Tag Archives: research

Rules for postgraduate conference presentations

03 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by in Humanties, Literature, Personal

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If you’ve not got experience speaking at conference before, here are the rules to speaking.

Turn up to the room five or ten minutes before it starts. Make yourself known to the session chair. If you have a powerpoint, now’s the time to put it on the computer and test it. If you have a handout, make this known to the chair. Sit up near the front where it’s easier for you to get up and walk to the lectern to give your talk.

You paper will be 20 minutes with 10 minutes questions (usually – it might be 45 minutes with 15 minutes questions at more advanced conferences but then, if you’re presenting at one of these, you don’t need this blog entry’s advice). Your absolute limit is 25 minutes of speaking before people get restless.

Going overtime is absolutely the worst thing you can do. Do not do it. Ever.

When you write your paper, time yourself before you give it. Unless you are an experienced presenter, with a topic that you really understand in a deep way, you will need to read your presentation off the paper. A good rule of thumb is one hundred words is about one minute. You’ll need to learn how to make such a presentation interesting; it is possible. I have learnt to leave two or three small sections I can extemporise on for about a minute or so before moving back to the written text.

Speak clearly and loudly. Speak to the person furtherest away from you in the room. Don’t speak too fast. Time yourself beforehand. Look at your audience at least occassionally.

If you are in a multi-paper panel, you are in the session for everyone else’s paper. Don’t run out and go to another session before or after your own paper. Yes, there may be parallel sessions to your own with papers you want to see. Too bad. Find the presenters afterward, apologise you couldn’t see their paper, and ask about it over lunch or afternoon tea.

Networking is the main point of conferences. Go to other papers. Ask questions. Go to lunch, dinner, drinks, with other participants.

Forthcoming conferences, mid-year edition

22 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Digital Classics, Latin Classics, Personal

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I’ve got three papers coming up in the next couple of months:

First up is Commanders and Commentary: The City and Territorial Discourse in the Roman Imagination at the 28th Pacific Rim Roman Literature Seminar in Melbourne on the 6th to 10th July 2014.

In Republican Rome, did the literature of the conquered and traversed landscape express theories about Rome itself? This paper starts with an examination of Cicero’s De Provinciis Consularibus. In this speech, delivered to the senate, Cicero sets up a polemic between the ‘virtuous’ commander, who writes reports to the Senate on his activities in the provinces, and the ‘worthless’ commander, who does not. I argue that this comparison contrasting ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Romans exemplifies Roman attitudes about the relationship between territorial conquest and discursive knowledge on one hand, and lacunae and oblivion on the other. In turn, the paper demonstrates the ways in which such discursive practices about contested territory clearly signal Roman conceptions of Rome itself, by contrasting the city to the territory it controls. In light of this textual interplay between Roman provinces and the discursive strategies of knowledge, the paper examines further models of territorial discourse and control in other Roman writers of the Late Republic and Augustan period. In particular it interrogates Livy’s history of the Second Punic War and teases out the ways that Livy uses the actions of commanders in the field as part of his discussion of the Roman political struggle in the city. The paper undertakes a comparative analysis of Cicero’s directly political literature on the one hand, and Livy’s literary historiography of politics, on the other, to uncover the potential commonalities and differences that they share in their respective understandings of Roman ‘power projection’ in the provinces and how these affect their literary theorisations of Rome itself.

After I deliver that I’m doing a slightly different version of it straight after: Conflict and Power in the Territorial Discourses of Late Republican Rome at the Australian Historical Association annual conference, (this year at the University of Queensland), on the 11th July 2014.

In Republican Rome, the landscape often features prominently in literature which discusses Roman governorship and territorial control. This paper examines Cicero’s De Provinciis Consularibus. In this speech, delivered to the senate, Cicero sets up a polemic between the ‘virtuous’ commander and the ‘worthless’ commander. I argue that this comparison illustrates Roman attitudes about the relationship between territorial conquest and discursive knowledge on one hand, and lacunae and oblivion on the other. In light of this comparison, the paper examines further models of territorial discourse and control in other Roman writers of the Late Republic and Augustan period.

Finally a paper with a slightly different bent; Using Django, Tasty Pie, and lxml for the Digital Humanities at Pycon AU 2014 in Brisbane on the 1st to 5th August.

Digital Humanities is the application of computer technology or computer-based quantitive methods to the problems and data of the disciplines of the Humanities. This paper will details some of the lessons learned by a recovering Java and C programmer in implementing a new Digital Humanities project on the Django platform. Using experience gleaned from two decades of programming experience and an ongoing PhD candidature in Classics and Ancient History, it will detail some of the gaps that need to be bridged between the two worlds and how Python APIs like Django and lxml can be used to bridge them, as well as what remains currently unsolved. It will also explore how the Tasty Pie REST framework for Django can be leveraged to solve particular types of problems in the Digital Humanities in creating textual annotations and linked data sets.

Obscurity and Livy 25.1 – some research notes.

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Classical History, Classics, Latin Classics, Roman History

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Livy's book 25 opens with a most remarkable sequence of non-events. Almost the entirety of 25,1 seems to deal with 'unimportant' details, right from the start. For example, at the beginning we learn that Hannibal was campaigning in the Sallentine region as part of his goal to capture the city of Tarentum, and:

Ipsorum interum Sallentinorum ignobiles urbes ad eum defecerunt (Livy 25.1.1)

In the interim, obscure (i.e. unimportant, undistinguished) cities of the Sallentines themselves defected to him.

These unworthy towns are left unnamed.

But then, a certain Titus Pomponius Veientanus accidentally managed to gather the appearance of a general on account of some random actions and had apparently dashed together a disordered army (which probably should be considered a rabble, but Livy uses the proper term for 'army' i.e. exercitus, but qualified with 'irregular': tumultuarius). He promptly lost a battle with Hanno, somewhere in Bruttium, probably:

et plures redissent, ni T. Pomponius Veientanus, praefectus socium, prosperis aliquot populationibus in agro Bruttio iusti ducis speciem nactus tumultuario exercitu coacto cum Hannone conflixisset (Livy 25.1.3)

and more (cities) would have returned (to the Roman side), if T. Pomponius Veientanus, a prefect of the allies, accidentally gathering the appearance of a legitimate general by favorably plundering Bruttian territory several times, had not fought Hanno with an irregularly assembled army.

Of course this army, a disordered lumpen mass of agricultural labourers and slaves (inconditae turbae agrestium servorumque), was defeated by Hanno with great loss of life, but the least notable thing about this military disaster was the capture of its leader (i.e. Pomponius), who was an unimportant waste of space:

minimum iacturae fuit quod praefectus inter ceteros est captus, et tum temerariae pugnae auctor et ante publicanus omnibus malis artibus et rei publicae et societatibus infidus damnosusque (Livy 25.1.4)

The least of the damage was that, along with the others, the prefect was captured, who at that time was the author of a imprudent battle, and who before that was a tax-collector skilled in every wrong-doing, and was treacherous and pernicious to both the republic and to societies.

This obscurity, unimportant and unmemorable history extends even to Sempronius the consul, who fights many puny battles (multa proelia parva, 25.1.5) and forcibly subdued a range of 'unimportant' Lucanian towns (ignobilia oppida Lucanorum aliquot expugnavit, 25.1.5).

All of these obscure and unworthy people, towns and events, aren't worth mentioning, really. Except of course, they are! Livy even names one of the unimportant people and expends a sentence telling us about his terrible life and what thoroughgoing rotter he really was. He's even mentioned again, by name, later in connection with another tax-collector at 25.3.9, relating to a species of ancient insurance fraud involving 'pretend shipwrecks' (falsa naufragia). This last event leads to a state crisis all through 25.4.

Then, immediately following these repeatedly obscure and un-note-worthy, yet briefly noted, events, at 25.1.6, we're now told that at Rome, due to the uncertain nature of events with wins and losses on both sides, men are now grasped by superstition, and proper Roman rites are abandoned, not just in the home, but in public too. In the forum and on the Capitoline, a crowd of women gathered and obeyed the customs of the fathers in neither sacrifices nor in prayers to the gods. 'Sacrificers and soothsayers' captured the minds of men (sacrificuli et vates ceperant hominum mentes), and rustics crowded the city abandoning their farms and profiting from ignorance. All this badness naturally led to civil disorder, and so the Senate ordered the city praetor to take the task in hand.

A contione was held and the praetor read the senate's decree, and order that books of prophesies and prayers or sacrificial guidelines written down must be surendered to him by April, and that no foreign or novel ritual was allowed to be performed in any public or consecrated place.

And straight after this we are given a list of state priests that died that year, at 25.2.1-2. Surely an ill omen.

Are these matters like the lists of prodigies which often open important sections of Livy? What to make of them? Why do these obscure events lead to an outbreak of public superstition? (Proximity in Livy is often a good indicator of 'causation'). Bear in mind the large, early losses of the Romans against the Carthaginians, such as at Trasimene and Cannae, three years before, are starting to fade into the background of Hannibal's campaign in the south of Italy, and an increasing focus on Spain and Sicily. It's not really until 25.6 that the focus starts to move off internal politics and the dangerous instability engendered by the clash of the tax-famers and the plebs at 25.4. But even 25.6 is about the disgraced veterans of Cannae and their pleading to Marcellus to be allowed to recover their honour. At 25.7.7-8 there is the list of the usual types of prodigies which must be then expiated at 25.9. It's a very confused and muddled beginning, for Livy's third decade at least, like we are leading up to a major military disaster.

But in this book, one of the greatest military triumphs ever accomplished by a Roman – the capture of Syracuse ('the most beautiful of the Greek cities') by Marcellus – is about to be recorded from 25.24 onwards.

I wonder if the connection between these 'facts of obscurity', corrupt tax-farmers, political instability, and the capture of Syracuse is the fact that the booty that Marcellus stripped from Syracuse (which is no longer visible in the city of Rome, in Livy's day, i.e. obscure), is also connected, via Livy's preface,to the blame he places on luxuria for 'modern' Rome's moral downfall? More research required.

Academic publishing. Broken but not for these reasons.

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by in 21st Century History, Academia, Classics, News Items, Personal

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I think this article by Erica Price about academic publishing is highly problematic, but nowhere near as problematic as some of the back and forth which she had with people from the writering community which can be found here.

erikadprice:

strange-radio:

erikadprice:
In order to succeed in academia, you must succeed in academic publishing. The length of the published works section of your CV (the academic equivalent of a resume) determines your job offers, promotions, pay scale, whether you get grants, and whether you get tenure. If you do not publish, you…

This is (bitterly) fucking hilarious, because in fiction publishing, all of the things she’s talking about here are giant red flags that signal “fake vanity publisher scam DO NOT USE DO NOT USE.” Not that fiction publishers don’t have their own set of major issues, but there is at least the understanding that everyone involved in the process is doing work that they should get paid for, even if it’s a lot of work for shitty, risky, or long-delayed pay. Like, something went wrong if nobody made any money.

THIS. Academic publishing functions the way mainstream publishing SCAMS function.

So, to make my objections specific. What the original poster is actually complaining about is the academic jobs market not the publishing market. All the movement to Open Access (OA) publishing (which is in itself a good thing, to make knowledge open) are only going to make all those original poster's complaints actually worse.

If you want "vanity publishing" just wait until you see the "Gold OA" model. Academics are increasingly required to publish their articles in a format that anyone can access (which I think is unequivocally a good thing). However the so-called "Gold" model which is preferred by many of the funding agencies and the journal publishers (especially in the UK where there is a big shit-fight over this),1 requires the Author to pay the Journal to get all the peer reviewing, editing, etcetera, done (and of course the peer reviewing work is still unpaid labour). Only rich authors or those from rich institutions will be able to publish extensively in this model.

Now that is really much more like "vanity" publishing, and it's already been reported some slimy commercial journal outfits are scanning through conference programmes and emailing likely presenters with offers to publish their work in their shitty little journal, for a fee, in the name of Open Access – and that is actual vanity publishing. This sort of thing has happened to PhD theses for years. Plus look what happens to scholarly monograph publishing in the world of pay-for-play open access. The "Gold" model will likely destroy or deeply cripple academic publishing in the Humanities (as opposed to the "Green" model which means placing articles after a short period of embargo, into freely accessible institutional repositories).

I have some additional objections to some of the points raised in the original article. The situations described in that piece are potentially different for different fields (the author's field is social psychology if I read the 'about' page correctly). It is a huge error of misattribution to assume that experience in one field is mirrored in all the others. Also it seems the author may also be involved with creative writing, which already has a commercial market for the primary output of creative writing (magazines, books, novels, New York Times bestseller list, etc).2

In areas like Ancient History and Classics (I can't really speak for any other areas), the journals are nearly all published by scholarly societies and the journal is usually included in the price of society membership (it not usually "a few hundred dollars" but more often in the range of about a hundred dollars or less). The journal itself is actually the paramount "good" the society produces.3 The comparison of the New Yorker to e.g. the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies is a category error.

However, and to extend my objection further, I do think that article refereeing – this is the "peer review" process which is what makes academic journals, actually academic journals – does necessarily need to be "unpaid" labour. I am not convinced that putting any sort of economic motivation in the peer review process is anything like an excellent idea. The point is that you are supposed to be paid for your time by your employing institution. The problem is therefore, the academic employment market, in this regard.

Another objection I take is to the characterisation of the "conference" market. The simple fact of the matter is the author thinks an academic conference presentation is a "TED-worthy" talk. If I went to an academic Classics conference and got a TED talk I'd be incensed. I don't want a popularised dumbing down for a generalised audience who each paid many thousands of dollars to attend. I want to see the cutting edge of research in my academic field.4 And a $300 registration fee? What sort of conferences is this person attending? Again I think the case is they are assuming their own field's experience is extended to every other field and generalising their own feelings about that to the "academic" area in general. The range for conference fees I find is more typically $100 to $200 but I will concede it does vary somewhat,5 so it might be up at $300 for some conferences. Anyway every single one of these conferences take a lot of hard work by volunteer labour (I know as I was just involved in organising one) and they are rarely run "for profit".

In short, I think this becomes part of a generalised grumbling about academic publishing, which is surely full of various inequities. But it's damned if you do, and damned if you don't. The real inequity in academic publishing is the exorbitant fees charged to access knowledge in the form of academic articles. But the solutions to that problem only make the specific complaints of the post even worse than they are now. The specific complaints in the post are about the academic job market, and the value of academic labour and how it is compensated (for it is labour). But I can't see how paying authors for academic articles or paying for people to peer-review those articles, is going to be solve either of these issues, when I think they will make it much worse. This is on top of what is already happening in academic publishing, in order to solve one group of problems, will likely make existing successful and currently viable publishing models (by Societies) far worse than they are now. But instead of working to a solution to address those set of new problems, what happens is then a lot of non-specialists misinterpret the undifferentiated pile of complaints as "academic publishing is shit" and all you've achieved is denigrating all of us in everyone else's eyes without ever having a specific set of addressable issues that can be overcome in specific ways. So the entire beautiful project of knowledge accumulation which has been underway these last 250 years will just be torn down by a baying mob and replaced with … what exactly?

  1. I have to point out the Robin Osbourne's arguments in the linked article really do seem to make him out to be an out of touch harrumphing Oxbridge Classics Don of the first order and therefore do our discipline a great disservice. However, he does make some valid points, and I do agree as you can see with the general thrust of the idea that "Gold OA" is a disaster for publishing in many Humanities disciplines. ↩

  2. No-one apart from an academic publisher in Classics wants to publish my highly technical philological/narratological arguments about Livy's representation of Hannibal as basically a divinely-controlled agent of the natural landscape! The audience for my work is optimistically in the hundreds, at most, and the people interested in it, who don't already have a degree in Classics, I would guess would be countable on my fingers. It is highly specialised, and it needs to be highly specialised (it also needs to be finished, lol procrastination with publishing meta-issues on my blog!). ↩

  3. The societies do generally make a lot of money from "institutional" subscribers (e.g. libraries) and this money is used to fund other society activities. The societies are going to have to find a new way to fund those activities – what I guess will probably happen is that the membership fees will rise slightly to cover the journal production costs and then the "cream" from the institutional subs will have to be made up elsewhere. But societies may also have to scale back their activities if they can't get an economic model to fund them, which would be a terrible harm to come from the Open Access model.  ↩

  4. Also I not only want to see the math (to use a Americanism) I would like you lay bare your working, and then ask you questions about it if I don't understand something you've said. ↩

  5. Including varying downwards to free. ↩

Barbarians at the gates

19 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by in 21st Century History, Academia, Humanties, News Items, Personal, Social Sciences

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Poor fellow, my country.

This is pretty indicative of the type of ignorant twits in charge of my country now.

In the linked blog post, Orlando makes a pretty good case for the study of the arts in economic terms for our very export-orientated tertiary education sector. I would like to point out the intrinsic value of the arts in Australian society in general. Where people spend their leisure time, and money, is perhaps indicative of what they truly value. And of course, entertainment industries, including TV, books, and films, and even self-education, are generally big on people’s discretionary budgets (where they have any).

But these fools* that now run the country don’t even see that all those accountants and doctors and lawyers and mining engineers often use their spare income to do things like … install home cinemas to watch movies (for instance, movies like Gladiator – a very popular bloke’s movie); and they get cable TV subscriptions for the endless (and very poor quality) History Channel documentaries on Romans, Hitler, and Stalin (throw in the Egyptians and you have 99% of the History Channel content). But since all of those things are obviously of no interest to anybody (especially the unimaginative Craig Kelly MP), why would anyone study any of things in any depth or subtlety?

I would like to remind these education-hating barbarians now in charge of our country that no-one takes up accountancy as a hobby.

To illustrate my point, just this year a medical doctor (gasp) recently donated several million dollars to our department at my university so we could create a prestigious chair in Classics! This is a man who saves the lives of cancer patients, and what does he think about research into the Humanities? Well, this:

It is not just one faculty that makes a university. They are all important, but to forget about where you came from is bizarre.

Read Dr Eliadis’ comments and compare and contrast them to the attitude of the oleaginous Craig Kelly MP. As this is a Classics blog, a sample of the sorts of Classics and Ancient History and related topics the galahs now in charge of my Government think are wastes of money (you can read the entire odious speech here, if you can stomach it):

A cool $150,000 went into a study of the impact of locally mined silver to make coins in Athens between the years 550 BC and 480 BC
…
Let us not forget the $85,000 that was given to a researcher for the study of Renaissance garden statues.
…
This is a little bewdy, too: $164,000 for a study of magical spells and rituals from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD to achieve success in personal relations—a most important expenditure!
…
It goes on: $265,000 for a study to understand the context and purpose of philosophy within higher education in the eastern Roman Empire in the period 300 BC to 500 AD.
…
Under the previous Labor government $253,000 of taxpayers’ money also went to study archaeology in the Central Caucuses.

This last one I include because it betrays the Government’s real agenda:

It goes on: $112,000 of taxpayers’ money spent on a study on rural communities in South Australia and how they will adapt to health challenges from climate change. The only problem is that according to our bureau’s records the hottest day ever recorded in South Australia was back in January 1960.

In other words, if he doesn’t already agree with it, or if he doesn’t already understand the issue and have a pre-determined position on it, Kelly’s not interested in it. Science and the Humanities must serve his narrow ideological interests. The man, and yes in fact most of the Government, are essentially intellectually incurious people. They are, in other words, dullards. I would say the real waste of money here is the money spent paying, and feeding, Kelly and his ilk.

A pox on this Government.

* In private I use much stronger language than that to describe them. Armando Iannucci style language. They thoroughly deserve it.

The magic disappearing act of Flaminius

29 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by in Latin Classics, Personal, Roman History

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I’ve written a couple of conference papers on the the story of Flaminius in Livy’s book 21 and 22, and his ‘magic disappearing act’ at Lake Trasimene in 217 B.C. If you’re interested in reading my paper, (formal title ‘The Seen and The Unseen’) you can download it (plus the powerpoint and the translation handout) from my page at at academia.edu. (one slight warning; because the latest version of the paper was presented at a generalist conference there’s a page of overview at the start which Classicists won’t need to read, but I think otherwise this version of the paper makes overall argument better).

Livy’s use of fatum

29 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Latin Classics

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Doing some basic research into Livy’s use of the term fat-um -is (fate) because I was interested in this passage at the end of the description of Hannibal’s dream at 21.22.9;

pergeret porro ire nec ultra inquireret sineretque fata in occulto esse

he was therefore to go on, nor enquire further, but suffer destiny to be wrapped in darkness. (translation – Loeb)

My interest in this little passage is sineret fata in occulto esse, which I translated as something like ‘he must allow the fates to be in secret’. You’ll note fata, the plural, is used here, but the Loeb has the singular ‘destiny’. I was wondering if the plural form has a special meaning, like aedis (temple, room), aedes (house). I asked about some of my fellow post-grads, and oddly enough, two out of three instantly said, “I am sure that’s the form it’s normally in”. Well, is it? Not when you look in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, and certainly not in Livy, it turns out.

Here I am also indebted to the work of Iiro Kajanto, 1957, God and Fate in Livy (Turku) a book which I’m not pleased to say I had to get out on inter-library loan and which is due back shortly. There’s a table on page 63, where he breaks out between fatum and fatalis (e.g. fatalis dux) but here I’m concerned much more with the different cases of fatum and have excluded the adjective. I used Brepolis to do the search. I reproduce the spreadsheet data at the end.

From the data:

The first decade (i.e. books 1 to 10) has 27 of 39 total occurrences. Books 21-45 have 12. The top three books are book 5 (7), book 8 (6) and book 1 (5). After book 30, there are fatum in any form only appears 3 times (all of them the dat/abl singular, fato).

The dat/abl sing.fato is the single most common form in Livy, nearly half of the references (18 of 39) are in this form. I presume because of the forms “by fate”, “with fate”, “to fate”, “from fate” etc. Outside the first decade, it is nearly all fato – actually the occurrence in book 21 is the only time fata is used after book 10 (plus there’s one occurrence of the nom/voc/acc sing. form fatum and one of gen pl. fatorum otherwise it’s fato all the way).

Of each case + number variant: fatum 2; fati 3, fato 18, fata 8, fatorum 1, fatis 7. Singular forms 23, plural 16. Nom/voc/acc s + pl, 10 times, gen s + pl, 4 times, dat/abl s + pl, 25 times.

The raw results from the Brepolis search (with the text in context) can be seen in a PDF here: Livy – fat-um -i search results.

Here is a breakdown of those results in tabular format:

(UPDATE: The html table formatting in the CSS of this WordPress template makes this a complete fail. I attach the Excel XLSX file instead : Occurances of fat-um -is in Livy.xlsx).

Recreating Julia Domna’s hairstyle and other styling tips from classical history

31 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Archaeology, Roman History

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A really interesting look at very interesting research in “experimental archaeology” – but with hairstyles! Janet Stephens (a qualified hairdresser working in ‘ancient hairstyle reconstruction’) creates ancient hairstyles using only the appropriate available tools. Her research has upended past views on how ancient women achieved the hairstyles we see in statues and busts. Video and interview.

The History Blog » Blog Archive » Janet Stephens: Intrepid Hairdressing Archaeologist:

Her work in this field is unique because her experience as a stylist gives her particular insight into how hair works and what can be accomplished with what tools. She upends a number of assumptions — that Roman women must have used wigs to achieve their more elaborate hairstyles, that they used hairpins — and injects a whole new simplicity and accuracy to the very vocabulary of ancient hairdressing.

(Via The history blog.)

Electronic Tools for Scholarship – my personal approach

27 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by in Academia, Classical History, Digital Classics, Personal, Software & Tools

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I have written before on the issue of software tools to better aid scholarly research (also known as: writing your PhD), not just on this blog, but also on my technical blog let x=x. This post is spurred by a brief conversation I had this afternoon with postgrad classicists about organising their electronic information, and hopefully will tie together some of those threads.

TL;DR – scroll down to the conclusion.

A word of warning. I use an Apple Macintosh, I have done so for quite a few years and in fact I’ve just bought my 4th straight 15″ MacBook Pro and there are six Macs in the house at the moment. All software mentioned here runs on a Macintosh. Obviously some of it may be available for Windows or Linux users, or equivalents. However I don’t care. I’m discussing what works (and doesn’t) for me, and that means on a Mac.

Writing tools

Although this process is naturally later than research in a temporal sense, writing tools are so centrally important to the process of all researchers in any Humanities subject, that they have to be dealt with as a priority. You need to choose the writing tool that best suits what you need to do in the way you want to write it: research tools have to fit into that “flow” and if they don’t, you generally chuck them out rather than adapt your writing methods.

First, there is Microsoft Word. For some people. this is as far as it gets. Word is their world. I understand Word fairly well, but I also understand it’s limitations and it’s annoyances. I generally only use it when I have to.

For general research writing, I use a tool called Scrivener, from Literature and Latte. Its more tailored to people like scriptwriters or novelists, however, it’s an invaluable tool to organise your thinking. You can write small focussed chunks of text on a topic and theme, and then use things like the ‘cork board’ to organise those chunks (presented as index cards onto which you can write a summary of their contents) into something approaching a coherent argument. Then you can flip back to the ‘Scrivenings’ view, which shows you the full text of the selected items, to see what needs altering to make the argument flow properly.

Once you’re happy with your draft in Scrivener, you “compile” the document into a target format, like an .RTF document:

Compiling a document from Scrivner's cork board view

After this you can polish the document in the word processor of your choice.

I did use Apple Pages for the bulk of my M.A. Thesis. It’s a great tool. I did find it lacked a couple of features I use in Word — at the end I exported from Pages into Word format and did the final production to PDF from Word.

Probably for my PhD, at the production stage I will probably use some type of TeΧ tool, likeLaTeΧ. Suggestions welcome on this idea.

Research tools

Here’s where I gets trickier, I think. For my M.A. I tried to use Evernote to organise article PDFs I got from databases, but I found in the end, that Evernote was just not up to the mark in terms of scholarly research. It has a lot of other neat features that users like but I found it unsustainable in use, mainly because I had to search for documents in databases with my web browser and then import the PDF into Evernote, including typing out the title and author.

In the end I ditched Evernote for version 1 of a program called Papers. Version 2 is now out. Papers connects me to the academic databases (warning: has a built-in bio-science prejudice) – even using my university’s Ezproxy for free access to them – and then allows me to search the databases to my heart’s content. It then imports the PDF into your own database. So you build your research database over time, and as well as searching databases, you can search your own research collection, as below:

Searching for everyone who quotes Walsh inside my research database

It also has an iPad app that will automatically sync with the Mac program and put all the PDFs on your iPad so you can read them there. This is very, very handy. Reading PDFs off a screen is horrible. Before I got the iPad I had to print out all my articles – not good for the environment! On the iPad you can annotate the PDFs, but I don’t do this, I either take notes into a notebook the traditional way, or I type the notes into a special research document in Scrivener. But having the iPad set up on a stand next to my computer screen while I do this is a tremendous boon.

If you have PDF books, you can import them into Papers, although you may have to type-in the title and author data. Many PDFs that you download from databases have data in them in such a way that Papers can sometimes auto-determine this data for you, if you have the PDFs already on your disk, but book PDFs rarely do. Papers can also handle journal abbreviations.

If I get e-books (ePub) from my library I immediately strip the useless copy protection which prevents the document from being utilised in a sane manner, and then load them up on my iPad using Apple’s iBooks. You can annotate documents in iBooks. It also handles PDFs, but not as well as ePub. The only drawback with this method is that in iBooks you lose the “original page number” that you get in the Adobe DRM’d viewer. But I think this is a fault of the idea of citing a “page” number in a document that can reformat itself to conform with any desired display as necessary. Classicists already know the way to cite “continuously scrolling” documents! But alas, the necessary numbering system is never included in the ePub documents. So you are forced to refer back to the original to get the “proper” page reference (and this means another 24 hour borrowing of the ePub document from the “library” to get it. This stuff all proves me that proprietary DRM is anti-scholarship, as I’ve said before.

Alternatives in this area are Mendeley and Zotero. I signed up to a Mendeley account but I’ve not really used it as I stuck with Papers. Zotero claims that “It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself”, the only fly in that ointment is I don’t actually do much of my work in a web browser. I mean, wikipedia is still not an acceptable source, right? Plus with Papers I don’t have to search JSTOR and then go to Project Muse and enter the same search in there too. I can just search once right in Papers and make sure I’ve got both JSTOR and Project Muse and any other relevant databases selected. I can also review the articles before deciding to import them or not right in the one program.

Citation managers

I have also used Endnote (my University gives me a free licence) to manage my modern citations and their bibliography. However, the problem for Classicists with Endnote, and this goes for all citation managers, is that they assume you have only one referencing style. In other words, when you have to manage your ancient sources separately, and possibly cite them differently, as you generally do in Classics, a citation manager can get in the way, enormously. Also I find that many people can’t cope with the complexity of making a custom citation and bibliographical style especially if the one they need isn’t available as a default in their citation manager of choice. Although I could, being a professional computer programmer, and an anal-retentive taxonomic organiser, so much of this stuff doesn’t scare me as much, but I can’t bring myself to recommend it to anyone.

Papers 2 added citation features, which brings a great integration to your research database and your citations and bibliography. However they are fairly primitive at the moment, and geared towards science users and therefore not useful to Humanities scholars (especially Classicists without our multiple citation formats). I’m kind-of ambivalent about this. For me, Papers’ number one feature is research article search and database management, so I hope they don’t screw that over to compete with specialised citation managers like Endnote. I can cope managing this stuff manually, for the moment.

What I do use with Papers, though, is it’s ability to just “drag and drop” entries from it into an open document and it will paste the entry as in a Bibliographic entry. This is just plain text so it can be adjusted as required. I then tend to manually manage my citations (we currently use a hybrid system of MLA format in footnotes, not inline MLA).

Dragging and dropping a Bibliographic entry from Papers into Scrivener

Conclusion

I tend to live in Scrivener and Papers. I write mostly with Scrivener. I sync my article PDFs in Papers for the Mac across to iOS Papers on my iPad so I can read them on-the-go and without printing them all out. I read ePub in iBooks, and I don’t use electronic annotations very much – preferring to use a notepad and pencil, or just type my notes straight into the “Research” section in my Scrivener document. Citation managers I avoid, but I do love the drag-and-drop bibliographic entry function in Papers.

Comments, clarifications, suggestions, flames, all welcome.

Publishing advice for Classics PhDs

14 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by in Academia, Greek Classics, Greek History, Latin Classics, Roman History

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From the CLASSICISTS mailing list, a link to a guide to getting your PhD research published: Publishing and the early career Classicist

This collection is based on presentations given at a half-day workshop held at the Institute of Classical Studies in May 2011. It is aimed at those approaching the end of, or who have recently received, their PhDs, and who would like some advice on thinking strategically about publication of their research, to raise their publishing profile most effectively and to maximize their attractiveness to potential academic employers.

The PDF above also links to the following guide to getting published, another useful document. Hopefully things have not changed drastically by the time I finish my own PhD (not very likely, I know)!