There are things that are fast and easy to do, there are things that aren't, and then there are things that will just gobble up all the available time and then some. Just like most of yesterday was gobbled up by finalising that reviewed (and thoroughly re-worked) paper.

The most interesting thing about it? The three proofreaders (thanks again! you did great work) sometimes totally agreed on which phrasing was totally crappy, and sometimes totally did not agree. I got to pick and choose, somehow.

So today I'll spend a half hour more on the last bit of the thing, finalising it for submission, and then I will get rid of it. Finally. Whew.

It makes me wonder, however. How much time is writing a paper supposed to take? I suspect there will be a huge range of timespans eaten by paper-writing, and probably time spent is not correlating directly to paper length. Or even paper importance.

When we started out with the idea of making the very first Textile Forum, we had just a limited number of goals - we wanted to make the Spinning Experiment possible, and we wanted to try if it's possible to get people from different backgrounds together to exchange knowledge, and practical knowledge.

After the absolute success of that first Forum in 2009, we decided to try making it a regular fixture. This was just four years ago, so it's not a real long-standing full-fledged tradition yet. Quite on the contrary, we are still finding how to make the Forum even better, to get better connection between the academic and the practical side, and how to establish it as a true long-term thing.

What I did not expect back then, or dared to dream of back then, is that we would have our own publication one day. But largely thanks to one person taking the stick and running with it (and gently hitting the contributors, including me, when appropriate, with said stick to keep them working) and doing all the editing work, we will have one. And now, since the proofs are in my inbox and our editor is waiting for the feedback, it suddenly feels much, much more real than before.

I will keep you updated once we have a firm publication date - and I am so looking forward to this!

There is that article that I am writing (or, rather, re-writing according to the suggestions made by the reviewers). It's about, who would have thought it, the never-ending spinning experiment. And it is driving me nuts.

Why? Well, for one thing, I am trying really hard to get some proper plots out of the thing. Which, according to my instructions and due to the help of a lovely person who knows R should be no problem... but my modules keep crashing, not reacting, or not giving me the results I need.

And then there's the citations. I have read in gazillions of publications that "thick yarn is made with heavy spindles"... and of course I did not take that as a note. And now I need to add a few more references to this, and it seems I cannot find them anymore. This is probably due to the fact that many of these books or articles were quite basic, or not typical scientific reference literature - but it makes it not easier to re-find them. So I will be shamelessly blegging:
Do you know a book (preferably something like a beginner's guide) or an (archaeological) article about hand-spindles and hand-spinning where heavy spindles are linked to thick(er) yarns? Please tell me in the comments. That would be really helpful.

As the long-term readers among you might know, I am using EndNote for my citation and bibliography needs. Theoretically, I also have all the .pdf files that I have of articles in one folder on my system, and all the titles of these articles in the EndNote database.

Theoretically. Which, unfortunately, is not at all what I really have - over time, a large stack of .pdfs has accumulated that are not yet in the database, because it all meant opening the file, copying the relevant bibliographical data into the database, then saving the file under a new (and unique) name also written to the database file. Yes, the programme can theoretically attach files to database entries - but I have never gotten the hang of that, and I also prefer to have things separately in case of desasters.

So here I was, with a stack of pdf files - unsorted, and with quite a few non-articles crept in between them - and my database. Enter Qiqqa, a database/citation tool geared entirely towards .pdf collections. (If it were a little less geared towards those, and a bit more open and more import-friendly from EndNote's end, I would have considered switching to it completely.) In my process of checking out Qiqqa, I already tried to use it for sorting, organising, and EndNote-ing my pdf files, but it turned out to be a tiny bit less trivial than I had thought.

So I have made a clean slate in Qiqqa and have now tackled (again) the task of sorting my files and inputting them into EndNote. It's still a multi-step process, but much less tedious than before. Preparation step was to make three new folders for sorting: One to hold the batch of pdfs for processing, one to hold the exported files, and one for the "rejects" - files that have obscure bibliographical data that will have to be entered by hand.

Step one: Move a batch of pdf files from the big heap into the processing folder.
Step two: Import that folder into Qiqqa (or set it as watch folder). The programme will now index (and, if necessary, OCR) those files.
Step three: Use the inbuild BibTex-Sniffer to match bibliographical data to the individual files, and delete all the non-articles from the library.
Step four: Make sure to move all the files for hand processing from the processing folder to the "rejects" folder (else they will be lost), then delete them from the library.
Step five: Export bibliographical data to a .bib file.
Step six: Export complete library to the export folder.
Step seven: Convert BibTex-file to an Endnote .xml file using this nifty little programme.
Step eight: Import bibliographical data into Endnote (excluding duplicates). (I only had one minor glitch with importing up to now which seems to have been an incompatible record type number.)
Step nine: Add "pdf file available" or similar thing into a suitable field of each of the new references (this can be done quickly with "change and move fields").
Step ten: Move all the exported files from the "doc" subfolder in the export folder into the regular folder for referenced pdf files.
Step eleven: Delete everything from the export folder and the processing folder.
Step twelve: Delete all the entries of the library.

Then start over... until everything is processed. It takes some time, but on the other hand, it allows me to be sure I get everything referenced and lets me clear out all the other pdfs that crept in without too much woes. And with the possibility to do this in smaller batches, it's also not so overwhelming to add hundreds of BibTex entries at once.

(And if this blogpost has made you want a bibliography programme/database, here is a list of those currently available, including EN and Qiqqa.)

Thank goodness it's Friday! I'm really looking forward to the weekend - and one of the things I have planned to do is starting the Xmas baking. There shall be cookies!

Otherwise, my main item on the to-do list today is to finish the submission of a paper (another one about the spinning experiment). It's the deadline today... and yes, that proves that I am a perfectly normal person, submitting right on deadline day.

And once that is done, I am planning to clear a bit of the rubble, er chaos, off my work desk (which includes some updating of my book database). And maybe play a little with the small digital microscope that I now have...

And next week, it will be back to normal winter-type work.

Endnote is, according to their makers, the bestest citation software ever. As is Zotero (according to their makers). And probably a bunch of others as well.

Back when I was still trying out stuff and relatively new to the world of people working in physics (who have an affinity to LaTeX-the-programme), I wrote one article in TeX. I had to re-do it in MS Word to get it published, but this little stint meant that I got to know the powers of BibTeX, which is the citation system thingie that comes with TeX. It is, more or less, a reference database that you cite from, and the programme does the formatting.

Sound familiar? That's just what EndNote does with Word. Back when I then found out that there was, indeed, such a programme, I bought it for the hefty sum they asked for the student edition back then and have been using it ever since. There's connection files to get data from online library catalogues (something I should have used more, I now think, it might have saved me lots of work), style files that can be altered to suit individual needs, and both a field for "notes" (which I use for making general, personal notes about a reference) and "research notes" (which I use for typing excerpts or snippets including the page number so they can actually be used for working without the physical copy of the book). Plus there are custom fields - those I have used to mark whether I own a book (physical or digital copy), where it stands in my library (well, that's a work in progress to be honest), if I have pictures in my picture database (by noting down the prefix of the image files, such as schweppe_ which is, in the actual files, followed by a page number so I have files like schweppe_10.png) and if I have already read it or just jotted it down for future reading.

According to the version history, my purchase of the programme must have been in 2004. Which means that my version is a little... older. Now, I have no problem with older software (I'm happily using Word2000, and not planning to change from that), but sometimes, it pays to look for alternatives. Especially since my EndNote is sort of iffy on the connection files, with quite a few of them not working (or not working anymore), and I cannot download the whole set of new ones from the site (there is no such button in my installation menu).

Due to the recent mention of Mendeley by Phiala in the comments of some other post, I did a little looking and found Qiqqa - a .pdf organising software with built-in OCR, a wizard to help with filling out the reference data for each imported .pdf, and the possibility to cite to Word. I quite like it on the first try and am currently using it to get some order into my .pdfs. I have even considered changing to this programme from EndNote for all my referencing, but it does not do a few things that I have grown accustomed to, and I have also read that it's not too easy to modify citation styles (something I regularly need to do).

Qiqqa is intended for use over the web, with web storage of .pdfs, something which I don't need (and don't want). It allows "vanilla references", that is those without a .pdf attached, but then I get a nasty popup if I want to associate a file with it now. It also does import from EndNote - but not the "Research Notes". There is the possibility to search for duplicates, but I found it rather hard to compare the actual duplicates with each other and decide which one should stay and which one should go. I have not tried the citation thingie yet, but from the overall feel, it's very much geared towards .pdf files only, and I don't want to use two programmes. So at the moment, my plan is to use Qiqqa to get some order into my .pdf files, then export the data via BibTeX and a converter to EndNote, and merge the two databases. (That's the plan only, though - and it might change if problems with the import should arise. Or if Qiqqa should evolve some more, and then I might reconsider using it as my new reference database thingie.)

I'd be happy to hear about your experiences with Qiqqa, EndNote, Zotero or whatever you use!

I have been asked to consider turning my blog into a book, and I'm now pondering the idea. It's true that I have written a lot of stuff over these past years, but I'm not convinced enough of them would be non-internet-specific enough for a print version.

It is certainly less work than writing a book from scratch - but it's also sort of non-ordered, non-sequitur, and containing a lot of filler posts or link lists.

And I'm just not sure whether anyone would really want to buy a version of this blog in form of a book. So I would be grateful for any feedback - what do you think about blogs turned books? Are there any articles I wrote on that blog that you'd like to have in a print version? Or should everything rather stay as it was?