The Language Teacher
October 2003

TLT Wired
Research Applications

Richard S. Lavin




Many researchers have to juggle the demands of research with those of teaching and administration. Being able to capture snippets of information quickly and reliably in odd moments during a busy semester is essential for building up the momentum to start writing over weekends or school vacations. Mac OS X's Unix base has encouraged a host of developers to produce a surprising variety of cheap but powerful and innovative applications for educators and scholars. Here are some tools that may facilitate the process of capturing and storing information, a necessary prelude to writing. One is a Mac OS X-only database with a difference, and the others are programs with wider availability that can profitably be used alongside it.

DEVONthink Personal Edition www.devon-technologies.com (shareware $35) makes intelligent use of OS X Services to enable the quick and easy capture of data. Simply selecting some text in the active application and choosing a menu command launches DEVONthink automatically, which imports the text as a new file. ICeCoffEE web.sabi.net/nriley/software/ (freeware) offers this and other functionality in a contextual menu, obviating the need for the trip to the menu.

Capturing data is just the start. Most of us have had difficulty tracking down files that slipped between the cracks of our filing system. Wouldn't it be nice if software could help us decide where to save things? DEVONthink is based on the concept of "semantic and associative data processing." In other words, when you send a piece of text DEVONthink's way, the software analyses the content in relation to files already stored and shows a list of possible places for the new file in a sidebar. A number of tools are provided to clarify relationships with pre-existing files: A See Also button shows a list of files whose contents are similar; a window at the bottom of each document displays an automatically generated list of the document's keywords; and, for text linguistics fanatics, a Concordance button leads to a list of all the words in the document with their frequency and other information. These tools are invaluable for reminding the researcher of other files that should be referred to while researching a theme. In many cases, a file belongs logically in two or more places. Modern operating systems do allow us to create duplicates of or aliases to files and move them to different places, but these are inconvenient workarounds; when saving a file we have to decide a single folder where it is to be placed. In DEVONthink, however, simply choosing multiple sites from the sidebar creates replicants, multiple copies of a file situated in all the folders where the file logically belongs. Unlike files duplicated in the Finder, these maintain their relationship indefinitely, changes in one being reflected in all the others.

For DEVONthink to do its stuff, files have to contain machine-readable text, but many research papers available for download on the internet are posted in Portable Document Format (PDF) exclusively. Fortunately, DEVONthink has a feature called pdftotext that intercepts all PDF files routed to DEVONthink and automatically converts them to text files before they arrive.

DEVONthink is useful for most kinds of textual data, but there is another kind of data that researchers have to deal with frequently and that deserves its own specialized software: references. References not only have to be found and input, but also searched and sorted and finally output in fussily specified ways. A standard in reference management software is EndNote www.endnote.com (prices vary according to region). This can perform all the standard tasks, and its biggest strength is its ability to search online databases and import references, thus saving a lot of typing.

However, as we have seen, a crucial function of good research is clarifying the links between a large number and variety of data. EndNote falls down in this regard: It allows only one link per reference to an external file or webpage. To the rescue comes Bookends www.sonnysoftware.com (shareware; $99, or $79 for competitive upgrade). This reference manager software has rather fewer features than EndNote (and a much more modest price) but it enables multiple links. This means that a seminal reference has the potential to act as the entry point into a topic, leading to a large number of related files. This has persuaded me to import all my EndNote files into Bookends and do most of my research from there.

A traditional computer filing system is a strict hierarchy: file a inside folder b inside folder c inside Documents. As mentioned before, it is possible to get around it to some extent with aliases and similar features, but these are add-ons that do nothing to alter the fundamentals of the system. DEVONthink and Bookends enable us to approach a vision of a new kind of filing system, one more in tune with the needs of research: a rich web of pieces of information connected in multiple, and evolving, ways.

Note: EndNote is available for multiple platforms. Bookends is available for Mac OS X and classic Mac OS. ICeCoffEE is available exclusively for Mac OS X, though it is modeled after ICeTEe, an application providing similar functionality in Mac OS.



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