tools for research

I tried to use only free and online tools for a semester - a combination of google docs, zotero and some other things. It hasn’t been a success for me, but that doesn’t in any way reflect the quality of the tools, just the way I wanted to use them.

Zotero: to get zotero to work on the multiple computers I use during the day I had it installed on a portable firefox installation on a USB key. Its slow to start up, slow enough that when I have the 10 minutes in my working day (I work full time, and study a paper a semester) it got in the way. Hopefully the upcoming zotero server will help with that, and I look forward to commenting on that in the future. The paper I’m studying doesn’t demand much in the way of research either (there is no essay writing) so zotero was a bit redundant anyway.

Google Docs: these are wonderful, but demand that I’m online - and I sometimes prefer not to be to reduce distraction. Especially when I’m writing! I don’t ask much from a word processor (I use text edit on the mac by choice: pretty much wordpad for the mac) but I just find the google doc interface… clunky. Not pretty enough. Sad but true. Its damn handy for sharing documents you’ve written though!

So for me the experiment hasn’t worked too well, though I’d be keen to repeat it at some point - perhaps when I start some proper research papers next semester, as well as with the release of the zotero server.

Soon: reviews of the ASUS eeePC, Skim and my favourite Text Edit!

After a few days thinking and talking to my collegues, I’ve decided on the software I’m going to use for the first experiment: google documents (with google gears for offline help) and zotero all running on Firefox.  The first task is going to see if I want to run this portably, using a nice USB key as my repository.  This is because its tricky to share zotero between browsers, but I think the zotero server may solve that at some point in the future.

The first problem is I don’t see a Harvard reference style for zotero, and that’s the style I’m expected to use in social sciences here at Otago.  I’ve used a hacked version of Harvard in endnote before, so I’ll have to find something similar.

Can you do a university course using open source and free online software? I’m going to try to do an entire semester’s work without touching proprietary applications. The goals are:

• Interoperability - everyone has to be able to read my work at the end
• Cross platform - I should be able to work at a PC _and_ a Mac, though as I’m not working on a linux box ATM I’m not going to test that.

the tools I’ll need are (to begin with);

• An editor
• biblographical software
• notes storage

Any suggestions?