i have been collecting research bits for my exegesis in a word doc. form or photocopied documents attacked with a highlighter.

my supervisor condemns me as ‘being linear’ and says i should embrace putting my research in a spreadsheet. i am unconvinced that this will make any difference in my life.

i don’t know where to get a spreadsheet from or what to do with it. i don’t want to spend money on it and i suppose it would be helpful that it was a format my supervisor could open and read. i fear i will be just wasting time better spent dropping ink into a puddle or pushing a paint brush or printing a print or reading another book.

anyone assist in convincing me one way or the other or can offer any suggestions?

sarahs mum said:

i have been collecting research bits for my exegesis in a word doc. form or photocopied documents attacked with a highlighter.

my supervisor condemns me as ‘being linear’ and says i should embrace putting my research in a spreadsheet. i am unconvinced that this will make any difference in my life.

i don’t know where to get a spreadsheet from or what to do with it. i don’t want to spend money on it and i suppose it would be helpful that it was a format my supervisor could open and read. i fear i will be just wasting time better spent dropping ink into a puddle or pushing a paint brush or printing a print or reading another book.

anyone assist in convincing me one way or the other or can offer any suggestions?

I can offer a free spreadsheet

I can offer a free spreadsheet
—-
thank you. that knocks out one concern.

how do you envisage putting what kind of data into a database / spreadsheet (think column and row headings or populating fields)?

in the same manner i am collecting it now..except across the page and not down the page. which is why i am worrying about it being a time waster.

Always give the customer what they want, by all means offer alternatives, but give them what they want.

bob(from black rock) said:

Always give the customer what they want, by all means offer alternatives, but give them what they want.

yeah. sigh.

This is art lit stuff – so who knows how you are arranging information, but do they want you to take notes/information/bits from your highlighted text and assign these to a set of categories? A spreadsheet can summarise and order information in a two-way tabulated way. And it is searchable.

For example

summarising a series of papers on symbolism of clouds in visual art from 1000 BCE to 2000 BCE.

Break down into categories of cloud symbolism (religious, emotional, meteorological, war, historical events, psychadelia, postmodernism, Freud and psychology), the date/era of works, the religious persuasion of the artist, other any literature on clouds in the day which may have influences society of the artist (were they topical in the day)…,

cross tabulate the categories this with Artist, Country, Medium…

whatever..

I got that time frame wrong – I’m multitasking and looking at long lists of collection information on another monitor…

1000 AD to 2000 AD

neomyrtus_ said:

This is art lit stuff – so who knows how you are arranging information, but do they want you to take notes/information/bits from your highlighted text and assign these to a set of categories? A spreadsheet can summarise and order information in a two-way tabulated way. And it is searchable.

For example

summarising a series of papers on symbolism of clouds in visual art from 1000 BCE to 2000 BCE.

Break down into categories of cloud symbolism (religious, emotional, meteorological, war, historical events, psychadelia, postmodernism, Freud and psychology), the date/era of works, the religious persuasion of the artist, other any literature on clouds in the day which may have influences society of the artist (were they topical in the day)…,

yep. thats the go. at the moment i have say..MYTH. and then i have a bit about what i think and have some quotes from various theorists. as i go to write up myth i will copy and paste under where i am writing. with a spreadsheet i suppose i would do the same thing.with a spreadsheet i would be going from browser to browser where with the word doc i am going top to bottom. on a spreadsheet i could highlight bits to stand out. yet in a word doc i can highlight stuff to stand out. with a spreadsheet it, the spreadsheet won’t get butchered like my word docs do. but i save new copies of my word docs all the time and i never seem to lose anything.

neomyrtus_ said:

I got that time frame wrong – I’m multitasking and looking at long lists of collection information on another monitor…

1000 AD to 2000 AD

Don’t know why, but every time I hear the word “multitasking” I always think this means fucking up two, or more jobs simultaneously.:-)

> i would be going from browser to browser where with the word doc i am going top to bottom
If I understand what you are saying, you might find it convenient to use two screens.