I imagine that most humanities academics have large collections of books that are in some sense their lives. And if you've ever had to make an insurance claim for something, you'll know that insurance companies want documentation of everything. And, insurance companies get the value of TV sets, but not hundreds or thousands of books. Put these things together, and you have potential nightmare: keeping some sort of catalogue of books that you own. Not guaranteed that would do the trick.
Anyway, with new smartphones with built in cameras, there's a new sort of solution for this cataloging problem: apps that can scan bar codes and download book data from the web.
I tested a few on my iPhone, and Book Crawler seems best: cleanest and most elegant interface, plus you can export the data off your iPhone in CSV or SQLite format. (It seems to me that a key thing to look at in iOS apps is import/export of data, so you don't have your work locked into a proprietary app.)
With this app, I can scan in books really quickly, say 10 in 5 minutes, so you can do a shelf in few minutes when you want to take a break to move around.
On the other hand, committing to this project is yet another form of enslavement to stuff and ownership of things.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
IndexAssistant for Indexing Books in Word
IndexAssistant is a very inexpensive piece of shareware for helping index books. It runs inside and works on top of Microsoft Word. Basically, it's a very powerful interface that helps streamline and organize the process of using Word's nativefunctions to index a document. It's especially helpful in: letting you see what your index looks like overall, through displaying an alphabetized list, so you can quickly mark text with an existing index entry; setting up subentries in your index (e.g., perception:visual); and quickly marking ranges of text for inclusion in your index.
Full disclosure: I wrote this software, because I couldn't afford expensive professional indexing software, and thought that the professional software was overkill with too steep a learning curve for the author indexing her own book. After that I thought it would something of a service to the community to release it cheap. Purchasing it will help me cover website costs.
Full disclosure: I wrote this software, because I couldn't afford expensive professional indexing software, and thought that the professional software was overkill with too steep a learning curve for the author indexing her own book. After that I thought it would something of a service to the community to release it cheap. Purchasing it will help me cover website costs.
Using an iPad to work with PDFs stored in EndNote
EndNote is a powerful bibliographic database helpful for humanities work. An iPad EndNote app is currently close to beta testing. I don't know what functionality this will have.
At present you can also access your EndNote database through EndNote Web, an online version of the database that you can sync with your desktop files.
But there is also a 'hack' for being able to browse through and annotate the PDF files of articles etc. that you have attached to your EndNote database. Here's how it works (on Windows):
1) PDFs attached to items in an EndNote database are stored in subfolders of the folder containing the EndNote database. Take a look at this using Windows Explorer.
E.g., suppose you have a database Philosophy.enl in a folder called Biblio. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to your Biblio folder. Within it, you'll see a folder called Philosophy.data, and within that, a folder called PDF--and within that a bunch of subfolders with names based on the names of your attached PDF files. These folder contain your PDFs.
2) Download and install SugarSync, and set up a SugarSync account. In Windows Explorer, navigate to the PDF folder discussed above, e.g., Biblio\Philosophy.data\PDF, right click this folder, and select SugarSync>Share this Folder. Or, use the SugarSync manager to share this PDF folder. (Or use SugarSync to share a 'bigger' folder that contains the PDF folder.) When you do this, all the PDFs attached to your EndNote database will be synced to your SugarSync account on the web.
3) Install PDF Expert on your iPad. Set it up to use your SugarSync account. In the home screen, tap on Network, then on your SugarSync account, then navigate to the PDF folder above, and tap the Sync button in the top right corner. PDF Expert will now automatically download and sync the entire PDF folder structure above from SugarSync. This PDF folder can now be accessed from the Documents item at the top left of PDF Expert's home screen.
4) You can then use PDF Expert to open and annotate of the PDFs in the PDF folder. When you're done, tap on Sync at the bottom left of PDF Expert's home screen. The annotations that you've added and saved on your iPad will be pushed back to SugarSync, and then pulled down into your Windows computer. When you open up your attached PDFs in EndNote in Windows, you'll see your annotations. (To accelerate the step of syncing the iPad to SugarSync, you can select the Push changes option in PDF Expert.)
5) Alternately, in step 2, you could have PDF Expert synchronize just a particular folder containing a PDF that you want to study and annotate. That way, there are far fewer files to Sync.
At present you can also access your EndNote database through EndNote Web, an online version of the database that you can sync with your desktop files.
But there is also a 'hack' for being able to browse through and annotate the PDF files of articles etc. that you have attached to your EndNote database. Here's how it works (on Windows):
1) PDFs attached to items in an EndNote database are stored in subfolders of the folder containing the EndNote database. Take a look at this using Windows Explorer.
E.g., suppose you have a database Philosophy.enl in a folder called Biblio. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to your Biblio folder. Within it, you'll see a folder called Philosophy.data, and within that, a folder called PDF--and within that a bunch of subfolders with names based on the names of your attached PDF files. These folder contain your PDFs.
2) Download and install SugarSync, and set up a SugarSync account. In Windows Explorer, navigate to the PDF folder discussed above, e.g., Biblio\Philosophy.data\PDF, right click this folder, and select SugarSync>Share this Folder. Or, use the SugarSync manager to share this PDF folder. (Or use SugarSync to share a 'bigger' folder that contains the PDF folder.) When you do this, all the PDFs attached to your EndNote database will be synced to your SugarSync account on the web.
3) Install PDF Expert on your iPad. Set it up to use your SugarSync account. In the home screen, tap on Network, then on your SugarSync account, then navigate to the PDF folder above, and tap the Sync button in the top right corner. PDF Expert will now automatically download and sync the entire PDF folder structure above from SugarSync. This PDF folder can now be accessed from the Documents item at the top left of PDF Expert's home screen.
4) You can then use PDF Expert to open and annotate of the PDFs in the PDF folder. When you're done, tap on Sync at the bottom left of PDF Expert's home screen. The annotations that you've added and saved on your iPad will be pushed back to SugarSync, and then pulled down into your Windows computer. When you open up your attached PDFs in EndNote in Windows, you'll see your annotations. (To accelerate the step of syncing the iPad to SugarSync, you can select the Push changes option in PDF Expert.)
5) Alternately, in step 2, you could have PDF Expert synchronize just a particular folder containing a PDF that you want to study and annotate. That way, there are far fewer files to Sync.
EndNote
EndNote is a very useful program that lets you: 1) Maintain a database of bibliographic information on books, articles, etc. 2) Store PDFs of articles in the database. 3) Cite your references in word processor such as Word, with automatic functionality to generate proper citation form where the text is cited, as well as generating a correspond list of references if called for by the style guide you are using.
Function 3) can be quite powerful, because you can reformat your citation and lists of references according to different style guides, simply by selecting different output styles in EndNote and regenerating the citations/references. The system of specifying styles is fairly powerful, and with tweaks, you can get it to work for humanities. One tweak you might need if you cite texts in other language is to turn off autocapitalization in the output style formatting, and manually editing titles to get the capitalization appropriate for languages such as French and English.
EndNote can import bibliographic information from many online indexing services and online journals, so it is very quick to get this information, together with abstracts, into EndNote. EndNote can also search within your library system for the full text PDFs of articles, using information such as the DOI. Results are quite variable, though, probably dependent on how permissions and other stuff is set up at your library.
Function 3) can be quite powerful, because you can reformat your citation and lists of references according to different style guides, simply by selecting different output styles in EndNote and regenerating the citations/references. The system of specifying styles is fairly powerful, and with tweaks, you can get it to work for humanities. One tweak you might need if you cite texts in other language is to turn off autocapitalization in the output style formatting, and manually editing titles to get the capitalization appropriate for languages such as French and English.
EndNote can import bibliographic information from many online indexing services and online journals, so it is very quick to get this information, together with abstracts, into EndNote. EndNote can also search within your library system for the full text PDFs of articles, using information such as the DOI. Results are quite variable, though, probably dependent on how permissions and other stuff is set up at your library.
iPad App for working with PDFs: PDF Expert
I've tested and looked at a number of apps to use on the iPad to read articles and books in PDF format. Of these, I think PDF Expert is the best:
1) It has best designed and simplest interface for highlighting and annotating documents. My view is that the iPad is a great platform for reading electronic texts (vs. a desktop, laptop, or eInk based reader) because its design is such to facilitate a very transparent and intimate engagement with text (for an electronic device). eInk is intolerably slow for quick scanning and reading, desktops are too remote and immobile, laptops too heavy and hurting of fingers and wrists around sharp edges. (Of course paper has the benefit of making present the whole article or book at once, of giving you a visual-physical-tactile map and sense of the whole thing and where you are in it; an iPad is never going to fall open just at the right page, or dogear you in the right direction.) Once you are engaged with reading on an iPad, transparent and engaging, clean design becomes a premium. PDF Expert has this: fewer steps to highlight, or enter a note on text than the best runner up Good Reader. E.g., PDF Expert automatically positions the flag for your sticky note text in the margin, and it's got a better interface for repositioning these flags. It's really quick to read through an article or book, highlight important passages with your finger, add notes if you want. And then it has a nice interface for looking through notes, highlights, bookmarks, etc.
2) File manager: GoodReader has powerful functionality for getting files on and off the iPad, but it's incredibly byzantine. PDF Expert's file manager interface is clean, clear, easy to use, transparent in function, and powerful, esp. it's ability to use SugarSync, so you can sync with PDFs on your computer.
3) It's also easy to open PDFs in PDF Expert from your email or web browser
1) It has best designed and simplest interface for highlighting and annotating documents. My view is that the iPad is a great platform for reading electronic texts (vs. a desktop, laptop, or eInk based reader) because its design is such to facilitate a very transparent and intimate engagement with text (for an electronic device). eInk is intolerably slow for quick scanning and reading, desktops are too remote and immobile, laptops too heavy and hurting of fingers and wrists around sharp edges. (Of course paper has the benefit of making present the whole article or book at once, of giving you a visual-physical-tactile map and sense of the whole thing and where you are in it; an iPad is never going to fall open just at the right page, or dogear you in the right direction.) Once you are engaged with reading on an iPad, transparent and engaging, clean design becomes a premium. PDF Expert has this: fewer steps to highlight, or enter a note on text than the best runner up Good Reader. E.g., PDF Expert automatically positions the flag for your sticky note text in the margin, and it's got a better interface for repositioning these flags. It's really quick to read through an article or book, highlight important passages with your finger, add notes if you want. And then it has a nice interface for looking through notes, highlights, bookmarks, etc.
2) File manager: GoodReader has powerful functionality for getting files on and off the iPad, but it's incredibly byzantine. PDF Expert's file manager interface is clean, clear, easy to use, transparent in function, and powerful, esp. it's ability to use SugarSync, so you can sync with PDFs on your computer.
3) It's also easy to open PDFs in PDF Expert from your email or web browser
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