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.
Having used some of the applications you recommend (Emacs, LaTeX), I appreciate the suggestions, but realistically speaking, the learning curve really can be quite steep.
I’ve been meaning to post about Firefox, but didn’t really feel like I had enough for a whole entry so here is the pointer. I like its search bar (like the Google bar, but with the option of switching to dictionaries, Amazon, IMDB, other search engines, etc.) and I like the Find bar. But then again, I know from my research that very few people use CTRL-F (or Apple-F) to find words on Web pages so I don’t how many people will actually benefit from the Find bar. Nonetheless, for those of us who use it, it’s nice to have.
I use State for stats, but do not use its incredibly limited do-file editor. Rather, for that I rely on UltraEdit ($35). I haven’t upgraded to the newest version so I don’t know about the most recent features. One feature I like a lot that was already present in several earlier versions is its find-in-files function. Of course, there are now more powerful services coming out to help look for content within files on one’s harddrive, but UltraEdit has had this feature for a while and it’s been very helpful.
You mentioned organizing folders and files so you know what’s in them. I have a separate folder for each paper I am working on regardless of the project to which it is tied. (For big projects I have separate project folders as well for the data sets, but that’s independent of the folders for papers.) Each of my files has a date as part of its name and I resave with new dates occasionally to keep former versions.
I do use Styles in MSWord and they are super helpful. You’re probably right that few people take advantage of those features. I can’t imagine using the program without them.
For bibliographic info I use EndNote. I am not super happy with the program, but I am very happy that I invested in it a few years ago. (If you can afford it, the best method is to hire an RA to input all the references you’ve accumulated.) These days, as soon as I see a reference I think I might want to cite at some point, I add it to my one gigantic all-encompassing EndNote file. To navigate the contents of the big file, I add keywords to entries.
I also just wanted to second the point about documenting all of your actions especially with statistical work. To an outsider, I’m sure the comment fields in my do-files look like complete overkill. But one really does revisit data not only months but several years later and it’s good to know why you did what you did. If co-authors come along, comment fields are also helpful to get them up to speed. And yes, I keep copies of the original data sets always. I then generate a new data set after I run the do-files.
I’ll hold off on posting about the graphics/photo-related programs I use. Although I definitely need some of those for work at times, that’s getting into a somewhat different territory.
Quicksilver looks neat, and I’ve downloaded it.
I’ll repeat my recommendation of Bookends, as bibliographic software - it produces BibTeX output, though I’ve never got on top of this.
My big need is for a successor to Scientific Word, that is a proper front end for LaTeX, that actually works like a WYSIWYG Word Processor. I don’t think TeXShop does this, and I’ve been stuck with a long-orphaned version of SW 2.5 for Mac Classic. Any help on this would be hugely appreciated.
For general WP, the best substitute for Word under OS 9 was Nisus Writer. The transition to OS X has been very painful, but the latest version (Nisus Writer Express 2.1.1) is a usable alternative to Word, though missing a lot of the nice stuff from the Classic version.
I meant to say “Stata” not “State” for the stats package. At least the underlying link is right.
As for email, I use GMail (despite what I said about it earlier) and love it. For private correspondance I have a separate account with which I remain a die-hard Pine user.
Unlike Kieran I run Windows, for my sins, here’s my list:
LaTeX (MiKTex version) with WinEdt as editor, plus BiBTeX for managing references.
Adobe Acrobat (full version) is, in my experience, a better way of getting from LaTeX output to Microsoft Word or RTF where you need to do this.
Firefox is a great browser, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, the ConQuery extension, enabling you to highlight text and then search in Amazon, Google, WikiPedia, Leo etc is a great boon.
But I’d also list the Memo pad on my Treo as a essential. I can paste in text and information (such a library classmarks!) on my desktop and then retrieve them in an archive… a physical one, I mean. And I can also use the process the other way to get text entered on my handheld to my pc. Works for all kinds of stuff: directions, recipes, you name it.
The Emacs/LaTeX/AucTEX combination really is the best for academic writing and typesetting and TeXShop does a pretty good joob if you’re not comfortable with Emacs.
[I mostly use Emacs on PCs and TeXShop on Macs as, as you say, Emacs under OS X is not perfect…]
I’ve typeset a whole book as camera ready copy using LaTex (not mine, someone else’s) and doing it in LaTeX is so much better than trying to use Word.
However, the huge problem for me is that some conferences & publications don’t accept papers in .pdf format and insist on .doc (Word).
It can be a REAL pain in the arse to try to convert from LaTeX to Word format - even when using tools like LaTeX2RTF.
If anyone can find a good tool that handles LaTeX to Word conversion, that’d be great!
Thanks for this Kieran: I am just in the initial stages of retooling a working environment from programming/mathematics (my day job) to social science (as an Open University student) and there are few things more pleasant that being told to leave well enough alone.
I would add, though, that on Suse Linux 9.1 (which I’m currently using)
I think the conclusion is (as usual) that I want a Mac. Unix and shinies, isn’t it?
Regarding the OS X Terminal’s lack of tabs, the solution is the free iTerm.
Which used to be buggy as heck, but I’ve gone back to it recently, and version 0.8.0 seems perfectly stable and usable.
You wrote “I do get work done, sometimes. Honestly.” As you see, this blog gives me difficulty getting punctuation over (no WYSIWYG), so I’m having to guess just what you meant by it.
Precisely how did you intend to punctuate that? Was it supposed to be a single sentence, perhaps?
This is by way of introduction to JQ’s queries about WYSIWYG. JQ, I suspect you may need to find some wrapper scripts to go on top of a very unadorned word processor. That would work best by consulting with people commonly working with the same subject matter (not necessarily your equals in the field), not just to draw on their libraries of macros but to help evolve them. If you can’t plug into a living group like that, try starting with something like wikipedia and remember to compensate for any self-selected nerd bias in its contributors’ discussions of WP functionality (you’ll benefit more from the “talk” pages than from the objective material on WP packages themselves).
Mac OS’s built in terminal is just the thing for when you want to use the unix command line. It. Just. Needs. Tabs.
iTerm. use it for a day and you’ll never look back.
I used iTerm for a while but, like Patrick, found the early versions quite bug-infested. I’ll have to check it out again.
I hadn’t thought to use Acrobat to convert LaTeX to Word or RTF — I just tried it, and it seems like it works pretty well, though it seems to choke on ligatures and long dashes.
I’m going to have to convert my book manuscript out of LaTeX soon (sob), and this looks like a good contender for doing it.
bookends
is another citation and note taking tool that i use instead of endnote. i like it because it lets me save the quotations that i want to use with the citation, search everything as opentext and automatically adds books and autofills appropriately for oft cited journals.
bbedit is my editor of choice, it plugs into cvs….
word and or mellel for writing, both use rtf.
grammarian for grammar and spell checking anywhere
netnewswire marsedit and wordpress for blogs
mediawiki for webbed note storage
terminal for many things
voodoopad for making conceptual messes
tinderbox for just about anything(though i really need to learn how to use it better)
osx server administration tools
watson…. information now, translation now, tell me what movies are on, what the recipe for anything is, etc.
stickies
iphoto for photos
————-
workflow: i use .mac synced to 2 laptops and my office machine. in there i have a folder ‘current writings’ where i keep what i’m writing now, and have worked on in the last few years. Not in there is my papers folder which i back up on a dvd every now and again. currently it holds around 2000 pdfs, which i can search using terms. the pdfs are a combination of journal articles, and anything that i found interesting at the moment and printed to pdf. with 10.4, this ‘personal research archive’ will autocategorize, but now, what i do is search and drop them into folders for projects, as i need them then drop them back into the general archive later.
I would suggest also heading over the engineering school to take a class in relational database theory, then to a corporate training vendor for a class in how to use relational databases in practice. Working through “SQL for Smarties” in Oracle or PostgrSQL would help drive these points home.
SAS, which you have probably used, is a great tool, but most people learn to use it without understanding the theory behind it, which leads to some sub-optimal results.
Cranky
First, the transition to graduate school is a good time to make a switch in your software platform.
Agreed. After MS Word did atrocious things to the formatting of my masters’ thesis, I decided to ditch it and learn LaTeX for my doctorate. It was a pretty steep learning curve, but by doing it in the early months of doctoral research, I managed to crack it, and in doing so, managed to make life a heck of a lot easier in the final months of getting everything proofed and printed.
For other writing, I’m a fan of Nisus Writer Express, and especially drawn to Ulysses. Both are far superior to MS Word: the former because of its simple interface, inline wordcount and dictionary/thesarus; the latter because it strips away WYSIWYG and lets you concentrate on the words on the screen.
As an Eng Lit type, I’ve always despaired of traditional citation management software (EndNote etc), which is fine for storing lists of citations with abstracts, but not for extensive quotations with page/line references from the works cited. That’s a vital addition for me, and I’ve yet to find a tool that’s quite up to the job.
I second Nick’s call for a software package to handle quotations! This whole setup has my techno-glands salivating, and that seems to be the only missing piece.
I second the recommendation for emacs and LaTeX, though I don’t have experience with the other software. I’m a physicsist, and the number one app that I want is a simple photo markup program. Just the ability to add arrows with numbers on them to pictures would be great.
In the longer term I’d like to have a dynamic lab notebook which automagically downloads pictures from my cell phone and allows me to mark them up and include text with change tracking. Something along the lines of a Wiki would be ideal. That way I can shoot snaps of equipment as I’m building it or installing it and add comments to keep track of what I did when. The notebook should also include the ability to link to data files and data processing scripts, again with change tracking. One other necessary element would be automatic backup to a remote RAID server. It seems to me that all the elements exist but nobody has yet integrated them into a single seamless app.
Plain old paper lab notebooks are great, but you can’t beat a picture for certain kinds of information. Done right the Sooper Dooper Electronic Lab Notebook could seamlessly integrate the nitty-gritty of lab work with data analysis and publication.
That said, simple photo markup would be a huge step in the right direction. I’ve tried doing it with photoshop, but it’s too big to just leave idling in the background while I do other things.
There is a more pleasant alternative to Emacs available: Alpha. The original Alpha was coded in a mixture of C and Tcl for Classic Mac OS, but now there is the cross-platform AlphaTk (coded entirely in Tcl/Tk, for all platforms that support Tcl/Tk, including Windows and Mac OS X); in addition, the original Alpha project has migrated to OS X as AlphaX.
The LaTeX mode in Alpha is very good, and the whole editor is very user-friendly (and it even supports many Emacs key combinations).
Links:
AlphaTk:
http://www.santafe.edu/~vince/Alphatk.html
AlphaX
http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~steffen/Alpha/AlphaX/
Note that in both cases you must have Tcl/Tk installed (links are on both sites).
Alun
What I wouldn’t give for an editor with the adaptability of emacs, but without the creeping kudzu of emacs. And with key combinations which aren’t stupid. Every time I’ve tried to learn emacs, I find myself completely unable to get past the sheer dumbness, from a usability point of view, of C-x C-f.
I’d love to get shot of MS Word and move to a TeX-based writing environment, but the lack of a decent editor prevents me. (Vi sucks for this purpose in a whole different way.)
I know I am in a minority of one on this subject, but I will go to my grave protesting that Latex documents look shit. For some reason they’re always in this yacky skinny serif font and the linespacing always looks too wide. I’ve seen plenty of them with really dodgy kerning and justification too.
I’ve been using Tinderbox as a note-taking/information management tool for the last three months or so. I love it, though feel that I’ve only scratched the surface of its usefulness (my feeling about it is similar to the way Kieran describes Quicksilver, which I downloaded weeks ago, but have yet to try). Right now Tinderbox is Mac-only, though they’re working on porting it to Windows.
For some reason they’re always in this yacky skinny serif font
That’s Computer Modern, the default Latex font. Standard installations come with three or four more (Times and Palatino, in particular), if you don’t like it (and many don’t, especially for online PDFs). If you want other ones you have to buy them. I forked out for Adobe’s versions of Sabon and Caslon, and I use those (especially Sabon) for my papers these days.
Easy installation of new fonts is one area where LaTeX falls down in a big way, though things have improved considerably in recent years.
You’ll get a lot more of an argument from me and others about the quality of kerning and justification in Latex, as opposed to things like MS Word.
I think the default TeX font is real purty, especially the capital Qs.
I bet it would be pretty easy, though maybe not so elegant, to hack together a quotation-management system using textfiles and swish-e. You’d have to use some sort of standard format for the files (überdorks would use XML, but that’s basically human-unwriteable) so that you could programmatically extract author, work, page, etc (keywords, I guess), then use the prog input type for swish-e, your program feeding the metadata to swish-e’s engine using the MetaNames or PropertyNames (or something, it’s been a while since I looked at swish-e last) features. Then you could search doing something like “swish-e -w author=’(someone or someonelse)’”. If that’s actually what you mean by quotation management. I just rely on my PRODIGIOUS MEMORY.
I’ve seen plenty of them with really dodgy kerning and justification too.
I really, really doubt this. Kerning can go wrong in LaTeX for basically two reasons: Incorrect font metrics, which is not a problem with LaTeX, but with the font, and end-users trying to insert manual spacing adjustments as if they were still working in a word processor, which is also not a problem with LaTeX.
Vim is a nice alternative to emacs for those who don’t want to develop emacs pinky. I usually use LaTeX and vim, but I know people who use LyX as their interface to LaTeX on UNIX and TeXnicCenter on Windows (it’s better than WinEDT and completely free.)
Revision control is a necessity if you care about your work, and I’ve recently converted from CVS to subversion (with the fsfs repository, not the BDB one.) Fixing a set of mistakes by typing “svn revert” just once makes the relatively minor effort of learning svn completely worthwhile.
Firefox for browsing, Thunderbird for email, and Sharpreader for reading RSS feeds on Windows. I haven’t found a UNIX RSS aggregator that I’m completely happy with yet. Thunderbird might be good, but it doesn’t import or export OPML files yet. I was surprised to see a discussion on a blog about software tools without a mention of RSS aggregators. I wouldn’t have the time to follow blogs without one.
I use python (with numarray) and Mathematica for most mathematics and programming work; I use perl for munging text, and I use bash for managing files. While almost everything leaves Windows Explorer in the dust and Konqueror is both pretty and powerful, nothing compares to a good shell like bash for ease of use and ability to automate.
Vim is a nice alternative to emacs for those who don’t want to develop emacs pinky
The downside, of course, is that you get colon cancer.
HA!
I will go to my grave protesting that Latex documents look shit.
Part of the learning curve was ensuring that my own stuff didn’t look like shit. Adobe Caslon Pro, thank you very much, with old-style figures and proper spacing. The default styles are rather crappy, to my eyes. But ‘\usepackage{palatino}’ (or even the ‘times’ package) works wonders as a starting point.
As for quotation management: something that hooks into BibTeX and its UIDs for texts, while offering a free-text search mapped to page references, would do me just fine.
I’m a big fan of Google Desktop.
http://desktop.google.com/about.html
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
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
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
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review