Tag Archives: Productivity

The Zotero Bookmarklet for the iPad and iPhone

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notecards

The research organizer and reference manager Zotero is one of ProfHacker’s favorite tools. I’ve shown how ZotPad allows you to access your saved sources and PDFs on your iPad, but there’s one key functionality that ZotPad doesn’t (yet) provide: saving citations to Zotero from your iPad.

Enter the Zotero Bookmarklet.

The Zotero Bookmarklet can be added to almost any modern browser—including Safari on the iPad or iPhone—and it allows you to save a source to your Zotero library, as long as the Zotero web service recognizes that source. In other words, the Zotero Bookmarklet works well with common research databases, electronic journals, and new sources, while it’s not likely to recognize regular blogs and random websites.

Installation of bookmarklets on iOS browsers is tricky, but this is the essential process (adapted from the official Zotero documentation):

  1. Bookmark this page (or any page). Be sure to save it to Safari’s Bookmarks Bar (as opposed to your regular bookmarks).
  2. Edit the bookmark you’ve just made.
  3. Rename the bookmark to something appropriate. Mine is called, simply, “Zotero.”
  4. Copy the code from the Zotero Bookmarklet page (click the iPhone/iPad link there to view it) and paste that code as the URL for the bookmark

 

And there you have it! The first time you save a source you’ll be prompted to log into Zotero, but then it should work fine for you. Note that if you use a non-Zotero server to sync your attachments, the attachments (say, a PDF of the article you’ve just saved from Project Muse) will not be saved to your account. My current workaround is to download the attachment to Dropbox from my iPad, and then add the file to the citation in Zotero once I’m at my regular PC. I haven’t been able to verify this, but I expect that if you do avail yourself of Zotero’s file storage service, the attachments save without a hassle.

(Addendum: Fellow ProfHacker Amy Cavender has confirmed that the Zotero Bookmarklet does indeed grab PDF attachments if you’re using Zotero’s own file storage service.)

Can you imagine using the Zotero Bookmarklet? Would it change your workflow? If you have an alternative that already works for you, what is it?

My Pile of Index Card photo by Flickr user koalazymonkey / Creative Commons Licensed

Portable Scanning with the Doxie One

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Cat on Desk
While a paperless university remains a fantasy, it’s certainly the case that there has been increased interest in paperless workflows. We’ve had a series of posts on paperless apps and devices here at ProfHacker, and David Sparks’s excellent e-book, Paperless galvanized many workflow discussions. (A recent good one is Chris Holscher‘s.)

One of the devices we looked at last year is the Doxie Go, a portable scanner by Apparent that tries to unbundle scanning from computers. You could scan anywhere, saving the scans either to internal memory or to an SD card, and then sync later. You could even use an Eye-Fi card to sync wirelessly to your computer. I liked the device, but Konrad, who travels to archives a bit more than I do, didn’t like the fact that the device doesn’t work while it’s charging.

This year, Apparent is back with a new model of Doxie Scanner: the Doxie One, which partly addresses Konrad’s concern. Like the Doxie Go, the One is a single-sheet scanner that is both portable and inexpensive. Indeed, the Doxie One is $149, which is an excellent price for the portability, ease of use, and quality of the product. It even resembles last year’s Go:

Doxie One

Doxie will also cheerfully sell you skins that let you add some color to your scanner.

The Doxie One addresses Konrad’s concern by removing the internal battery altogether. Instead, it’s powered by a regular AC outlet, or by 4 rechargeable (not alkaline) AAA batteries. (Like the Go, the One will not scan while connected to a computer.)

Another reason the Doxie One is $50 cheaper than last year’s model is that there’s no internal storage. Scans are saved directly to an SD card. Doxie includes a 2GB card with the Doxie One, but it’s not an Eye-Fi card, so it doesn’t support wireless syncing out of the box. You can sync scans to a computer either directly from the SD card or with the included USB cable. You can also sync to an iPad, if you have one of Apple’s SD card reader adapters. (On the iPad, the scans open in iPhoto, rather than in a native app.)

It’s also the case that the Doxie One only supports 300dpi scans, unlike the Go which can also support 600dpi. (If higher quality scans are your priority, then you are probably not in the market for a $150 ultraportable scanner.)

The review unit I’ve been playing with works exactly like last year’s Doxie Go: it’s a dead-simple single-sheet scanner, capable of scanning a letter-size sheet in 8 seconds. As I said last year, this is a scanner you’ll want to use to process the daily onslaught of paper, not to reduce your archive of photocopied journal articles to .pdfs. The software is intuitive, allowing for edits, for combining sheets into one PDF, for sharing with Evernote/Dropbox (or, on a Mac, via AirDrop or iMessage), and more.

If price and space were not constraints, then the David Sparks-endorsed Fujitsu ScanSnap would be the scanner to buy. But it’s more than $400! Even Fujitsu’s portable models are in a different price range than the Doxie line. But the scanner that works best is the one you have with you always, and the Doxie scanners are portable and affordable enough to be a useful tool in digitizing paper–possibly even in the classroom.

Not everyone will want a scanner like this. After all, there are in fact apps for that, which turn your smartphone’s camera into a scanner, some even offering OCR. While I have used them in a pinch, right now I find the apps a little annoying to use–I’m always worried about the light, or the background, or holding my hand steady, or whatever. A simple little scanner that grabs the paper, runs it through, and gives you a nice digital copy is just the thing. And the Doxie Go and new Doxie One make it trivial to get rid of the paper cluttering up your office, home, or car–or to keep it from getting there in the first place.

Photo “Lila on a Messy Desk” by Flickr user Laurie Avocado / Creative Commons BY-2.0

Open Thread Wednesday: Scheduling a Department’s Courses

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As one semester or quarter is coming to a close, a ProfHacker’s s thoughts inevitably turn to the next. Unless that ProfHacker is a Chair or Director of Undergraduate Studies who is responsible for planning the courses and schedules for the entire following academic year.

As a new, alt-ac faculty member in my department, I’ve recently become acquainted with how we go about this scheduling process. The DUS sends out a Word document as an attachment with six questions, ranging from asking about which core course the faculty member would prefer to teach, to graduate seminars, and the preferred time slots in which that teaching will happen. Faculty members type up their responses on the form and then return them electronically or printed out to the DUS, who then gets to work planning the schedule.

Someone in our department recently suggested that there could be a more efficient way of at least collecting the data. And I think that’s true and easy to do. A tool like Google Forms (which we’ve written about on more than one occasion) or Survey Monkey could make the data entry and collection faster for everyone involved (and who doesn’t want to be done with such things as quickly as possible). Survey Monkey even has a tool that will help you send reminders out to the people who haven’t yet filled out the form. One more obvious incentive for using electronic means to collect these data is that it comes formatted ready for a spreadsheet (one of my favorite tools), which means it will be easier to sort and then see the masochists outliers who really DO want to teach that 8:30am class on MWF.

But once the data has been made more accessible, there’s still the problem of sorting everyone and making those assignments. And that’s the question that I want to pose (perhaps somewhat selfishly) to the ProfHacker community this afternoon: does your department or program have a really great way for making those assignments once you know what people’s preferences are? Do you have a meeting with everyone? Do you have any tools (besides chocolate, coffee, or some other comfort) that help make this process any easier? Let us know in the comments!

Lead image: Bar Camp Schedule REBCPHX 2010 / Dru Bloomfield / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Using AppleScript to Automate Notetaking

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Writing setup at London Library[This guest post reprints, with permission, Jason Heppler's post from Saturday. Jason is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he is also project manager for the William F. Cody Archive. He's also the author of The Rubyist Historian. You can follow him on Twitter at @jaheppler.--JBJ]

On a recent episode of Gabe Weatherhead‘s Generational podcast he spoke with Walton Jones, professor of Behavioral Neurobiology at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. They talk about Professor Jones’ system for annotating and summarizing academic papers about twenty minutes into the podcast. He’s further detailed his academic workflow on his blog, so be sure to give his explanation a read.

I’ve noted before how I manage my PDFs using the filesystem and Open Meta tagging. I’ve tended to maintain my notes in plain text written directly into DEVONthink, but after listening to Weatherhead’s talk with Jones and reading his post I’ve decided to adopt part of his system.

As a scientist Jones spends much of his time synthesizing the latest research that normally comes to him as a PDF from journals. Where I became interested in his system was 1) his color coded annotations and 2) his method of extracting those annotations to plain text. His system uses colors for different notes, green for references, red for summaries, and so on. Where the system really inspired me was his AppleScript that can process the PDF he has marked up (either in Skim or iAnnotate that scans the PDF and extracts notes based on his categorization using Markdown syntax. He then dumps the notes into VoodooPad. Be sure to read his explanation of his system as my summary doesn’t do it complete justice. [Update: I was remiss in pointing out that the original AppleScript adapted by Walton Jones came from John Sidiropoulos at his blog OrganoGnosi. His blog has lots of advice on using digital tools for academic research.]

The system relies on an AppleScript that looks for annotations in the PDF and extracts the text into Markdown-formatted plain text. I modified the script slightly for my own needs, and made it available here via GitHub’s Gist service. [JBJ: We can't yet embed Gists directly, alas! Apologies for any inconvenience.] For the curious, here’s a partial screenshot of the code:

Screenshot of gist

I take my notes in Skim, which would result in something like:

Skim notes

When the script is run on a PDF, it results in a note formatted in Markdown that looks similar to this:

Screenshot of Markdown output

That’s where the other half of the magic comes in Jones’s system. The note not only includes the text I wanted but also a hyperlink to the page of a particular reference. Transformed into Markdown, the note allows me to click on the reference and be taken back to the source. My notes used to appear similarly, often taking a form such as:

[3] Noting the page number in brackets followed by my notes, thoughts, direct quotes, and so on from a PDF or book.

As I mentioned, my notes were previously entered directly into DEVONthink. But with this new system I’ll be keeping my notes in the same directory as the document I’m taking notes on. From there, DEVONthink will index the directory for easy searching and organizing.

Update on 11/29: Readers have pointed out that the hyperlinking to specific pages isn’t working the way it should. The solution, near as I’ve been able to replicate the problem, points to just how unrobust this system is, unfortunately.

Walton Jones had to work around the problem by writing his own custom URL scheme. You may need to adopt his system to get everything working. But Skim seems to handle page numbers without any problems, at least for me. There are a few things to bear in mind when using the script: 1) The notes must appear in the same directory as the PDF, and 2) the file must match exactly the text in the note (which the script should handle for you). So, for example, example-article.pdf#page=3 must correspond exactly to example-article.pdf and reside in the same directory as the notes, otherwise it doesn’t know where the file is located. Also, be sure that no spaces are included in the filename, otherwise the Markdown linking will not work.

The other area that makes the system tricky to use is the way I’m using it. When I transform the text notes into Markdown, I save the resulting markup as a PDF (either transformed in Marked.app or fed through wkpdf). The PDF file of my notes is opened in Skim, which can handle linking back to the article because all of these actions are happening within the same application. In other words, if you are planning on using the hyperlinking system as I use it, you will need to contain all activity in Skim. Otherwise, you may need to look into Walton Jones’s custom URL scheme. Relatedly, you might check out John Sidiropoulos’s brilliant post on DEVONthink and hyperlinks.

Photo “Writing setup at London Library” by Flickr user TheCreativePenn / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

 

Updates to Evernote

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Elephant slide

That members of the team here at ProfHacker are fans of Evernote is hardly a secret; we’ve mentioned it on numerous occasions. It’s very useful for storing and searching whatever information you want to keep track of, and it syncs across platforms, so all your notes are available to you, no matter what device you’re using.

Within the last few weeks, Evernote has released updates to the Mac and iOS versions of its client software. I won’t bore you with a list of the features; the posts linked in this paragraph (with their accompanying videos) provide a good overview for those who want it.

What I’d like to do instead is point out two of the new features that I find useful for my own work:

  • The new sidebar in the Mac version. I have a lot of notebooks, and a lot of tags, but there are only a few that I use with any great frequency. The ability to add them to the sidebar as shortcuts makes it very easy to get to them very quickly—even more quickly than using the search function. Being able to show or hide the Notebooks list, and otherwise customize the sidebar, is a nice touch. (An aside: the Atlas view available from the sidebar is interesting. I don’t expect I’ll use it much, but I can see it being very useful for someone who travels a lot.)
  • The tabbed view in the iOS version. This way of viewing one’s content makes it easy to find things quickly by notebook, tag, or place. That’s good, because while the search function is there in the iOS app, it isn’t particularly easy to find (you have to pull down on the grey bar between the green header and the notes list—but it’s not obvious, nor, I suspect, all that easy for someone with large thumbs). The app functions quickly and smoothly, even on an aging iPhone 3GS.

The Mac version runs on 10.6.6 and above; for the mobile version, you’ll need to be running at least iOS 5.0.

Have you given either of these new versions a try? If so, let us know what you think of them in the comments.


[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by sabotrax]