writing a doctoral thesis (...
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writing a doctoral thesis (in education)by WalterJarvis - 11:48PM, Mar 28, 2004 |
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I'm a complete novice to NoteBook and aboiut to start writing my dissertation following a case study. Are there any users who have been down the path of using NoteBook in their dissertation and if so how? I'm anxious to tap into a small community of users in the HE field -
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Hi, I did my dissertation before NoteBook (or indeed before my migration to OSX). Yet, as I continue to do what people call "qualitative research", I might fall into the HE field category of people. In my work NoteBook has quickly become my favoured app for most of my work: gathering/ordering data, managing writing projects (keeping track of documents, to-dos, mails,), managing teaching etc. As for gathering/ordering data I had a project a few years back where I used a tool called QSV Nud*ist, which is dedicated for storing, coding and retrieving textual data. It is a bit more powerful than NoteBook when it comes to coding/searching, but the interface was no less than terrible and it is not available for OSX. I think you can go a long stretch using NoteBook and the use of keywords & stickers for coding text. Moreover, I think it is wise to have one notebook for your data and one for managing the project, attempts at analysis etc. In that way your "own" stuff will not appear in searches/indices within your "data" notebook. Hope this was of some help. /ceffe
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Wow, thanks Ceffe. Thrilled to get your response. Sounds like we have quite a bit in common - dissertation, qualitative perspective, HE teaching, preparing papers, etc. I'll take your lead on using NoteBook in the manner you're suggesting. This will illustrate my novice status but Did you actually use NoteBook to write up complete documents - as opposed to sketching an outline? If so could you pont to one of - or a combination of - the exemplars (HE Professor, Scholar, IT specialist, etc to illustrate how? I'd be very grateful. Any other suggestiions about best practice in using NB for dissertation, papers, teaching? What is your field? What do you teach? Thanks again Walter
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I use NoteBook mainly to get myself organized. I also use it to share research work with my peers. So far this have been only informal documents. Recently I started writing a network design document using NB. Design guides are pretty complex technical documents, in printed form they are usually about 250 to 300 pages. It is pretty hard to read them as PDF or on paper. The document I am working on is designed to be HTML-only. This allows me to use NoteBook as writing tool. My "informal" reserach reports got pretty good acceptance. I think this is mainly because they have --thanks to NoteBook-- a very flexible format. For example, use collapsed cells if you need an quick overview, and expand cells when you need more detailed information. And you can drill down immediately! This is provides flexibility that you do not have with paper or PDF documents. I want to leverage this flexibity for my design document. I hope to come up with a document that is both easy to read and comprehensive. My main tools the achieve that are mind maps to illustrate the logical structure and NoteBook to provide the content. I am still facing issues regarding the integration of mind maps and NoteBook's HTML code. In conclusion, yes it is possible to write "complete" documents with NoteBook. Provided the only format you have to deliver is HTML. NoteBook can produce PDF or printed output but this cannot compete with the output produced by other tools. So far my favorite documentation tools were LaTeX, ConTeXt and DocBook (in chronological order :-). For paper-based documentation I would still chose ConTeXt. For HTML-based documents I would chose NoteBook. Cheers, /Markus.
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quote: Ok. Many questions! I do not write up complete documents (i.e. papers, books) in NoteBook. For that I still use MS Word (sigh), both because I can get better control over formatting (change a style and the change is reflected throughout) and because of its integration with EndNote (another sigh). I sigh, because I do not think either of them is perfect. Yet, I use NoteBook for all the work surrounding that (gathering data, sorting, searching data, sketching/outlining ideas, taking notes of comments on drafts and sorting them, and indeed to keep track of versions of papers). I also use it for managing courses both for making lecture notes as well as keeping the syllabus (and communicating through html). Hence all in all, for me NoteBook does not replace a word processor/bibliographic toolkit, yet it replaces the word processor as well as paper mess for all the work where these techniques/tools do not excel. The logic I use is to have at least one notebook per project (be it a course, a paper, a book project etc.). And, in case the empirical material seems to grow I would use a dedicated project notebook for that. In addition I have a few "basic notebooks" which I use on a daily basis for things like planning work or taking notes of readings. In this way I can archive a project notebook when the project is completed. Hence, in sum, a new project is really begun when I fire of a new notebook and it is really terminated when the notebook(s) for that project are archived. As for what I do. I teach and research in "market studies" which at my school is part of a marketing and industry dynamics department. Ah yes, I have an at this time incomplete notebook for my work stuff at my mac homepage (homepage.mac.com/claesfredrik/work - I have a tiny page at the school as well but I have not found a way to publish notebook content to the official site). /cheers ceffe
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G'day markus and caffe Thanks so much for passing on your NB experiences. I really do value your suggestions. I simply now need to learn through implementing your ideas - getting immersed in using NB for outlining and developing both the dissertation and teaching materials Doing so however with the confidence that you guys have been using NB in really useful ways, so perhaps when I get into strife I may again call on your assistance and advice. I'll keep you posted with (visible) progress and if you're interested perhaps you might suggest refinements along the way. Best wishes fellas Walter
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PS Forgot to ask: is there any straight forward way of linking NB with EndNote? Walter
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quote: Hi again, I'm glad to be of help. No there is no good linking between NB and EndNote. The straight forward of copy formatted (option drag from EndNote or command-k) works well for getting one or several references from an Endnote database into a notebook. Yet, you cannot get the kind of dynamic link you have between MS Word and EndNote where addition of citations in a word document updates the document's bibliography. /ceffe
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thanks /ceffe. Do you know whether the good people at NB working on something to facilitate a dynamic link with EndNote? Walter
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quote: Hi again. I do not know, but I doubt they are working on facilitating such a link. Actually I would not recommend it either. I think EndNote lacks the elegance of NoteBook and I would hate NoteBook to be dragged in such a direction. (I know, it may sound as a strange argument.) I've used EndNote since v2 - now on 7.0 - and the porting of it to MACOSX was a bit disappointing I must say. Moreover, the link between EndNote and Word is done from the EndNote point. (It works OK now, but it has had its problems with stability and I tend to avoid the highest setting of integration - cite while you write instant formatting - since it has not been completely stable.) If you want bibliographies created from notebook pages containing citations you can insert those from endnote (just drag and drop) and then use the scan rtf feature of endnote. Select the text on a notebook page, select scan rtf in the services menu and what you get is an rtf file with the text containing formatted citations and a bibliography. I've not used it much so I cannot vouch for how well it works, but when I tried now it worked ok. Bottom line, for me, is that for finalising texts a word processor/bibliographic package works better since I can get control over formatting and dynamic when citing. I use Word/EndNote as I know them inside out, not because they are perfect. Moreover, colleagues I work with use the same combination and that facilitates working together in writing projects. (Actually the embedding of EndNote data in word documents was perhaps the best enhancement in later years. This means that I can send a formatted draft to another word/endnote user and they do not have to have the same citations in their EndNote database since all necessary data for a citation I entered into the document is contained in the word file.) sorry for the long post /ceffe
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once again I'm grateful to the voice of experience. you're right, best to stay with the word-cite platform. I need to explore in order to learn the max and limiitations of NB re dissertation etc. It's just thatI was about to tackle the literature review chapter so I guess I was getting ahead of myself in imagining an all-purpose outliner and bibliography vehicle. One day maybe. Any suggestions? thanks again /ceffe regards Walter
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quote: Did you have a look at Mellel <http://www.redlers.com>? It is a nice word processor at a very reasonable price. In my opinion much better then word. I must admit that I only used for a few short papers so far. Mellel is supposed to integrate with reference managers such as Bookends <http://www.sonnysoftware.com/> or Endnote. I have not used this feature or software. Cheers, /Markus.
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quote: Hi, Thanks for the tip Markus! Actually, I have looked in the direction of Mellel several times (when MS Word have behaved particularly grumpy), and it looks very nice and affordable. Perhaps I will make the leap some day. Yet, as much as I hate to admit it, the +10 years working with the EndNote/Word combination makes it a big leap. (And as I said above, it would affect how I work with some of my closer colleagues.) Yet, given that I'm not fully pleased with how they work in OSX, it is really annoying to think of all the money I have spent on licenses for those two apps over the years. On a happy note though. NoteBook has been very good in relieving me of working in Word for all that stuff that is not actual writing on a paper or book. /ceffe
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Hi everyone, I just posted in another thread, but I think this thread is more to the point of what I was after, which is basically coming up with OS X solutions for the three parts of academic research: an academic word processor, notetaking software, and bibliographic management. I have switched to Mellel for academic writing, which integrates superbly with Bookends, so this covers two of the three superbly. Notetaking is so distinct an activity from both writing (word processing) and bibliographic management (EndNote and Bookends), so I'm hoping NoteBook will fit the bill and complement the software I use for the other two tasks. For notetaking, I used my own custom HyperCard solution in OS 9 ("HyperNote"), but now I absolutely have to find a better way in OS X. So I'm trying out NoteBook for 30 days, to see how I can get it to work with Mellel and Bookends. If anyone else is going down this path, maybe we can compare notes. FYI, on Bookends: You can import references from EndNote into Bookends, and Bookends is very stable and has a clean, intuitive interface. It can also download references from databases such as Amazon and Library of Congress. Unlike the Word-Endnote combination, with Bookends, citations inserted into Mellel are intact objects - there are no codes that can be messed up by accidental find and replace operations. PEACE Kerry
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ceffe
Member
09:07AM, Mar 29, 2004