features in DT, because I prefer to have all my material available with or without an Internet connection. If I want to use a web article, I tend to PDF it. YMMV according to how much of your research is based on web materials — for me, almost none.

Scrivener

I do use the wonderful Scrivener, and some of you noticed that my seventh label is in fact called “Scrivener”. I use this to mark documents in my database which I have copied into Scrivener’s research folder. I had one Scrivener project per thesis chapter, and extracted documents relevant to that chapter from DT into Scrivener. Labelling them in DT helped me avoid accidental duplication. This was more of a hack than a strategy — tedious, but it was late enough in the thesis game that it did what it needed to do. I need to think more about this, but a future post on Scrivener is definitely in order.

Other apps

I’ve never used Sente or Papers (on the former, see the interesting exchange between Bruce Williamson and Peter Medway in the comments) but I did experiment with Evernote, and found it not quite to my liking. I’m not sure why — perhaps the lack of structure, or haphazardness, or the fact that for some reason uploading pictures from my iPhone just didn’t seem to work all that well for me. But I know many for whom it is an indispensable part of their workflow, so I’d still encourage anyone thinking about their research systems to give both a go. Finally, I gave up on Microsoft Word for Macs a long time ago, switched to the glorious Mellel (which integrates with Bookends), and never looked back.

In that vein, here is a great article on how to review journal articles, which junior academics may find useful (I certainly did). Take-home message: be nice, be prompt. Pay it forward, pass it on.

Tills has also perfected the art of war against space: the bookshelf stack. Behold, a mighty phalanx of bookshelves wedged between floor and ceiling: a triumphant conquest of dead space, reclaimed for king and country! or maybe for the sanity of the storekeeper.

But surely there is no more fitting source of bookporn than the so-called “pubic triangle” of Edinburgh. This is the western flank of the Old Town, famous as much for its proliferation of shady bars and lapdance parlours as for its astonishing concentration of second-hand bookstores. A heady mix of booze, bosoms and books, indeed; many of these establishments have been proudly balancing flesh-sleaze with bibliophilic erotica for decades. Here is Edinburgh Books, whose central room is presided over gravely by Clarence, resident water-buffalo:

and whose enormous space combines creative shelving, miscellaneous taxidermic creations and national pride:

and here is Armchair Books, a marvellous, eccentric place. Does that door ajar not entice? and seduce?

and upon entry, deliver untold delights, proffered to its lustful clientele atop a bed of luxurious Oriental carpets?

(They are, they declare, under sporadic, “feeble but sinister attack” by the government. I believe them).

so get thee to Edinburgh, where book and bosom meet in countless suggestive ways. I guarantee you will come away enraptured–and, given the range of excellent and well-priced merchandise, utterly spent.

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

– Maurice Maeterlinck, Le Trésor des Humbles (1896), trans. Shaun Whiteside (2001)

in somewhat worse translation, at least to my modern ears,

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words! We believe we have dived down to the most unfathomable depths, and when we reappear on the surface, the drop of water that glistens on our trembling finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We believe we have discovered a grotto that is stored with bewildering treasure; we come back to the light of day, and the gems we have brought are false–mere pieces of glass–and yet does the treasure shine on, unceasingly, in the darkness!

– Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, trans. Alfred Sutro (1899)

To each reader her time.

“The Mysteries of Lam Qua” is a gallery of nineteenth century oil portraits by a Chinese artist known as Lam Qua (林官) (1801-1860). His paintings are beautiful, grotesque physiological studies of patients with extreme tumour growths. Lam Qua’s paintings were specially commissioned by Reverend Dr Peter Parker, who established the first American hospital in Guangzhou in 1835 and who successfully introduced several Western surgical techniques to China: amputation, anesthesia and reconstructive surgery.

I visited the Surgeon’s Hall Museum in Edinburgh this past summer and recall the same sense of wide-eyed, horrified fascination which many of its exhibits evoked in me: a tiny, perfect fetus curled into itself, baring a spine like a ridged toothpick; a plaster cast of a dissected human torso; a meticulous diagram of tooth extraction. Exhibits of medical conditions arrest a moment of pain, and render it frozen and motionless. My sense of unease must come, I suppose, from the sympathy of pain (a deeply private but nonetheless very universal thing) and from the stillness which we all know is so inappropriate to the experience of pain (for in pain, we squirm, we flail, we cry — in pain, we are not still, unless in sleep or death).

The Lam Qua paintings are unsettling in a further way. Captured in oils, the patients bear their anomalies calmly, as if they were props: like a rose borne delicately in one hand, say, or a pearl earring. Their characters shine through in the way they hold themselves, the way they gaze at the viewer, their expressions, the way they dress — some are even set amidst landscape. In all respects, then, these paintings are portraits, except for the grotesque and painful anomalies they depict (almost as though incidental to the portrait), and the juxtaposition is unsettling.

Apart from everything else, then, the paintings made me think a lot about how we feel about, view and come to terms with physical abnormality. And this is why I thought the small related display, Ways of Seeing, was right on topic. It’s a flash program which imposes a narrow field of vision on a Lam Qua portrait, and then widens out to slowly permit us full view. Exhibit #2 begins with the face of a woman — we meet her dignified, regal gaze — and then widens to show us the ghastly blight on her breast. We are first impressed, then repelled; perhaps if we met her in real life, our gaze might follow the same trajectory from her normality to her abnormality. But the widening of our vision can work the other way around too. As Exhibit #3 suggests, we might begin staring with horrified fascination at an abnormality, but widen our vision to acknowledge the whole human, and perhaps, to recognize the humanity of the whole.

The wonderful “Mysteries of Lam Qua” project grew out of a seminar taught at Michigan State University in 2001 on Medicine, Race and Culture. Lam Qua’s paintings are held in the Peter Parker Collection at the Yale University Medical Historical Library and the Gordon Museum at King’s College London. You can view the whole gallery here.

But I have stack access to the Widener and the Yenching, a beautiful office, a brilliant cohort of peers and colleagues, and the strangely irascible marginalia of undergraduates, to keep me company along the way, and throughout the Boston winters. The cup overfloweth, truly.

My previous installment was about database meta-structures, in the context of which I discussed using labels for GTD. This post is about using labels for content-management. Over the course of my PhD research, I made two improvements (read: hacks) to my labels which turned out to be very useful to me. The first hack concerns timelines; the second became a substantial aid to writing up my thesis.

Fig. 1: Labels

Hack #1: Chronologies

Somewhere along the line, I decided that I needed a system of chronological organization, and came up with a folder I called Chronologies.

Fig. 2: Chronologies

This is basically a collection of smart groups, each of which contains all source documents and notes pertaining to a single year. As I worked on the period from roughly 1920 until 1965, I made one smart group for each year according to the following parameters:

Fig. 3: Chronologies parameters

The most important tweak which made this work was that I started and stuck to a system of naming my files. Every time I wrote or imported a time-sensitive document into my database, I would name it according to a strict YYYY.MM.DD format. So for example, in the screenshot above, the file highlighted green is a letter to the colonial office dated 14 May 1948. This file was automatically included in my 1948 smart group because it met one of the boolean criteria (its name matches the string “1948″). And because all files are named according to the same format, with the date first, I can sort them alphabetically and get a list of documents in ascending chronological order over the course of a single year (see Fig. 2).

Much later — almost too much later — I made a second improvement to my Chronologies group which I also found helpful and wished I’d started earlier. This was my Events group: a collection of text files whose file names detailed major, time-sensitive events.

Fig. 4: Events group

Most of the text files were empty: the important information was always in their titles, though occasionally I would add explanatory notes in the body of the text file. All events were labelled, and thus highlighted orange. Because their name format was the same as other time-sensitive documents, they show up in my Chronologies group, thus giving me a timeline of source documents which was punctuated by important contemporary events highlighted in orange (see Fig. 2). I found this really useful when revisiting and analyzing documents, and wish I’d started it earlier.

For my next database, however, I’d like to implement some method of streamlining my chronologies file (probably with tags) according to theme, biography, country or some other variable. This way, I’d have a series of fine-tuned chronologies rather than working with one gigantic all-encompassing timeline.

Hack #2: Bridges

My second hack used another label to generate a smart group I called, for want of a better name, ‘Bridges’.

Fig. 5: Bridges

This was basically an aid to writing. I started this group during my fieldwork year. Every so often, after some weeks in the archive, I tried to step back from the sources I’d been looking at in order to write and think thematically about them: in other words, to create prose ‘bridges’ between my sources. I used DevonThink’s internal hyperlinking to draft chunks of thematic prose which linked directly to the source files from which I got my ideas and information. In the example above (Fig. 5), I’d just gone through a whole clutch of booklists from the 1930s, and that paragraph was an early and roughshod attempt to think through some of the trends I’d noticed from the archive. A lot of this prose ended up directly in the thesis: what you see remaining in the Bridges group above is detritus, the stuff which didn’t make it in.

The reason I used labels and smart groups, rather than creating an ordinary group for these ‘bridge’ notes, is because they’re located all over my database. I tended to write them directly into the folders which contained the sources on which they drew; or they might reside in a folder containing articles which had stimulated those thoughts. Labelling them and collecting them into a smart group simply made them easier to find and manage.

I found this practice extremely helpful in keeping me mindful of larger themes even as I was mired in archival minutiae — why exactly I was looking at a particular run of sources, what sort of questions I should be asking of them, what I was getting out of looking at them. Hyperlinking to the notes I’d made kept their contents and insights fresh and readily accessible, rather than sinking out of sight, and out of mind, into the deep recesses of my database.

So that concludes my three-part series on DevonThink for history research. I learned an enormous amount from doing this on the fly over the course of my PhD. For my next project, which I am just about to start, I’ll undoubtedly dream up even more improvements, and generate still more shortfalls, on this most circuitous road towards a more perfect research system.

At China Heritage Quarterly, Lois Conner just reviewed an exhibition of Felix Beato’s beautiful 19th century photography of the Near and Far East, looking closely at three of his photographs. My favourite is this one, strange and wonderful beast of a boat that it is:

but this one is more haunting: the bodies draped with macabre grace among the battlements, softened and stilled to sepia. I look and can’t look and can’t look away. In case you missed it, China Heritage Quarterly also put out this excellent collection of Ernest Boeschmann’s late Qing photography last year, which I loved.

University of Chicago Press recently put out (let me draw a breath) the first two volumes of The History of Cartography (1987) in free PDF, along with (take a second breath) full colour maps of the world (H/t).

Two ways to discover new books to read, in farflung and unthinkably different disciplines to your own: listen to some interesting and/or eminent people tell you what their best five books are, or endlessly refresh this page, with wide bemused eyes. (Fine, you can view the full list too. HT).

The BBC has put their entire sixty-odd year archive of Reith Lectures online, “indefinitely”. I found out about this, as I do many things, through Open Culture, which is a dangerous portal to madness and autodidactic longing. Aung San Suu Kyi gives this year’s Reith Lectures.

DT has a small but useful feature: data labels.

Labels let you visually highlight or tag files. There are only 7 available labels — I’d love the ability to add more, but they are fully customizable and served their purposes well enough. As you can see in the image above, if you play with your keyboard settings in OS X system preferences, you can assign shortcuts which make it easier to add labels to a file. (I’ve used Cmd+number). You can have only one label per file, and once labelled, the file is highlighted in the colour associated with that label.

DT also has, alongside its normal groups, the ability to create Smart Groups according to customizable boolean criteria. The DT interface offers natural language fields to help the uninitiated put boolean operators together. For example, below are the criteria for the “All Images” Smart Group which now comes bundled with DT:

This smart group will automatically contain within it all files within the database which DT thinks are images.

Broadly speaking, I use labels in conjunction with smart groups for two ends: GTD and content management. I’ll discuss GTD in this post, and content management in the next.

I’m not a canonical follower of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) — I find it too fussy — but I’ve found the principles behind it useful, and at the risk of copyright infringement, I’ve tended to use the term GTD as a personal shorthand for “doing my work stuff productively”. I have four labels which I use to get stuff done: Urgent, Done, To Read and To Do This Week.

• Urgent files are those which need attention for any reason: a missing citation, something I need to take note of or check up on when I return to the archive it’s from, something I need to investigate further, and so on. There are usually very few of these, and they get addressed almost immediately. This label was most useful during the period of fieldwork and archive work, but almost never got used once I started writing.
• To Read are PDFs or text files of documents which I haven’t read yet. There were still hundreds of them when I finished my PhD, which may or may not bode well for the book project.
• To Do This Week are files which require attention this week: whether I needed to read them, take notes on them or incorporate them into my chapters. I tended to select these at the start of each week depending on what chapter or aspect of the PhD I planned to be working on, and work through them over the course of the week.
• Files were marked Done when they got, well, done.

I also created Smart Groups for each label, according to the following criteria:

My weekly work was therefore nicely collected in one group, and I could scan through the larger To Read group each week to see what needed to be done. I found I no longer had use for my Urgent group after I got back from fieldwork, and got rid of it. Items which got Done didn’t need a smart group: they just disappeared back into the database.

This system worked really well for me. I liked that when I imported an article or text which I wanted to read into my database, or scribbled a note to myself on a file, I wouldn’t simply lose track of it as it vanished into the deep recesses of my folder structure. This does tend to happen as the database grows and increasingly resembles a gigantic ravenous black hole to which miscellany, haphazard flashes of insight and good intentions go to die.

Next post: using labels for content management: Bridges, Chronologies and more.

If you’re dropping by from the mothership, hi! I’m Rachel. I write now and then about history, academia, research tech and bookporn. Hit the RSS if you’re into any of that, I’d probably like to know you — R. L. 01.09.2011

As some of you know, I am a loyal devotee of DevonThink, and was fortunate enough to have found out about it early on in my research. For four years, over the course of my PhD, I mucked about with it: exploring, optimizing, and adding to it–sometimes systematically, sometimes not. In consequence, it’s a gnarled, twisty and flawed little place (presumably, like the brain whence it sprung).

Nevertheless, I thought I’d offer a tour through my PhD database for several purposes: to allow those who are interested in finding out more about DT to get some specific insight into its uses for humanities research; to document for myself some of the things I did which worked and didn’t; to hear from anyone with more experience in research management systems; and perhaps offer something new or different to those who already use DT or something similar.

(For those who don’t know or use DT, it’s an amazing piece of research management software for Macs, consisting of a smart, flexibly structured database into which one can place all manner of files, web bookmarks, photos and notes. Some use one database for everything; I prefer to allocate one database per project. This post is about my PhD database).

Here’s my root file structure. In this post I’m primarily going to discuss the yellow folders, called “groups”: specifically, Archives, Chronologies, Images, Library, Notebooks and +Notes. (NB: For all images, click to expand).

I suppose I’m a little old-fashioned in my approach to groups. I don’t really exploit the full flexibility of DT — how it allows you, for instance, to “replicate” files in many different places such that changing something in one file will change all instances of that file no matter which group it’s in. Some people are happy, therefore, to have files floating freely across many different groups. To me (stodgy old historian that I am), a file needs to be anchored in one place: it must have a group which is its original container, no matter where else it might also appear. So I have a Research Library group which originally contains my notes on all the books, journal articles and dissertations I read:

and an Archives group which contains my notes from all the repositories I’ve consulted. Here are my groups from the National Archives (TNA) at Kew, London:

though as you can see, I don’t just have traditional archives in there, but also web resources and personal collections: in short, anything that’s a collection of some kind, grouped according to where I physically went and consulted them.

Together, those two basic groups contained the bulk of my research material (over 4000 individual items!), both primary and secondary. Each seminar, interview, book, journal and archive file has a group of its own; everything I know about or learn from that source, and often the source itself in PDF, JPG or DOC form, is in there. With the archives, I generally found it easiest to replicate the tree structure of each individual archive in my own database; so, for example, I’ve followed TNA’s own organizational logic: Cabinet Papers (CAB), Colonial Office (CO), Dominions Office (DO) etc., drilling down in the same way you would drill down in the archives themselves:

Nearly the whole database is, of course, searchable: a feature for which I was increasingly thankful the deeper I got into my research and writing. On the whole, these two groups worked extremely well for me: they made intuitive sense, and were apposite to my research needs. Structurally speaking, I don’t think I’d change this for my next project.

Of the remaining four groups, Chronologies was the most successful, and I’ll discuss it in the next post. Images was created before DT updated to version 2, which included an automatic Images group. Not that I ever did anything particularly clever with my own outdated version: as the subgroup’s name suggests, I used it as a dumping ground for a small, ragtag and totally unsorted collection of images I found interesting over the years:

some of which may find their way into future blog posts.

That leaves Notebooks and +Notes. Neither of these really worked out: in the case of the latter I found a better way to write notes to myself, and in the case of the former, I abandoned it altogether. Notebooks was intended to be a group in which I could collect thoughts and readings about various (rather esoteric) subjects not necessarily related to my PhD. My favourite part of it is the Homeless Quotes group, which grew into a nice collection of amusing, moving or thought-provoking scraps and bons mots I picked up over the years:

I still like the idea behind the Notebooks, but in practice it was too broad-ranging, and too loosely connected to my research, for it to make sense within this database. Its failure in this respect suggests that a DT database, at least for me, has to be bounded and specific to a project.

I’m still thinking, therefore, about the best way to capture and organize all the wider topical reading, thinking and notetaking I do (and want to continue doing) which isn’t necessarily bounded to a particular project. I want to read about European history, behavioural biology, Persian miniatures, Chinese etymology, deep sea marine life, genetics, porcelain trade, group theory and hurricanes. I love and worship Cosma Shalizi’s notebooks, but while the lack of an organizing principle turns his notebooks into a marvellous, sprawling maze of discovery and erudition, I suspect that for lesser mortals such as myself, something much more systematic is required for a lifetime of learning.

Next post: my DT database in meta-mode — after I get back from a holiday.