#AcWriMo Brought Me Back For More

This was my second year participating in the annual #AcWriMo - Academic Writing Month. You can read more about the concept here. There's a lively online community of people participating, commenting, and sharing strategies, and as you can tell by the hashtag, much of this is done on Twitter. There's also a massive GoogleDoc spreadsheet where everyone declares their goals for the month and reports on their daily achievements. I think this year we had around 700 people declare their intent to participate. This type of constant, but slightly anonymous, accountability offered by the spreadsheet seems to work really well for me.

Last year's #AcWriMo was incredibly productive for me, as it got me on track with consistent writing and built some habits that allowed me to write a complete, but very rough draft of my dissertation in about three months. The most critical thing about #AcWriMo for me last year was finding out first-hand the importance of daily writing. It's not just a matter of slowly chipping away at a big project through steady work, but daily writing also builds momentum, and over time you are able to write more and more.

Last year I also discovered the beautiful software that is Scrivener, which I now swear by for writing anything longer than the shortest conference paper, and Skim, a FREE PDF annotation software that lets you mark up even un-OCRed documents. Added to Papers, for bibliography and digital library management, and these are the three programs I run constantly. People clued me into a host of other apps for Mac, most of which are free or run online and which boost productivity significantly. When I really want to crank out work I run FocusBooster (a free pomodoro app) and give myself some low background noise from Coffitivity. It's a blissful, productive bubble. I should also give a shout-out to the PhDometer, which has the benefit of counting total words written, not just the words you keep, which is what Scrivener or Word do. The PhDometer is a more reflection of the creation and editorial process involved in (particularly) academic writing.

Last year was so productive, and helped me develop some really great writing habits, so it was really a no-brainer to jump in again for this year's run. I even got tapped to help with the organization this time around. I'll be back with a post in the next few days reflecting on how this year's month went for me.

Drowning in Documents

In preparation (or is it procrastination?) for getting started on writing the dissertation I've decided that I need to organize my electronic files in some sort of bibliographic software. The goal is to know what I have so that I can figure out what I'm missing and then know what I need. Simple enough, right?


I began the process of converting my physical library into an electronic one before when moved to Wales in 2007, since I knew I'd need to write grant proposals while all my books were packed away into storage. The work that I put in then (hours and hours of scanning) have paid off in two ways: 1) My entire academic library fits onto one Billy bookcase, and 2) I always have my resources just a mouse click away, as the computer is infinitely more portable than a bag full of books. There is a downside to this process, though.


I am drowning in electronic documents. As a conservative estimate I would say that I have 1000 files on my computer that need to be recorded in some type of bibliographic software. Most of the files are centralized (two folders - Ecuador Stuff and Everything Else), but there are others scattered throughout my computer, sitting in the folder of the class when I downloaded it to write a paper, or, even worse, languishing in the catch-all "Prelim" folder that contains everything I used to study for my comprehensive exams prior to fieldwork. Not only do I not know what I have, but I don't even know where it is!


My husband has BiblioScape, so I downloaded their free version, BiblioExpress, to give that a try. The program is quite simple, and reminds me of a more basic version of the EndNote 9 that I had once upon a time. It's limited, but it could record it all, which is the point of this exercise, and best of all, it's free. 


Through our university library we have free access to RefWorks, which is an online based application. I downloaded it a while ago, but I could never get the offline version to work correctly. Even though spotty internet is no longer an issue for us, I still prefer the ability to do the data entry on my computer, and not have to navigate a website. A friend recommended Zotero, which sounds awesome, but it's a plug-in for Firefox, and I'm using Chrome. Also, it's web-based.


My preference, at the moment, is EndNote X4. I downloaded a free 30-day trial from their website, and if I like it I can buy it through our university for a very reasonable sum. One of my favorite features is that I can import the PDFs into the program, which means that even if I move files around during subsequent housecleaning the program will still open them for me, which is a big plus in light of the disorganized state of my files.


So the question remains, how should I organize my electronic files on my computer, and how should I organize the references within EndNote? One giant folder, my current two and a bit, or detailed sub-folders by category? The same for within EndNote: should I keep an Ecuador library and a non-Ecuador library (even though there are some cases of overlap), or put them together and separate them into groups by topic within the program?


Any of you out there with experience in this kind of thing, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.