Inspired by the discussion to this post, and by Kieran Healy’s evolving workflow post, I pose some questions with my tale of woe about computers and research workflow for historians.
Preambulatory wistful open source note
I learned Emacs first, many years ago, and can still get back into its groove after a few days of use. But historians wishing to geek out in this wise face two problems: (1) publishers want a .doc document at deadline and (2) even with all manner of wonderful LaTeX tools, it’s still profoundly difficult to do historian-style foot- or end-notes. (But see Federico Garcia’s opcit.sty.)
I probably would have weathered (2) and indeed I hacked up opcit to do what I wanted, but I foundered on (1). So I went slinking back to the commercial apps.
In this fallen age
At present, I use Endnote to organize and format citations. So Endnote = index cards, both bibliographical and note-taking. I have been urged to try Zotero, but as I don’t normally use Firefox, I’m not in a hurry to do so. I know of no other program capable of generating historian-type citations.
For actual writing, I use the marvelous and under-rated Scrivener. If you haven’t tried it, you must. It permits you to create and shuffle and tack to a bulletin board a collection of virtual index cards. It’s superb. And it exports a finished draft to .doc — truly a wonderful program.
Which leaves me to open Word only as a last step — to clean up any formatting, proofread, and straighten out the bibliography with Endnote.
For graphs, as and when necessary, I use Excel, Stata, and Numbers — i.e., I haven’t figured out which one is least likely to generate uglitude.
I know I could dump Word/Excel for OpenOffice, but last time I tried it it was (a) twiceover ugly, as in it required some kind of kludgy shell app to open an X Windows app which was ugly simpliciter; (b) didn’t have a lot of functionality I got from Excel.
I might use Google’s online suite if I didn’t fear surrendering my absolute entire life to them.
And, ftr, I use Keynote for presentations.
I welcome all manner of suggestions and critiques.
The Edge of the American West 
30 comments
January 27, 2008 at 9:12 am
Ben Alpers
For actual writing, I use the marvelous and under-rated Scrivener. If you haven’t tried it, you must.
I prefer not to.
Sorry…couldn’t resist. Actually Scrivener looks really cool. And it’s not too expensive. I may give it a whirl. I currently use Tinderbox for keeping track of my notes, but I only scratch the surface of it. It’s an incredible note-keeping program that can do all kinds of things I haven’t even begun to get my head around, but it’s specifically geared toward writing.
January 27, 2008 at 9:15 am
eric
Aw, I shoulda seen that coming.
Does Tinderbox do citations?
January 27, 2008 at 9:20 am
Ben Alpers
I don’t use it for citations, but I imagine that it can be configured to handle them.
I still do far too much by hand in Word.
January 27, 2008 at 9:22 am
eric
Yeah, my feeling is, the age when we should be formatting citations by hand must have passed — especially as computers are not as likely as I am to generate orphaned Ibids.
January 27, 2008 at 9:35 am
Ben Alpers
I totally agree. I have Endnote…but I don’t really use Endnote. I just need to take the time to familiarize myself with it.
January 27, 2008 at 9:36 am
Ben Alpers
I also have Zotero, but I really haven’t used that.
Any thoughts on Zotero vs. Endnote from those who’ve used both?
January 27, 2008 at 10:43 am
David Silbey
I use Bookends (sonnysoftware.com), which I migrated to when Endnote became horribly buggy (around version 6) and they started charging $100/pop for upgrades to fix the bugs. Note also that Endnote does not currently work with Word 2008 and there’s no time line for when it will
January 27, 2008 at 10:50 am
Terence Dodge
Greetings
If time permits, look at “NeoOffice”, Aqua front end for “OpenOffice” so no “shell, aka X11” for it to run, generally the spreadsheet part of the “suite” makes nice with excel documents, opening saving back to original. Word clone, in general, but I do not do detail so I do not know if it works with bookends.
Terence
January 27, 2008 at 10:53 am
eric
So David, does Bookends do footnotes the proper Chicago way?
Thanks, Terence, I’ll give NeoOffice a shot —
January 27, 2008 at 11:31 am
ben wolfson
A non-NeoOffice aqua-native OpenOffice is in the works, too.
January 27, 2008 at 11:36 am
ben wolfson
I don’t use either Zotero or Endnote (I just have a .bib file), but Zotero does seem to have the twin advantages of (a) being free and (b) forcing the user to use Firefox. Eric may not use Firefox much, but that just reveals that he’s still in his technological nonage.
January 27, 2008 at 12:35 pm
David Silbey
“So David, does Bookends do footnotes the proper Chicago way?”
It does, indeed. The developer is also incredibly responsive, as opposed to the folks who do Endnote.
(A version of Bookends compatible with Word 2008 was released two days after MS released 2008, to give you an example).
I didn’t like Zotero when I tried it, cause I don’t really like Firefox on the Mac. But they do seem to be developing it quite quickly.
I second your enthusiastic endorsement of Scrivener. It’s the kind of program that will bring us together and overcome the bitter partisanship that has marked the software world. It is a united, not a divider. Well, actually, it’s Mac-only, so never mind.
January 27, 2008 at 1:00 pm
urbino
Ignore this test. This is only a test.
January 27, 2008 at 1:06 pm
urbino
I’ve never used it, but, just for the sake of adding it to the conversation, Microsoft OneNote does what it sounds like Scrivener does and, obviously, is available for the PC.
Richard Powers uses it to write his novels, so it must have something going for it.
(BTW, Eric, something there is that doesn’t love an anchor tag. If it links outside this domain, that is.)
January 27, 2008 at 1:17 pm
David Silbey
In fact, Bookends also plays nice with Scrivener. From the web site:
” In addition to word processors, Bookends makes it easy to integrate your work with other applications: import references and pdfs from Safari and other browsers with drag and drop, import references directly from Mellel documents and Papers databases, embed hypertext links in documents made by applications such as TextEdit, DevonThink, Scrivener, and OmniOutliner so that you can instantly switch to linked references in Bookends. Cross-talk with more third party applications is on the way.”
January 27, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Sandie
I love EndNote. I’ve tried Zotero, but it still seems too buggy for me, and I can get EndNote for free from my university store. My big problem, however, is that I’m a die-hard WordPerfect fan (cannot stand Word and seem to be incapable of learning it), but WordPerfect does not work with a Mac. So, I have to use a program like Parallels to work back and forth between my Mac and the WordPerfect program. EndNote also stopped working with WordPerfect, so I still have to scan and convert everything in WordPerfect to make Endnote work well. I also use Pages, but I don’t think it’s as good for academic writing as WordPerfect.
January 27, 2008 at 1:54 pm
eric
Eric may not use Firefox much, but that just reveals that he’s still in his technological nonage.
It reveals that Firefox for the Mac is hella slow on my computer, my dear Ben sir.
January 27, 2008 at 1:57 pm
eric
Right, a Bookends tryout for me, then.
BTW, Eric, something there is that doesn’t love an anchor tag. If it links outside this domain, that is
For things like this, and like a preview button, we are I fear at the mercy of WordPress.com, which puts restrictions on what html you can use.
Richard Powers is teh awesome. I especially like Gain.
January 27, 2008 at 2:06 pm
urbino
It doesn’t seem to be a WordPress issue. I’ve done tons of them in the past (here and on other WP blogs), and Ben seems to have gotten it to work, above. Nonetheless, the last few times I’ve tried it here, one of 2 things has happened: the link was stripped out, or the comment simply never appeared.
I’ve not read much of Powers. Just The Time of Our Singing, which I found much overwritten. OTOH, he’s Richard Powers and I’m not. And one supposes he, as an ex-programmer, has a good eye for software.
January 27, 2008 at 2:33 pm
David Silbey
“(b) forcing the user to use Firefox”
That, sir, is not an advantage.
January 27, 2008 at 2:45 pm
urbino
This is not a comment.
January 27, 2008 at 2:46 pm
urbino
Huh. That one worked, E. Curiouser and curiouser.
January 27, 2008 at 2:54 pm
urbino
And that one (not appearing) didn’t.
I think it’s a CSS issue, E. If the url in the tag is long enough that, as raw text, it looks like the comment is going to screw up the format of the comments section (i.e., make it wider than allowed), the comment is not posted. This even though the comment wouldn’t screw up the formatting, given that the long string is markup, not content.
January 27, 2008 at 7:50 pm
David
Ben — Zotero is fabulous as a bibliography tool. Not only is it free, but the development team updates it often. It takes little time to figure out how to use it. I think at the moment it is a little less good for notetaking than for storing sources.
Does anyone have a good sense of what the windows equivalent to Scrivener would be?
January 27, 2008 at 7:58 pm
urbino
Microsoft OneNote does what it sounds like Scrivener
January 27, 2008 at 7:58 pm
urbino
does
January 27, 2008 at 7:59 pm
eric
I think it’s a CSS issue, E
If I send you our css, will you fix it?
January 27, 2008 at 8:00 pm
urbino
I’m not a CSS pro (more of a middleware man), but I’m willing to take a look, yeah.
January 27, 2008 at 8:03 pm
urbino
Ari has my email addy.
I should add that when I said I thought it was a CSS issue, I wasn’t being entirely precise. The problem may not be in the CSS itself (though it might); it might be that WP is applying the CSS before parsing the markup.
January 27, 2008 at 8:04 pm
urbino
Upon further review, that seems extremely unlikely.