Academia

I wrote about my workflow in more detail in 2020. Not a lot has changed, so this text is shorter and focuses on the changes. Hardware MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2 iPhone XR Remarkable 2 The MacBook I’ve been using for years is still going strong, which is pretty impressive given the current standards of disposable hardware. Reading Pocket Remarkable 2 Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2 Zotero + Zotfile + MacOS Preview I got my Remarkable 2 after some time I last wrote about my workflow, and it’s worked more or less like I expected. It allows me to read articles on a nicer screen, while taking notes on the PDF file itself. This is convenient, but moving those notes somewhere more permanent is not, which means that I don’t really do that. I read a lot of texts for seminars, or while reviewing them, where this is not really a problem: the notes I take are about a particular text, not so much about the concepts behind it. ...

I’ve worked in academia now for a decade. I tend to test out different tools and ways of doing things. Here’s how I’m working in 2020. This is written for two audiences: for my future self and other academics who are interested in knowing how other people have solved similar problems. Hardware I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) I work on. For a six year old laptop it works great. It even has some USB connectors and a HDMI port, because it’s from before Apple decided that people don’t actually want to connect their computers to anything. This is the first MacOS device I’ve used, but since I’ve used Linux for years the Unix similarities helped me get started. Importantly, it has a working terminal emulator, with all the things you would expect from one. ...

I’ve recently seen more academic talks where the author has been reading out their paper out loud in front of the audience. I’ve heard a couple of different reasons why people do so: they have problems staying on time; they are nervous about giving presentations; they need help to stay on track. Staying on track and on time is definitely important, so these are important things to focus on and reading a pre-written talk can help with these. ...

I’ve lately been moving away from the walled gardens I used to put my research in and trying to find ways of making my research as openly accessible as possible while keeping it future-proof. These goals are not that hard to accomplish, but they do require some effort and some new tools. In order to research to be freely accessible, somebody needs to make it accessible, because that’s not currently the default for published research, even if it’s funded by public resources. So what would be needed for that to be reality? ...

Writing academic articles is harder than it needs to be. Writing research articles takes a long time. Depending on the data and the methodology used, there may be years of fieldwork or multiple experiments or analyses to be done before getting to the final part of finally writing something down for others to read. The final product of that process, the scientific article, is still pretty similar across fields and has stayed relatively stable over time. ...

I just deleted my accounts on Academia.edu and ResearchGate. I think we are currently in a crucial time in choosing how academia shapes up in the future and they are not helping. Academic publishing is weird. Most of the labour is provided by academics: we write the papers, we do the reviews and we are the editors keeping the journals alive. Yet, the academic publishing giants reap the rewards, selling journal subscriptions to the universities of the very people who create the content on those journals. Sure, there are costs to running those journals, from server space to layout services, but those are marginal compared to the massive academic effort of doing the actual research, review and editing. ...