" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

A few months back I started a blog about get­ting the dis­ser­ta­tion done called Fuck Yeah Dis­ser­ta­tion!. Rather than leav­ing it to mum­mify on the inter-webs, I’m going to repost some entries here from time to time.

Adding to my reviews of best apps ever, I present to you Scrivener, a robust note-taking and draft­ing appli­ca­tion that is a cru­cial step of my dis­ser­ta­tion process. It’s cur­rently Mac-only, but they are beta-testing a Win­dows ver­sion.

Above is a screen grab of my Scrivener win­dow, includ­ing some of my favorite fea­tures that deserve attention.

1. Col­lec­tions. This is like your Finder in OS10 or Win­dows Explorer. It allows you to nav­i­gate your fold­ers and doc­u­ments while also giv­ing you a visual sense of your project. The “Binder” is your main col­lec­tion of doc­u­ments, and then you can cre­ate cus­tom “sub-collections” of select doc­u­ments (like chap­ters, top­ics, etc.). The “Col­lec­tions” pane doesn’t make copies of your doc­u­ments, so when you cre­ate a sub-collection with selected docs, you’re edit­ing the orig­i­nals, not copies.

2. Com­pile. My favorite fea­ture. Let’s say you have 5 doc­u­ments selected in your “Col­lec­tions,” Scrivener will assem­ble all of the doc­u­ments sequen­tially in the edit­ing pane. You can then edit all doc­u­ments together as one, change the doc­u­ment order, or delete entire sec­tions. Finally, when you click “Com­pile,” Scrivener allows you to export all selected doc­u­ments into one file with a choice of numer­ous for­mats includ­ing .rtf, .txt, .pdf, .html, .doc, et al.

3. In text link­ing. I’ve known about this fea­ture for a while, but my Table of Con­tents is the first time I’ve imple­mented this fea­ture. Basi­cally, you can link any of your text to any other file in your Binder, like cre­at­ing your own wiki. I can also see this fea­ture com­ing in handy for cre­at­ing a lit­er­a­ture review, mind-mapping, image ref­er­enc­ing, etc.

4. Foot­notes and Com­ments. One of my com­plaints about other note-taking pro­grams like Devon­Think or Ever­note is the lack of sub-annotations. Scrivener allows you to make foot­notes and com­ments, that you can then export into var­i­ous for­mats. Liz from Con­fec­tious offers a pretty sim­ple hack to import your Zotero ref­er­ences into Scriver rich-text files.

5. Word/Character Count Tar­get. I like to work in con­tin­u­ous page blocks (no vis­i­ble page breaks), but the prob­lem with that is you can lose track of your progress. The Count Tar­get fea­ture allows you to set a word count goal per doc­u­ment and it gives you a nice visual to com­mu­ni­cate your progress.

6. Extra stuff. A great full-screen edi­tor (although I really love Write­room for dis­trac­tion free writ­ing); The “Quick­ref” fea­ture allows you to open a doc­u­ment in a small, float­ing win­dow above your cur­rent doc­u­ment; “Snap­shot” let’s you to save a ver­sion of your doc­u­ment and use it to com­pare to future versions.

Over­all, Scrivener is a pow­er­ful tool for dis­ser­ta­tion writ­ers, but I can see it used for any writ­ing project. Scrivener is not free, but they do offer a stu­dent dis­count and pro­vide a 30-day free trial. (And this is a “real” free trial, not the CS5 crap trial that counts days when you don’t use the program.)