![]() In fact, I spend a lot of time in Scrivener. It seem so since I spend a day or days at a time doing focused work within specific tools. sensemakingThough I drew in arrows that indicate a sort of continuous back-and-forth process at a micro-level, there do seem to be larger foraging and sense-making loops. In effect, it represents a simple CTA that generalizes the academic workflow that I now use. cognitive task analysisMy current workflow is represented below. The diagram below is extracted from Pirolli and Card (2005). Another way to look at this is as an interleaving of bottom-up processes with top-down processes: search, filter, and understand versus find evidence, examine counter arguments, and re-evaluate. ![]() ![]() The first part (framing data) is posed as an “information foraging loop” while the second (fitting data to a model) as a “sense-making loop”. In essence, sense-making is a set of processes for framing data to a model and also fitting data to a mental model ( Klein, Moon, & Hoffman 2006). While developing my own workflow, I ran across an article from Pirolli and Card (2005) that reminded me intensely of academic workflows! In fact, they had done a cognitive task analysis (CTA) of intelligence analysts. This post by Steven Berlin Johnson describing his use of DevonThink is representative. I reasoned that someone who publishes a lot probably was good at re-use of previous thinking and work. What the heck?! (I’ll get back to this later.)įairly quickly, I came to the conclusion that my best chance at settling on a workflow was to focus on studying the workflows of researchers who were very skilled. For instance, various students and researchers would admit to using multiple brain-storming tools simultaneously. At first, I couldn’t see why there were so many over-lapping functionalities. Naturally, I downloaded a variety and began to explore. What I found was huge discussion on the relative merits and trade-offs on organization (knowledge management) tools, brain-storming tools, note-taking, bibliography, and writing tools. So I read everything I could find on academic workflows. In fact, I realized that my largest problem was actually the ability to re-use my own thinking, knowledge, and experience. Like many other doctoral students, I came to the realization that my method was incredibly inefficient and could not scale. ![]() In the end, all of my work was in disconnected Evernote notes and Word documents. For each of four papers, I considered my question, amassed sources, crammed notes into Evernote, outlined, wrote, re-wrote, re-thought, re-searched, re-collected, re-assembled, re-drafted and finally spend a day inserting and formatting sources properly. And the time spent reading, thinking, and learning was potentially invaluable. Of course, if I was lucky, some of the writing might make it into my dissertation. During doctoral comprehensive exams, I paused to consider the effort it took to research and produce answers to questions that would only be used in a 2-hour comprehensive exam. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |