Paperless scholarship with pen and paper

There has been a paradoxical shift in my classroom and my own habits. The students have stopped asking for printed handouts but at the same time they started to take their own notes with pen and paper. Similarly, I use more pen and paper while at the same time praising the paperless office. Why is this?

Handwritten lecture notes imported to Evernote and searched for a specific term.

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Papers 3 library searchable by Spotlight

Since my first post about Papers 3, a reference and pdf-file management software, it has significantly matured to become one of if not the best in the field. The most recent addition (version 3.2.6) has been to make a Papers 3 library indexable by Spotlight. Although documents in a Papers 3 library can be searched by FoxTrot or from within the app itself, these solutions are not ideal for searching on the fly. Now you can find Papers 3 library documents directly from Finder.

Using Spotlight to search documents in Papers 3 library

FoxTrot Professional Search

I had been trying FoxTrot Professional Search for several months before eventually deciding to buy the professional version. My initial motivation was to find a tool that could search inside Papers3 library, but I have discovered that the appeal of FoxTrot is much stronger.

Searching with FoxTrot Professional in the Papers3 library

Cobook is buggy

Following Aleh’s entry on contact management I decided to give CoBook a try. But it’s really buggy and doesn’t seem to work well with Yosemite. The Latvian company which built CoBook was recently bought by FullContact and while they’ve promised to keep everything running, right now it’s unusable.

Three more tips on using TextExpander

Over five years of using TextExpander I’ve saved myself typing whooping 400,000 characters (a medium-size PhD dissertation). Yet, there are always new ways to use this amazing software. Here are three recent examples I’ve introduced into my workflows:

1. Names with accented characters

I work with people whose names contain accented characters (å, ö, č, etc.). I agree with this argument that correct spelling of names is very important, but disagree that Microsoft Word’s Autocorrect is the best solution. Neither do I want to change the Keyboard layout just for one character or to search for that character in Apple’s Character Viewer. Instead, I use TextExpander to automatically change “Hakan” to “Håkan”, “Jorn” to “Jörn” etc. Then I don’t need to lift my fingers from the keyboard to keep my colleagues pleased with seeing their names correctly spelled.

More so, the place I live in is called Bosjökloster and it is in town of Höör. Guess what my snippets [,,bos] and [,,hh] refer to! These two I use at least several times a week filling in various forms.

Sources and Methods. And Tinderbox

I have just listened to Sources and Methods, a podcast “about interesting people doing interesting things”. This episode was their interview with Mark Bernstein, the creator of Tinderbox app. I fully agree with Mark that note-taking is a very important activity which we usually give too little thought. I am not entirely happy with my note-taking workflow and I wish someone would help me to make it better. I have a pretty good system for naming, tagging and organizing most of my notes. But academic thinking requires much more than classifying information into a set of unmovable categories and keywords. Academics try to develop new categories based on discovering and documenting new connection between ideas.  If I hear correctly, this is what Tinderbox is about.

Organizing academic contacts

Earlier I wrote about capturing contacts. This entry is about organizing academic contacts. Software for organizing contacts is not as developed as for other content (e.g. documents, tasks, or bibliographic citations) so finding a good app and a system may take a bit of time.

Presentation zen with emoji

In presentations, I find myself in a constant battle with giving the audience enough visual cues so they can absorb my messages without cramming a lot of words on slides. In a recent talk, I was able to use emoji to help convey my point.

Macademic on Mac Power Users. Second-guessing.

Last week I had the pleasure of being a guest on MacPowerUsers, my favorite Mac podcast. Frankly, I was quite nervous before the show as I had never before spoken on air. But it turned out surprisingly relaxing. Katie and David felt like a couple of old friends. I could just sit back and talk about my favorite topics. Time flew by! Immediately afterwards I could only think of how much I enjoyed it, not how well it went. Soon, however, I started second-guessing one of my answers. (After all, second-guessing is what I am paid for as a professor, isn’t it?). But it was too late to change anything. Sometimes, you only have one draft, not three. On the other hand, why not use Macademic?

A great list of apps for a university teacher

The Teaching in Higher Education blog has a great list of 10 apps useful for a professor. I am going to try all of them during the upcoming school year. Nice to see a professional touch. Thanks, Bonnie!