Planning & executing

Posted by Darren McDonald
Aug 18, 2021 at 05:33 AM

Sure @Alexander Deliyannis. I am using Craft as my research journal (or research diary, as it is sometimes referred).

In the past, I had a physical notebook which I used for my journal. In the notebook, I would title each entry with the date, and, after completing the entry, keywords that would summarize the gist of the entry. Things I would write about in the journal included, but not limited to; thoughts and TODOs from reading research papers, development of research method, contact information and e-mail correspondence with authors of research papers, keeping information and records of discussions people involved in research, thoughts about new concepts and development of existing ones, diagramming research findings and concepts, and so on. I started keeping research journals as a way to manage the huge amount of information in a research project. Later I found it useful as an audit used to “recover” the journey I took in the research project which is necessary for qualitative research. I even now often refer to older journals which I have scanned and put into a Dropbox folder.

In Craft, I am essentially recreating this process but including more with each entry as I am free to attach PDFs of research journals, copies of emails, diagrams, and so on. I use the highlighting and text coloring (Decorations: Block/Focus) in Craft to replace the multi-color pen system I used for the physical journal. (Red for TODOs, and so on). I use bold and other text formatting to make words and phrases stand out. For me, I like to use the WYSIWYG approach to display. I need to be able to color code and put words and phrases in bold and so on to make I to make sense of the what I am writing while I am writing. As such, markdown does not work for me at this stage. I also create links to related parts of the journal which I can first find through a search if I don’t know where I wrote them.

I use the hierarchical folder system to break my projects down in a way that is manageable to me, so that I can jump right into a project. If the I decide to change the way I am structure projects, I can easily do this without upsetting the internal links between pages.

I have been toying with Craft to write up the drafts of research papers for publication. However, I think that for some reason that another tool is better for me to write the drafts. I have been using Scriviner for the hard grind but have been unhappy with the complexity of Scriviner getting in the way of just writing. I am trying out Highland 2 as it the software develops or OmniOutliner as it is to fill this gap. For writing drafts of research papers I need to break down pages into smaller sections that I can easily jump to and move around. I am even happy to use markdown in this stage of writing. But for analysing and writing about other peoples research papers I find Craft works extremely well for me. It would be even better if Craft had an easy way of showing where in the papers certain quotes are drawn from so I can read the quotations in context which would later potentially lead to further insight. At the moment I am writing annointment bibliographies of papers and books with the paper or book PDF file attached. I do a more in-depth and analysis, using the methods I have mentioned above, for papers and books that I can apply to my own study .

I find using Craft as a research journal helps me get a hold of the problems the original poster of this thread, @Dellu, wrote about. The research journal analogy is helpful to me to force me to focus and bring together my readings, findings and thoughts for published research. However, I am only using only the basic of features offered by Craft. I will probably use more features when I actually need them. As such, I am finding Craft can accommodate and grow with my needs, not forcing me into a way of dong things dictated by the software.

Hopes this helps you on your own journey. Thank you for your giving my the opportunity for sitting down and write about part of my workflow. This has helped me probably more than it has helped you. :)

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
That should have been:
> >Fascinating; could you elaborate further on this appoach? Are you
>referring to structuring a paper and referencing existing material, or
>more?
>