More on using your mac for long-form writing

This is following up my last post on this topic, mostly by copying and pasting comments. First, I want to especially thank Craig and M.Allen for their helpful suggestions. Also, I had some people ask me if there were any similar program suggestions for a windows based computer. Particularly for citation management. Any suggestions, let me know.

First, one category I left of were things to stop time waste (you know, like reading blogs). I have used LeechBlock. Craig makes this suggestion:

I also recommend Freedom. It turns off network connectivity for a designated period of time thus preventing you from wasting your life reading blogs and Twitter. (As I am doing now.)

Which is a good suggestion. I think I might try using this one. I have found that I am just too skilled at getting distracted on the internet, that LeechBlock is sometimes too nuanced of a tool for my work.

On the issue of what to use for word processing and citation management, this is what Craig suggested:

I write in plain text in TextWrangler, where I also markup the text in LaTeX. Marking it up as such allows to easily identify what should be bolded, italicized, and the like should I want to output the text to Word or RTF instead. Unlike proprietary document formats (e.g., Word, Mellel, etc), plain text will most likely always be readable by all computers at all times. Will come in handy when you are editing your complete works on your deathbed in fifty years.For citation management, I use BibDesk, which integrates very well into LaTeX. If you loved the aesthetic features of Mellel (which I had used at the start of my dissertation), you'll die for LaTeX.

I've never used Scrivener, but I understand it can fulfill the same functions as TextWrangler. The advantage of TextWrangler (and LaTeX and BibDesk) is that it is professional quality and free. LaTeX and BibDesk also have the advantage of being open source.

M. Allen also made these comments on LaTeX:

Since I do some technical work, I had trained myself in LaTeX. Thankfully, LaTeX is incredibly flexible in compiling documents, lists of tables, list of figures, and is built with its own bibliography package. TeXShop for mac is free, so my bibliography and writing packages are free altogether.

When compiling the document, I can specify what I want if I don't want the whole document. So, for the job market, just telling it to return "Chapter 4", makes life easy for that (or having people read it).

If you do not do any mathematical work, then learning LaTeX is not really ideal. However, if you do (logic, or in my case, game theory), then this combination made it a great tool for compiling my dissertation.

Lastly, JonEP suggested this for citation management, a browser based solution:

I'd strongly urge you to consider Zotero, not only for bibliography management, but especially if you are girding yourself for the long haul of a dissertation (I just finished one). Zotero is particularly useful for acquiring articles -- as you do research on your computer, you are constantly pulling down articles that are useful to you. Without Zotero, the task of entering bibliographic information about each article is so onerous that it soon overwhelms you. With Zotero, you are able to rapidly integrate new material into your collection and keep it organized and relevant.

I'd also strongly recommend checking out NVIVO, a program that helps you code and analyze your notes. [Nvivo is for windows, and I haven't used it. --Scu]

Now, I haven't used any of these programs, but I figure I would put this out there. And I generally agree about using open source tech. So, there you have it. Any other suggestions? Comments?

Tricking out your Mac for long-form academic writing (especially a dissertation)

So, many of you are in the process of writing your dissertation, and those of you who aren't, do other long academic writing. Anyway, there are lots of products to help you write with a Mac, and most people I talk to don't seem to use many different products to help with their productivity. A quick note here: If you are being highly productive, besides making sure you back-up your work, there is no real reason to play with other systems. But many of you come here because you are goofing off from your work. So, if you are goofing off anyway, you might as well goof off in ways that can help your long-term productivity. So, some products to help you work.

(1) ALWAYS BACK-UP YOUR WORK! I don't have a lot of smart or specific suggestions here. For example, there are pros and cons to backing up on the cloud or not. I would welcome suggestions in comments for specific back-up strategies for macs. But all of you should be backing up in some form or another.

(2) Word Processing:
The main option is, of course, Scrivener. Fairly cheap at $38.25 (that is the educational license version cost), it is versatile, and also allows you to make documents into formats that other people will actually look at. What makes Scrivener such a fun product to work with, is that it allows you to have total control of writing in many different points throughout a long work. It also is great for giving you control at the changing of different parts of the document. Want to experiment how splitting up a paragraph and turning in two will look? You can type it out and easily switch different views to get a good sense of it. Also, the writing mode is perfect for just writing, shutting out the rest of the computer and everything but a surface for putting words onto.

EDIT: Two additional notes for Scrivener, this post from Charles Stross is pretty useful for learning and describing the basics of use. Also, here is an academic template for scrivener.

I haven't had a chance to use MS Office 2011 for Macs, but I have only heard good things. The one I have is pretty terrible in lots of ways, and is mostly used because the world uses MS Office.

I have used openoffice for Macs, and I have to say I was distinctly underimpressed. It is regularly slow, and causes more pinwheel action than most things I do on a Mac. The price is nice, for you grad students, but there are some other really good options.

I have tried two other word processors, and I want to briefly discuss them. One is Apple's iWork's Pages. I enjoyed using pages primarily for making fliers and image heavy texts. I don't do a lot of work with images in my academic writing, so I haven't really used it for that. However, I hear good things. As a standard word processor, it was pretty strong. But not amazing, and I had a lot of compatibility issues.

The other one is Mellel, which I only played around with long enough to expire the free trial. I really liked it a lot. Fast to load, and really controllable writing experience. I definitely felt like I had more control over the aesthetics of my document. But its lack of compatibility (it doesn't support docx, and only supports doc partially) made it not a good investment for me.

There are plenty of other word processors I haven't tried, like Bean and Nisus Writer. I recently was talking with someone who uses Scrivener for all of her long-form writing, and uses bean for all of her note taking and shorter word processing needs. If anyone has any experiance with other word processors I would like to hear them.

(3) Bibliography/Digital Library: I use Bookends. That is also the only one I have any experience with. It is fairly affordable at $99 or $69 (student), and I really like it. Anyone out there with experience with EndNote, Papers, or Sente? I can say that I found Bookends fairly easy to work with, and have never had the sort of problems to make me go and play around with the others. I have heard good things about Papers, but never really used it.

(4) Spelling and Grammar Check: Most of your word processing software will have some sort of spelling and grammar checks (MS Word's Grammar check is pretty decent these days, honestly). However, I suggest Grammarian Pro2. I know some people who cannot stand it, and it requires some active work in the beginning to get it synced to your particular problems and needs, but I think it is worth the effort.


Okay, what did I forget? Other suggestions or reviews? If I get enough of them I will make a follow-up post. Also, I guess I should say I have gotten no money, or even free products, for this post. But if anyone wants to give me free products to review for them, let me know.

Some thoughts on writing the dissertation

You might have noticed that my blogging has fallen off of late. I am still trying to adjust to my new schedule this semester, and blogging has been the first causality. As I organize my life in better ways, I am sure that my blogging will pick up. Now, to the post.


Tim Morton has been doing a series of advice posts on writing the dissertation. You can find them here, and they are worth reading. I wanted to add in some things from a current dissertation writer.
So far, so true from what Tim has been saying. Getting over the idea that you are writing your first book has been the hardest thing for me. Not only has my adviser been telling me this since almost the first day I ever met him (he didn't realize he was my adviser at that time). It also helped reading some dissertations that became books I also read (for reasons that include legitimate academic ones, I read both Jason Wirth's dissertation and Matt Calarco's. I've also read the books they eventually informed. While similar enough to understand their filiation, they were also different enough to really hammer in that these are two different products). With all of that, on some level I still had been thinking of my dissertation as my book-to-be. It was until about a month ago, when the tension between the first part of the dissertation and the second part of the dissertation (for those who are interested in some details, read this) was too much conceptually for me. Not too much for the same dissertation, but two much to be one book. What will almost certainly happen is that the dissertation will provide the framework and raw research for two different book projects, rather than the one.
Another issue of the dissertation is the balance between writing and researching. I'm the sort of scholar who happily spends many hours in archives, who enjoys taking a weekend to track down the origins of a particular phrase, etc. I've always been the sort of intellectual who befriends the small, marginal, asides in work. The dissertation really allows me to wallow in mode. Switching to a writing mode, and at some point ending the perpetual research has been hard. Focus on exactly what the dissertation looks like, and the goals I want to accomplish has been the biggest helps in this regard.
Marketability is the last thing I want to talk about, here. One of the weird things that emerges for anyone who engages in interdisciplinary work is that despite the tendency of your work to often generate excitement among diverse people, is that it is often hard to translate that excitement in proving you are engaged in a disciplinary intellectual adventure. There is a desire, at times, to put your dissertation in a sort of disciplinary drag. I don't have much to say here, I am bad at that. On some level, a dissertation has got to be thought of as a vehicle to help you get a job, and ignoring that seems like a bad idea. On the other hand, the degree of how to do that and in what ways are not something I can speak to.

I should probably take the time to break off a few chapters and try to get them published.

Some random dissertation talk

So, I almost never talk about the dissertation on here, and I suddenly realized that many of you may have no clue what the work was looking like. Anyway, here is a brief description of the work, for any that are curious. (I just got through chatting with the philo department here on campus, and realized that I need practice talking about the dissertation project).

The dissertation is basically divided into two sections. The first section is dedicated to understanding the way that raising and slaughtering of other animals have changed our mode of production. I want to be precise here, the argument isn't how a different mode of production has given rise to different slaughtering and raising methods, but actually the opposite argument. The way we have killed animals and raised animals has greatly shifted our modes of production. The first obvious way occurs with the invention of the assembly line at the Chicago stockyards (and of course, not just an assembly line, but everything that made Chicago possible. This involved the raise of trains, the invention of refrigerator cars, monocultural agriculture, disciplinary techniques of worker management, new accounting methods, barbed wire, vertical monopolies, feedlots and early genetic manipulations of animals, new advertising techniques, etc). So, the assembly line was birthed through a whole ecology of interactions that centered around and mutually interdependent with Chicago and the packers. In this case, the argument is against a sort of historical accident (though of course, it could have happened otherwise). But that it required a certain disavowal of the animal, a certain biopolitics, that really allowed for these new modes of production ('the machine', as Marx puts it) to develop.
The next major change obviously culminates in the 1970s with the birth of what we call factory farming. This of course brings in all sorts of biocapital changes in the mode of production. In this case the question of eugenics being rooted so strongly in the animal sciences, and the development of certain reproductive technologies really rises out of animal sciences. But what occurs is a certain molecular or genetic primitive accumulation, and again what begins with animals is now beginning to spread elsewhere.
What is important in all of this is to understand that the disavowal of the animal is not ancillary or even produced by these modes of production, but rather the disavowal of the animal is constitutive to these modes.
The second section of the dissertation focuses on the other end, rather than looking at what we are doing and have done to animals, this section looks at proposed solutions to the question of the animal. In this case I explore the concept of the person, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming-animal, an ontology of vulnerability, and vegetarianism/veganism. I think the last two are the ones that I tend to post about the most on this blog, so I'll let that go for now. I have made some small moves on this blog to what I am interested about in the concept of the person, but it is mostly about how that concept is rooted in property ownership and legal obligations. As far as D&G are concerned, I think their work is pretty awesome, but I think there remains a nagging anthropocentrism to their work, a certain obsession with the human that remains in the notion of becoming-animal.

There was a lot more I wanted to do, but my committee and I agreed that the dissertation was going to be big enough as it was (which is why I don't deal the question of sacrifice or the question of rights in any real detail in the dissertation).

So, that's it.