Picking up on an old item over at 43 Folders (this post has been marinading for a while), here’s a discussion of the applications and tools I use to get work done. I do get work done, sometimes. Honestly.
I’ll give you two lists. The first contains examples of software I find really useful, but which doesn’t directly contribute to the work I’m supposed to be doing. (Some of it actively detracts from it, alas.) The second list is comprised of the applications I use to do what I’m paid for, and it might possibly interest graduate students in departments like mine. If you just care about the latter list, then a discussion about choosing workflow applications [pdf] might also be of interest. (That note overlaps with this post: it doesn’t contain the first list, but adds some examples to the second.) If you don’t care about any of this, well, just move along quietly.
You can do productive, maintainable and reproducible work with all kinds of different software set-ups. This is the main reason I don’t go around encouraging everyone to convert to the group of applications I myself use. (My rule is that I don’t try to persuade anyone to switch if I can’t commit to offering them technical support during and after their move.) So this discussion is not geared toward convincing you there is One True Way to do your work. I do think, however, that if you’re in the early phase of your career as a graduate student in, say, Sociology or Political Science, you should give some thought to how you’re going to organize and manage your work. This is so for two reasons. First, the transition to graduate school is a good time to make a switch in your software platform. Early on, there’s less inertia and cost associated with switching things around than there will be later. Second, in the social sciences, text and data management skills are usually not taught explicitly. This means that you may end up adopting the practices of your advisor or mentor, continue to use what you’re taught in your methods classes, or just copy whatever your peers are using. Following any one of these paths may lead you to an arrangement that you’re happy with. But not all solutions are equally useful or powerful, and you can find yourself locked-in to a less-than-ideal setup quite quickly.
Although I’m going to describe some specific applications, in the end it’s not really about the software. For any kind of formal data analysis that leads to a scholarly paper, however you do it, there are basic principles that you’ll want to adhere to. The main one, for example, is never do anything interactively. Always write it down as a piece of code or an explicit procedure instead. That way, you leave the beginnings of an audit trail and document your own work to save your future self six months down the line from hours spent wondering what the hell it was you thought you were doing. A second principle is that a file or folder should always be able to tell you what it is — i.e., you’ll need some method for organizing and documenting papers, code, datasets, output files or whatever it is you’re working with. A third principle is that repetitive and error-prone processes should be automated as much as possible. This makes it easier to check for mistakes. Rather than copying and pasting code over and over to do basically the same thing to different parts of your data, write a general function that can be called whenever it’s needed. This idea applies even when there’s no data analysis. It pays to have some system to automatically generate and format the bibliography in a paper, for example. There are many ways of implementing these principles. You could use Microsoft Word, Endnote and SPSS. Or Textpad and Stata. Or a pile of legal pads, a calculator, a pair of scissors and a box of file folders. It’s the principles that matter. But software applications are not all created equal, and some make it easier than others to do the Right Thing. For instance, it is possible to produce well-structured, easily-maintainable documents using Microsoft Word, but you have to use its styling and outlining features strictly and responsibly. Most people don’t bother to do this. So it’s probably a good idea to invest some time learning about the alternatives, especially if they are free or very cheap to try.
These are applications that I use routinely but fall outside the core “Workflow” category. A lot of other people use them too, because they’re good (or the best) tools for everyday jobs. All of them are Mac OS X applications.
These applications form the core of my own work environment — i.e., the things I need (besides ideas, data and sharp kick) to write papers. Papers will generally contain text, the results of data analysis (in Tables or Figures) and the scholarly apparatus of notes and references. I want to be able to easily edit text, analyze data and minimize error along the way. I like to do this without switching in and out of different applications. All of these applications are freely available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux (and other more esoteric platforms, too).
From my point of view, the Workflow applications I use have three main advantages. First, they’re free and open. Second, they deliberately implement “best practices” in their default configurations. Writing documents in LaTeX markup encourages you to produce papers with a clear structure, and the output itself is of very high quality aesthetically. By contrast, there are strong arguments to the effect that, unless you’re very careful, word processors are stupid and inefficient.2 Similarly, by default R implements modern statistical methods in a high-quality way that discourages you from thinking in terms of canned solutions. It also produces figures that accord with accepted standards of efficient and effective information design. (There’s no chartjunk.) And third, the applications are well-integrated. Everything works inside Emacs, and all of them talk to or can take advantage of the others. R can output LaTeX tables, for instance, even if you don’t use Sweave.
At the same time, I certainly didn’t start out using all of them all at once. Some have fairly steep learning curves. There are a number of possible routes in to the applications. You could try LaTeX first, using any editor. (A number of good ones are available for Mac OS and Windows.) Or you could try Emacs and LaTeX together first. You could begin using R and its GUI, and never mind about the text editing. Sweave can be left till last, though I’ve found it increasingly useful since I’ve started using it, and wish that all of my old data directories were documented in this format.
A disadvantage of the particular applications I use is that I’m in a minority with respect to other people in my field. Most people use Microsoft Word to write papers, and if you’re collaborating with people (people you can’t boss around, I mean) this can be an issue. Similarly, journals and presses in my field generally don’t accept material marked up in LaTeX. Converting files to Word can be a pain (the easiest way is to do it by converting your LaTeX file to HTML first) but I’ve found the day-to-day benefits outweigh the network externalities. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
It would be nice if all you needed to do your work was a bunch of well-written and very useful applications. But of course its a bit more complicated than that. In order to get to the point where you can write a paper, you need to be organized enough to have collected some data, read the right literature and, most importantly, be asking an interesting question. No amount of software is going to solve those problems for you. Believe me, I speak from experience. The besetting vice of an interest in productivity-enhancing applications is the temptation to waste a tremendous amount of time installing productivity-enhancing applications. The work-related material on my computer tends to be a lot better organized than my approach to generating new ideas and managing the projects that come out of them — and of course those are what matter in the end. The process of idea generation and project management can be run efficiently, too, but I’m not sure I’m the person to be telling people how to do it.
1 Actually, in the worst but quite common case, you use a menu-driven statistics package and do not record what you do, so all you have from the data analysis is the output.
2 I think that the increase in online writing and publishing has made Word Processors look even worse than they used to. If you want to produce text that can be easily presented as a standards-compliant Web page or a nicely-formatted PDF file, then it’s much easier to use a text editor and a “rendering pipeline” that supports a markup system like Textile or Markdown. But that’s a rant for another day.
Further to my last post on idling , I see via Limited, Inc. that the French electricity company EDF are disciplining an employee (an economist who also happens to be a Lacanian psychoanalyst … only in France!) who has written a book — Bonjour Paresse — on how to skive at work. The Belfast Telegraph offers some top tips :
Skiving off is such an ugly expression. Much more preferable are terms such as ‘zero-tasking’ or ‘enabling real-time back-end utilisation’. For those interested in how to zero-task successfully, here are five hot tips:
1. Never walk down a corridor without a a document in your hands. People with documents in their hands look like hard-working employees heading for an important meeting.
2. Make sure you carry home lots of documents at night. This gives the impression you work much harder than you do.
3. Use your computer to look busy. Try www.IShouldBeWorking.com or www.BoredAtWork.com for entertainment. The I Should Be Working site has a neat panic button that instantly transfers you to a more business-like page with one click.
4. Build huge piles of documents around your workspace as only top management can get away with a clean desk. Last year’s work looks just like this year’s - volume counts.
5. If you have voicemail on your phone, don’t answer it. Let the callers leave a message. Try to return the calls when you know the callers aren’t there. In the end they’ll try to find a solution that doesn’t involve you.
Yeah, the guys over here probably think they’re pretty hot stuff, right?
After all, it’s definitely a very cool thing to be able to print off your own specially configurable buzzword card from the web, take it to the next buttock-shrivelling meeting you have to attend, patiently tick off the matches against your boss’s (or boss’s boss’s boss’s) tedious meanderings, and finally get yourself fired by standing up during his/her peroration and shouting ‘Bingo!’
I can’t be the only one, can I?
But I’m afraid that synergizing, leveraging and proactivity (so last century), just won’t cut it any more. I learned at a presentation today that the cool kids have moved on:
Once upon a time, benighted souls referred to ‘ways of dealing with people’, but now, we have engagement models instead. Aren’t you glad?
Better yet, consider the case of disintermediation, a bloody awful word if ever there was one, but which did at least once have a meaning, namely ‘getting rid of the man in the middle’.
It now seems to be used to mean ‘placing oneself in the middle when one really shouldn’t be’, the precise opposite. (Example usage: ‘If you find my guys are disintermediating you, tell them to get out of the way, and then tell me so I can fire them’).
(I’m supposing that this semantic shift reflects the fact that being able to say ‘disintermediation’ an hour into a meeting is a mark of exceptional, rather suspicious, and evidently promotable keenness, and thus that attention to the obvious literal meaning of the word looks pretty effete and is frankly an indication of sackability. That’s a terrible word also, in every way.)
Finally, I can offer to managers the rousing cheer that one is raising the bar so that you guys can swing from it.
Nobody present had sufficient courage to ask whether a noose would be involved, but my making that observation evidently reflects no more than deficiencies in my own reserves of can do, an old favourite I don’t hear as often as I’d expect.
Look sharp, CT’ers. I’m looking for some other good examples to add to my own Bingo Card. Suggestions?
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
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The Conservative Philosopher
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Garden of Forking Paths
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Tom Irish
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Barry Lam
Language Hat
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Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
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Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
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Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
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Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
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Donyell Coleman
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Jeff Cooper
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Peter Friedman
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InstaPundit
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Lawmeme
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Punishment Theory
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Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
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H.D. Miller
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Marc Mulholland
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Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
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Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
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