MAPH Week 20: Oh Crap, the Papers

Do you know that moment in Stephen King’s The Mist where the survivors in the Land Cruiser kill themselves rather than face a world–seemingly–without hope? 

Well, for me, that moment was last week and thing with the tentacles is named Heidegger.

Now, I consider myself an organized person.  I defined my undergraduate experience by starting papers months before they were due and spending weeks and weeks rewriting and polishing until every paper read like a diminutive monograph on some topic.  Where syllabi listed assignments ahead of time, I always tried to be at least a week ahead–creating a pillow to catch me in the event that some paper, project, or presentation took longer than expected.  Some of this behaviour was the direct result of a detail-oriented nature and some arose of necessities associated with taking twenty to twenty-one hours worth of courses per semester  All this is merely to say: I know a thing or two about keeping up.

First quarter at University of Chicago caught me by surprise.  Not only did I essentially only have nine weeks to get whole course spanning seminar papers completed–plus the extra two weeks of the MAPH program’s head start–but I found that getting information on or permission for paper topics was no longer as easy as staying late after class or scheduling a time to meet with the professor by email.  As a result, lets just say that even if you manage to select a paper topic early–say in the first three weeks or so of class–you won’t actually have the go-ahead to start the project until week five or six–if you are very attentive and your professor is very communicative.  (As one of my fellow MAPHers learned the hard way when a professor neglected to respond to any of this student’s paper topic emails throughout the entire quarter and refused to was time by answering questions during class).  So, at the end of week nine, I found that I still had substantial work to do on two papers plus the beginnings of thesis writing homework to contend with.

Second, quarter I resolved to avoid that uncomfortable position again.  I selected likely paper topics in my second week for two of my classes and got confirmation early before other students could flood professor’s email in-boxes.  By week five I had those two papers written and by week seven they were being proofed by philosophically minded friends and/or the classes’ teaching assistants.  By week nine they were both getting final content messages and prose polishing so you’d think I’d be sitting pretty right now going into week ten.  Problem is, that pesky third paper.

The third paper is in a class called Heidegger and Christianity taught by the amazing Dr. Ryan Coyn of University of Chicago’s Divinity School.  Now, my undergraduate training was from a continental heavy school and the class that made me a philosopher was a class linking Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida to a–providedly–postmodern version of Christianity, so in theory this class should have been a breeze.  I selected my paper topic for Heidegger and Christianity in week two along with my other two courses and started writing.  By week five I’d begun to despair of ever finding a “way into” my topic.  Heideggerians will tell you that Heideggerian philosophy is almost a self-contained world with uniquely defined terminology and a swirling eddy of intertextual correspondence among Heidegger’s published works.  Further, Heidegger seems to take almost perverse pleasure in subverting nearly any common ground that his phenomenology might have had–not only with any analytic philosopher–but with all previous forms of phenomenological reduction (Husserl).

The solution seems to be ready-to-hand: simply investigate some facet of Heidegger’s system without appeal to other streams of philosophy.  And that would be an outstanding answer if I had something unique and interesting to say about Heidegger’s philosophy qua Heidegger’s philosophy.  Problem is, that approach necessitates that I have a sufficient grasp of Heidegger’s project to pick this thread or that.  I don’t–at least not compared to the rest of the folks in the class who as Ph.D.s have been working on Heidegger for as many as seven years.  So, I need to bring in an outside source to relate to Heidegger–hopefully illuminating interesting features of both sources.

My first conversational partner for Heidegger was Gottlob Frege.  I’ve built some fairly strong chops in analytic philosophy of language since arriving at UChicago and Heidegger wrote about language and logic extensively so no problem right?  Wrong.  Seventeen pages into a seminar paper trying to bring the two into conversation, I realized–with the help of some Heideggerians and a Fregeian–that my reading of Heidegger was no-longer sufficiently Heideggerian to pass muster for a continentalist and my reading of Frege was too Heideggerian to satisfy an analytical inspection.  Seventeen pages and weeks of work… flush.

So, where am I now.  Well, I’ve recruited a new interlocutor for Heidegger that promises a more rewarding discourse: Kierkegaard.  Problem is, I’ve only got a couple days to write it, a couple more to polish it, and then it’s due.  Oh crap.

A Virtual Paper Chase: Organizing a scholarly life with ebooks and an iPad

The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: After the advent of “paperless” offices, the consulting detective found a lucrative second career…

I always laugh my butt off at those television commercials for scanners that promise to empty your file cabinets, clean out your receipt shoe boxes and otherwise banish home office clutter.  The reason is simple: for most folks scanning paper documents into electronic ones only succeeds in transferring a real mess into a virtual one.

I think electronic housekeeping is actually worse than physically tidying up.  I have several thousand books stored on four external hard drives, documents created both on my laptop (which hangs out on my desk top) and on my iPad (which takes the place of my laptop), and a myriad of .pdf files that I get through U of C’s Chalk site and email. To further complicate matters, at any given point I have books in various stages of being scanned, processed, and corrected and art projects either starting as scanned photos, digital working files, or finalized TIFs. I’m not writing this to complain though.  If these things were sitting in piles near my desk I might risk them falling over and crushing me or an apartment wildfire that would rage through my collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs books.  However, while paper documents are far less portable, they are far more likely to get permanently lost or destroyed.  Virtual documents are easy to lose and easy to delete.  Now, I’d never go back to hauling all my course books, toting mountains of notes, and having to scale up drawings the old-fashioned way, but after reading about a friend’s electronic filing system, I thought I’d share my own strategies to keep my virtual library in check.

There are three varieties of documents that I commonly have to manage.

1. Archived documents – I’ve already discussed the process of turning books into .pdf files here and here, so I’ll assume that everyone understands the bit in the last paragraph about scanning, processing, and correcting.  We’ll call documents that somebody else published to paper and I recreated virtually “Archived” documents.

2. Digital documents – These documents are html websites that have been used for course readings, .pdf files that Professors have given me by email/ Chalk, and video or audio embedded files that can’t be easily converted into some other form.

3. User-created documents – This category includes class notes, class work drafts and final papers, photographs, and art files.

An organization system could be keyed to anyone of these document types.  For example, I could lump my course books (archived) and websites (digital) in with my course notes (user-created) using a program like Circus Ponie’s NoteBooks.  I’ve tried NoteBooks before and found that, while it works fine to collect documents for a particular class or according to the needs of a paper, in the long-term, keying items to my user-created documents tends cause me to “lose” documents because I forget which project I was working on when I found them.  Instead, I prefer to group my user-created and digital docs with my archived books.

So how does it work in practice?

My books are scanned to .pdf files which are archived to a pair of hard drives and saved on my iPad in iAnnotate.  Within iAnnotate I have a series of folders that hold all the books for a single course or a particular project.  The Library view screen also allows me to duplicate, e-mail, and tag books for global searching.

My course notes are taken in two ways.  Notes that are very close to the text (i.e. specific to a passage) are written in the book they refer to.  So, for example, here I have some comments on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit that are linked to particular high lighted passages.

These notes stay with the book as I move it from the iPad to the computer after I have finished with the particular course the book used to be associated with, but can also be stripped out to provide a fresh copy if I want to read the book without my former prejudices getting in the way.  Notes that are not closely related to a particular text are taken in a paper notebook that I can later scanned creating a new archive document (for example “Notes from 20th Century Science Fiction Literature”).

Digital documents that I receive from my Professors or other students are copied into a text editor (like Open Office’s NeoOffice or Microsoft’s Word and turned into .pdfs with the original html address at the top.  In this way I can be assured that I can locate the document on the web if changes are made AND I have a permanent copy in case the link disappears.  These files are grouped with the books they refer to or the physical notebooks that I will later scan depending on their character.

The “spotlight” function in my Macbook, iPad, or the search function in iAnnotate can turn up searched terms in the filename, text itself, or in the annotations or bookmarks in the case of iAnnotate.  By keeping the organizational scheme at the level of files and folders rather than integrating the files into another program (like Notebooks, EverNote, or Zetero) I know that I will continue to be able to access my documents even if programs change formats, operating systems aren’t backwards compatible with now-defunct programs, or I change operating systems.  On the downside, topic level schemes are faster because they are more narrowly defined.  To illustrate, a search for “phenomenology” in my library turns up several thousand hits because it counts every file name, every instance of the word in a text, and every annotation that includes the word.  If I simply had a notebook named “phenomenology” with links to books, embedded digital docs, and course notes the resulting body of knowledge would be much more manageable.

So, there you have it.  My system is not nearly as advanced or user-friendly as some other software based systems, but I’m betting that it will be less likely to fall prey to technological changes than those other approaches.  I would love to hear how the rest of you organize the flotsam and jetsam of your scholarly lives–especially those who resist the “paperless” revolution–so leave a note in the comments section.