In the past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about ideas and the tools that we use to capture and prepare them. And, while doing so, I came to a rather obvious realization: there’s a lot of ways to seize thought and force it into another shape.
I mean, think about it for a moment: you can travel with a moleskin in your back pocket, send yourself an email, speak into your phone, or aggregate material from the Internet. You can scrape, speak, jot, doodle or draw. It’s ridiculously easy to do, and there’s certainly no shortage of tools to help you; which leads to a quandary.
There is a big problem with such a strategy, however: it is destined for failure.
Not all thought is the same. Even amongst similar specimens, the beasties likely have a texture and flavor that is utterly distinctive. The thinking required for a book chapter, for example, is not the same as that needed for an email; nor is the subtlety required for poetry present within most blog posts.
In some cases, the idea is like steak, in others it’s potatoes or onions; and like food, the grit of the thought determines how you prepare and consume it. You certainly wouldn’t grill a cake, nor would you cook ribs in the microwave. Those tools simply aren’t suited to the job. Similarly, some ideas require a particular medium and trying to force them into another is like convincing a teenager to cut his hair. The only way forward involves duct tape and an experience no one wishes to discuss later.
Thus, when facing a recalcitrant idea — as when dealing with defiant teenagers — the only only realistic option is to capitulate and suffer the eccentricities. In some cases, the idea may demand that you capture it on pen on paper, perhaps even dictating a particular type of pen. Such divas (I’m looking at you, Sarcasm) require that you savor each word or brush stroke. Or, it may obligate you to type it out, as fast as you can, threatening to leave if you can’t keep up.
They’re fickle little bastards, ideas.
But just because ideas are wholly unique does not mean that they don’t have commonalities. Nor does it mean that all ruminations are unreasonable. You just have to match the idea to the right tool. It’s like knowing that salmon should be poached in the dishwasher (PDF).
Which leads me back to my quandary. Trying to classify ideas and determine an appropriate tool is daunting. Yet, I have come up against a case (enforced by deadlines) where I need some answers.
Specifically, I need to figure out whether or not to include note-taking features into LyX-Outline. And because I am unable to divine a solution on my own, I thought I would post an open inquiry as to the best way forward. What say you, oh humble readers of this blog (and future users of LyX-Outline)?
LyX-Outline: Should Notes Really Live With a Project Draft?
On paper, one of the most compelling features in Scrivener (the Mac OS X program that I am using as an inspiration for LyX-Outline) is the ability to aggregate content into a research binder. Scrivener makes it easy to pull in photos, PDF documents and other material, which you can then refer to while writing.
Unfortunately, while this feature sounds good in theory, I’ve found that it to be of limited practical benefit. (At least for the type of writing that I do.) Anything I use must be attributed, cited and properly foot-noted; and these are tasks which Scrivener doesn’t handle so well. (For that matter, neither OneNote or EverNote, the other two note-taking programs I like to use, do a particular good job at it, either.)
Zotero (my favorite reference manager), on the other hand excels at tracking citations, files, and source-related notes. It’s the main reason for it’s existence. Even better, this information can then be synced to other computers and automatically inserted into my writing. The fact that it is a permanent part of my reference library and available for reuse is only icing on the cake. (Reusing text may be plagiarism; but reusing quotations/references is smart.) But while Zotero may be perfectly suited for this class of notes and subset of ideas, in other places it is woefully inadequate.
Consider, for example, the notes, summaries, thoughts and scrivenings directly related to the structure of your writing. For this material, trying to sort and save with Zotero is actually harmful. When you place a note in Zotero, there’s a permanence to it. It becomes locked to a particular references and is only retrieved sporadically, thereby losing ts spontaneity and adaptability.
In fact, it is the dynamic ideas — which require the freedom to evolve and mature — that are those best suited to a tool like Scrivener or LyX-Outline. They should live in close proximity to the text they describe and have the freedom to be moved, nested, split, and combined. When the tool is adaptable, it’s easier to be innovative and fluid.
Which leads to an important development question: LyX-Outline needs a way to deal with both sets of ideas. In the latter case, I’ve already created the Corkboard and Outliner. But how should I deal with raw source material?
Should I try and incorporate a content manager/notes-feature into LyX-Outline (as Scrivener does)? Or should I continue to use external tools and hone LyX-Outline as a writing environment?
As future users of this program, what do you think would be most helpful?
Comments
9 Responses to “Project Notes, Dynamic Ideas and LyX-Outline”
Dear Mr. Oakes,
When surfing for Ubuntu-tools that can help me organize my thoughts, I was distracted by your LyX-writing tool. I mean it caught my interest, and I think I will be a future user indeed.
This post about the different aspects of ‘ideas’ appeals to me. My thought on it: The raw material you mention are not Ideas, but rather Sources. I think as a writer it is very useful to have your sources stored with the necessary information to make decent references and the like.
On the other side there are the dynamic, creative, ideas. These are, in my opinion, specifically your own. I like the way you describe them, and these need room indeed. In short, I think sources and ideas are two wholly different things, and they both deserve their own feature, so use both. As an end-user, I don’t really care whether my program uses another (p.e. Zotero) in the back ground or as a plug-in, as long as it is decently integrated.
Hopefully my comment is useful to you. By all means do continue the good work!
Kind Regards,
Moon
Hi Moon,
Thank you very much for this excellent comment. I will take a look at integrating Zotero (or another external tool, another option is Mendeley). I was wondering if you might expound on what you mean by “decently integrated” though. Examples would be tremendously helpful.
Cheers,
Rob Oakes
One more word of support for an initiative that can make Linux much more writer-friendly!
I will second Moon’s comment in dealing separately with ‘Sources’ and ‘Ideas’, and note that it is in this second area that Lyx-Outline can excel, especially in the absence of other serious offerings in the Linux world. I would advise against trying to build reference (Sources) management from scratch –Zotero and Mendeley are established tools with a broad user base and there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
Re integration: Some kind of free linking of Ideas to Sources and vice versa is required; an Idea can stem from a Source, and may also be supported by others. Linking is better than importing which replicates information, and can lead to inconsistencies if the original changes. On the other hand, importing could be useful in the final draft to produce a complete manuscript. In Windows there are special URLs that can point to specific references within databases of programs such as Endnote; I imagine that this can also be done in Linux if the target program supports it.
[...] for putting together drafts — only cover a small amount of the spectrum. As I implied in the previous post, Zotero is really good for material that has a degree of permanence to it; while [...]
Hi there,
it’s very interesting this recurrent presence of the notes. I think the notes and the “support material” should exist somewhere else and not in the lyx-outline. For example in my research I have simulations’ results, papers, my notes with plots rambling ideas and ‘other stuff’. All of them are living and are stored in different places… Maybe there is a good way to store all this stuff together, but didn’t find any.
As already you pointed out the solution to this problem is very complex, so I think the best is to concentrate to get Lyx-Outline really geared up to the writing and let something else organizing the notes.
Now on the tool.
I just want to report that I’m experimenting with the tool and I really like the behaviour. When I saw scrivener I really loved the idea of the small chunk of text and idea that need to be expanded and that can be beautifully organized in the corkboard.
I have three small suggestions:
1. When a section is clicked on the outline view, the corkboard should display the chunk with the same section.
If the section has subchildren than those can be displayed on the bottom row, always as chunkies
2. It should be possible to have at list two types of organization: chunkies already in the document and chunkies which are not yet there but they will go in at some point. Maybe a slightly different colour will help the user to modify the two.
3. When a chunk with subchildren is doubleclicked on the corkboard it should be expanded and the subsection should be revealed and make accessible to the user.
This are just small suggestions, and maybe not the most conviniet.
On a side note I can’t get the spellchecker to work from the compiled lyx (it is just gray out). There is some compilation flag which needs to be set?
Thanks for the amazing work, I can’t wait for the development of this tool.
Thanks,
Michele
Hi Michele,
Thanks for the recommendations. I appreciate you taking the time to talk about what works and what doesn’t work. Right now, the views are tied into a custom widget. This is mostly for testing purposes as I get them to behave consistently and predictably. My overall goal is to incorporate the views into the main document window (I’ll probably leave the widget as well, though I’m still undecided). This will make the behavior more consistent with what you see in Scrivener, and will also unify the navigation. I’ll give some thought about what you have to say and try to incorporate the ideas into my existing plans.
Re: Spellchecker
The process for getting it to work is slightly different on every platform. Are you on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux?
Linux is the easiest, and simply involves installing the devel libraries for either aspell or hunspell, depending on which engine you wish to use. If you’re using Mac, you’ll need to download and install either aspell or hunspell at the command line. The easiest way to do this is through MacPorts. I’m afraid I can’t offer much insight on Windows, as I primarily only use the stable version of LyX there. (Most of LyX-Outline development happens on Mac/Linux.)
After you get the dictionary installed, you just need to reconfigure and recompile. Cmake should then do all of the hard parts.
Best,
Rob
I’m on Ubuntu, installed aspell-dev and everything worked properly.
Thanks.
I came to Lyx from Latex and, day after day, learnt to use it better. The only problem was the lack of clarity of the layout on the Lyx-side. The corkboard integration is a big help against this feeling of mess in the ideas.
I also tried Mindmap tools like freemind and sometimes I used the export to latex function to get the outline directly. But this is an unidirectional function. An implementation of a mindmap function could be an idea, so that we could go back and forth from the map to the text and from the text to the map (as you did with the section in the coarkboard part ? ) What do you think of having both tools in the same software? Or do you think this has to keep separate as two different steps of the writing process?
Best,
C.
I think that a mindmap would be a very nice addition. It’s also something that I would like to add, eventually.
The way that I’ve built things, the corkboard and Outline both use a common data store (called a model). That code is all in place. To add mind-mapping would simply require another, specialiazed view and wouldn’t necessarily involve all that much work.
It’s not something that I’d like to get sidetracked into right now (still trying to get things stable and released and merged into LyX), but if there’s someone who would like to help, it would be a great side project.
Care to comment?