Mindful Ink     Life, Living and Productivity

Our friend Martin at UniversityBlog has a very nice collection of good resources up.  Some of them are news to me, and look very useful!  

2. INTUTE: ESRC FESTIVAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 2008

Between the 7th and 14th of March, Intute’s great Social Sciences Blog had a 10-part series on the best blogs in different subjects (Sociology, Psychology, Law, Elections, Statistics & Data, Economics, Business & Management, International Relations, Europe, and Politics & Government). It was a great series and it’s bound to include forums, sites, and blogs that you were not aware of.

Favourite Blogs in Social Sciences

So swing by the UniversityBlog for some handy new resources!  What other resources do you use that aren’t quite in the mass consciousness yet?

How many times have you heard a professor suggest that Wikipedia is completely unreliable and essentially useless because “anyone can edit it?” Niko Pfund, the publisher of the Oxford University Press, disagrees and is in fact “increasingly bored” by his colleagues’ vilification of the Wiki project. Why?

“The Oxford English Dictionary, arguably the greatest reference work in the English language…found its origins in a wiki model, whereby scholars put out the word to English speakers far and wide that they would welcome hard evidence of the earliest appearances of English words. The response was astonishing…so much so that the building in which the word submissions were kept, called The Scriptorum, began to sink under the weight of all the paper. Wikipedia is here to stay and its evolution will be one of the more interesting publishing and technology stories in the next decade.”

Pfund also suggests that the anti-wiki bias in academia may be rooted in professional self-interest: if regular people can contribute to academic discussion in a meaningful way, maybe academics aren’t so “elite” after all. What do you guys think? Are the OED/wiki models comparable?

“Inside Oxford University Press: Questions for Niko Pfund” [h/t to Wired Campus]

Very nice article from Cal at Study Hacks today on managing your resources when undertaking a major paper.

Study Hacks »  Monday Master Class: How to Build a Paper Research Database
In this article, I’m going to teach you how to build a simplified Branch-style Paper Research Database using Microsoft Excel. I’ll tell you how to format it, populate it, and use it to structure your writing.

He uses MS Excel for this, which is easily accessible for all students in the forms via OpeOffice for everything, or Numbers for Mac users (and a number of variations there of).

Also, though not exactly using this method, one could make use of Zotero (the firefox extension) and I often use a very similar method using the Mac database program Yojimbo (though easily done in programs like OneNote, DevonThink, etc.)

 A few days back I wrote a bit about the process of reading academically, and how the “tricks” we may learn to read other books do not work so well in these environments. A while back I mentioned a bit of this as well, producing a “Reading” cheatsheet you can get here as well as some “reading note cards.”

Lifehack.org has written an excellent follow up post discussing those “tricks” that DO help.

1. Skim the book. Examine the table of contents to get a feeling for the structure and main points of the book. Flip through the chapters, skimming the first few paragraphs of each, and then the section headings. Check the index for any topics you feel are especially important. Then, if you have time;
2. Read the Introduction and conclusion. Most of the author’s theoretical position will be laid out in the introduction, along with at least a summary of the chapters and sections within. The conclusion revisits much of these points, and usually gives a good overview of the data or other evidence. Sometimes the conclusion is not marked as such; in this case, read the last chapter. Then, if you have time;
3. Dip in. Read the chapters that seem most relevant or interesting. Get a sense for what the author is trying to accomplish. Flip through the rest of the book and look more closely at anything that catches your eye. Then, if you have time;
4. Finish the book. Read the whole thing. If you know you’ll have time, skip 1 - 3 and just read, cover to cover.

For a lot more like this, and a book that taught me a great deal with tips like those above and more, is the classic: How to Read a Book.