So here it is - my first blog entry! It's strange, after years of writing for myself, and a small addiction to reading OTHER people's blogs, you'd have thought that I would have started my own blog a long time ago. But, it turns out, I am actually quite shy about sharing my thoughts about the world in a public forum, unless, of course, it is a status update on Facebook for select friends only. Even then, I am aware of editing myself quite a bit.
So, I guess I may never have got around to setting up a blog if it wasn't a class requirement for a course I am taking on Digital Tools for Qualitative Researchers. Yikes! Not only do I have to publish my writing to the great, wide world of the internet, but I am supposed to sound somewhat scholarly and thoughtful as well. Scary stuff indeed. I have still not decided if I will really release this publicly (no doubt to be crushingly ignored by the world), or just submit it for the class and keep it private. Maybe I will compromise and only share it with select (and, hopefully indulgent) family and friends.
The good news is that actually setting up the blog was definitely the easy part. The toughest decision was which design template to pick, and it's not as if that is an irreversible decision. The next problem was what to call my blog. I can't claim to have put too much thought into that - "The Vetty Thesp" came back to me as I tried to come up with a quick and dirty description of who I am. At Cambridge, I was a vet student, who did a lot of acting, which was an unusual combination, hence the nickname. Most vets did sports, or outdoorsy, hearty activities, or, if they were smart (like my dear husband), they didn't do much extracurricular stuff at all since the vet course took up a lot of time and required more than your average amount of work. But I hung out with students in the humanities and social sciences, rehearsing, learning lines, and generally being slightly pretentious. I wasn't particularly talented, but had a wonderful time basking in the glow of people who were - including, just to name drop a bit, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Rachel Weisz, not that either one of them would remember me.
Anyway, these days I don't act, and I am not really a clinical vet either, but I do still seem to have (and enjoy) an interdisciplinary approach to life and work. I work in veterinary education - trying to design curricula for professional veterinary students, while working on my own PhD in Educational Policy and Leadership. As such, I feel like I am a bit of a translator, moving between the biological science paradigms and professional world of veterinary medicine, and the more postmodern, qualitative, social science world of higher education. So I stuck with the nickname for my blog, at least until I can come up with a better one.
But, enough rambling on about me. The other part of the class assignment was to review a piece of software that had been introduced in the course. In the spirit of the New Year, I have been trying to get organized, and so, it made sense to me to explore some of the software we had been talking about that is designed to help organize and keep track of scholarly references and notes. I have been using Endnote for a few years, thanks to my brilliant husband, who introduced me to it not long after I started my graduate program. It is pretty brilliant for organizing and keeping track of references, as long as you are disciplined at entering the relevant information as you come across it. The pay off comes when you are writing a paper, and you can use the "cite while you write" feature, so that you can add the citations directly from Endnote into Word. The software formats the citations according to whatever style manual you set it to (APA Style - 6th edition for most of my courses), AND creates the appropriate bibliography at the end of the document as well. For anyone that has ever done this manually, you will appreciate how awesome that is. (I know, I need to get out more...!)
These days, you can also link each reference in Endnote to a pdf of the article, as long the file is saved somewhere on your computer. The problem with that, is that I have not found a good way to organize and keep track of all the pdf's I have stored all over my hard drive. I have started to save them all into one folder for all my Endnote references, but, I have not been good about labeling them or sorting them by any other meaningful system. And so, it was with interest, that I learnt about Mendeley, a free software system that is designed to organize your academic reference pdf files.
Mendeley has some pretty cool features. I downloaded it onto the hard drive of my MacBook, and imported all the pdf files that I had in my Endnote folder - it extracted all the bibliographic information from the pdf's of all the journal articles, and so, effectively, created another bibliographic library. Since it is web-based, this means that I can access my library from any computer, including an iPhone and iPad app, which I have yet to try, but I am excited about. Finally, it allows you to mark up pdf's with highlighting and notes, similar to Adobe Acrobat, except that it is right there, linked to the bibliographic information.
I must admit that I am just beginning to explore all the features of Mendeley (this class assignment was due before I had time to play more). So I have not yet figured out how best to use it for my needs. I am particularly intrigued by the feature that allows you to set up an automatic sync with any folder on your hard drive, which would mean that anytime I add a file to my Endnote folder, it will update my Mendeley library as well. But I have found one big limitation, that makes me inclined to think that I am not letting go of my dear, comfort-blankie that is Endnote, and that is that Mendeley does not seem to cope well with pdf files of book chapters or other sources that are not journal articles. I don't think I realized how many of my references are non-journal articles, until I realized that I couldn't find them in Mendeley. I am sure that it is possible to manually enter that information, but I am loathe to go through that process when it is all right there in Endnote anyway - I just don't have the time to do that all over again. Maybe there is a way to download all that information from Endnote directly into Mendeley, but I haven't found it yet. Finally, it may be possible to "cite-while-you-write" from Mendeley, but again, I am not that far up the learning curve. Having said that, I am having problems, right now, with getting that feature to work with Endnote in my new MS Office for Mac 2011as well. For a technophobe like me, all these updates and additions sometimes end up being more exhausting than helpful. Sigh!
Finally, on a quick, fun note... this course on digital tools has also introduced me to Wordle. You can upload any word document or enter a website, and it will create an unlimited (?) number of really pretty word clouds based on the frequency of words in the text. I definitely haven't figured how I could use this for scholarly reasons, but it sure is fun to play with. Just for fun, I am attaching a word cloud of this blog post, as my first, official "Word Art:" My First Blog.
Bye for now!
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