On the internet, no one knows you’re a 23-year-old historian!

I’m a big fan of present self as lazy enemy of future selves. This is not limited to the historian’s hoarding. In every Photoshop document I create, in every program I initiate, there is a series of decisions that will either make it legible & understandable to some future self… or completely twisted and incomprehensible. The latter is always *always* faster and easier. And frankly I usually choose it. So I spend a lot of time cursing the Sloan of six weeks ago.

More on point: For you digital-age academics out there: If you really are thinking about building hoards that grow over decades, what are you doing now to store & back this stuff up — especially the digital-only references, the PDFs and web pages? What are the creative schemes & solutions?

I know Rachel is a big fan of DevonThink, which I have too.

The two best PDF sorting, tagging, downloading programs I use are Yep! and Papers. The key with both is that you can tag, search, and sort. Papers supports some subscriptions, proxy logins (where you can access university-only resources), and inline database searches. There isn’t a perfect reading app though.

Actually, the biggest issue facing academic researchers is that for the most part, we don’t want to read texts, we want to use them — to hoard, to mark, to snip, to search, to deploy.

None of the reading apps convert terribly well to writing apps. Scrivener is okay. Word’s resource managers have gotten better. Zotero is popular and versatile, but would (I think) be better as a stand-alone, Webkit-enabled app than just a Firefox extension. (Whole ‘nother post — Firefox extensions that should be applications.)

This goes back to my long-standing complaints with the do-everything web browser. The web browser environment is versatile, yes, but in 9 cases out of 10 I would prefer a specialized, web-capable application that could communicate intelligently with my web browser, word processor, databases, and so on.

So, to prod a little more — are Yep! and Papers going to work in 10 years? 20?

I mean I guess wherever there’s a big enough market, there will be tools for migrating, upgrading, etc.

It’s just that a box of papers is a format that’s always compatible, always accessible.

Box of 5.25″ floppies, not so much. So is Yep! more like a box of papers or more like a box of floppies?

Yeah, as long as they’re around, they’ll work. They’re really not sophisticated apps at all, especially Yep! — it’s basically just a fancy, convenient version of the Finder.

A better analogy might be iTunes. It helps you sort, find, and add to your library, but it doesn’t mess with your underlying files. So yeah, if the apps died tomorrow, you’d lose some of your metadata, but your hoarded files beneath that wouldn’t go away. Most of the metadata is just autotagged anyways.

Compatibility is a real problem though — one of my big disappointments with Scrivener is when I learned that the free versions and pay versions were actually incompatible, so research binders created with one wouldn’t open properly with the other. Yet they have the same file extension. This is a crazy-ass headache and has led me to abandon working in the app for current projects — which is a shame, since it actually does integrate research and writing together reasonably well. It also turns PDFs into images, not text-aware docs. Dumb.