Here’s a useful tip for anyone with Adobe Acrobat.

The quickest way to avoid the annoying hard return formatting you usually get when copying and pasting text from a PDF into Word, Open Office or whatever is to first add tags to the document:

Advanced > Accessibility > Add Tags to Document

There are other ways round it, but to think I used to correct the formatting line by line…

A recent flurry of tweets, seemingly initiated by @thesiswhisperer, discussed the use of tense in literature review. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive rule to using either present or past tense (i.e. Smith (1989) argues… vs. Smith (1989) argued… etc.), though switching from one to the other can be problematic and should only be done within grammatical conventions.

I tend to get into all sorts of tangles with tense, so I try to be consistent and use the present tense*. It feels more immediate and dynamic, centralising the key arguments within contemporary debate rather than the historical perspectives of individual academics. From a doctoral perspective, this approach seems favourable to the role of the literature review in enabling the emerging researcher to locate herself within the key debates she has chosen to explore, and to developing an active rather than passive voice.

* The only occasion I tend to use the past tense is when a specific historical or developmental context becomes the key focus, such as describing a change of opinion or evolution of an idea or concept. For example:

…seems to be a significant re-evaluation of the perspective she adopted in her previous study (Smith, 1989), when she argued…

George Cukor | Born Yesterday (1950)

In his entertaining article from 2007 (revived via a tweet from my colleague @leroyh), Jonathan Wolff describes the tension a novelist creates between story and plot to keep the reader engaged in the unfolding narrative. He suggests however, that the inherent protocols of academic writing – and requirement to signpost theoretical, methodological and analytical processes – dictate such tensions are removed entirely.

Extending Wolff’s detective novel metaphor to the TV screen; it could be said that academics take the Columbo approach to revealing the ‘killer facts.’ The 70′s cop show from NBC (revived in 1989 by ABC) was unusual in discarding the ‘whodunnit’ format in favour of revealing the murderer at the very start, only for him or her to be hounded relentlessly by Lieutenant Columbo (Peter Falk), whose dishevelled looks and wandering style of enquiry belied a incisive analytical mind, a meticulous approach, and a ruthless pursuit of the truth.

This post presents a preliminary draft for a paper I am co-authoring with LeRoy Hill and Tracy Sisson. As some of you will know from previous posts, early this year LeRoy and I designed and presented a series of social media sessions for PhD students and Early Career Researchers at the Jubilee Graduate Centre with the cooperation and support of Tracy, the centre manager. In June, we presented this as a case study of a student-led training initiative, at the Future Learningscapes e-learning conference at the University of Greenwich, and we are accepting their offer to write up the presentation for their post-conference publication next year.

They are keen we incorporate reflections on our experiences from presenting at the conference and feedback from attendees. We also decided it would be appropriate to partly conduct the co-authorship process in the participatory arena of the social web. Therefore both LeRoy and I are presenting our personal perspectives through our own sites. You can read my draft on my wiki and download it here.

I would be happy to receive feedback on this from conference attendees or students who came to the original sessions, though comments and suggestions from anyone else would be greatly appreciated.

digress.it is a WordPress plug-in for the social annotation of text, It’s an upgrade of CommentPress, originally developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, enabling fine-grained annotation (i.e. by each paragraph of text). Projects can also be hosted at the digress.it site, such as this full text of Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society.

Having negotiated some of the most complex graphics, multimedia and programming software known to mankind, nothing quite gives me a headache like Microsoft Word. Since I only recently learnt to use styles, I have become obsessively protective of my revised template and annoyed with anything that corrupts it. Sick of copying and pasting unwanted formatted text between documents and from the Web, a quick Google search reveals I am not alone. Numerous blogposts and forums show consensus in thinking that Word should, by default, paste text unformatted (instead of having to go through several unnecessary clicks to get to ‘paste special’ > ‘as unformatted text’). There’s no easy option to change this; instead you have to delve into the exciting world of Visual Basic. Here’s a step-by-step guide from Paul Spoerry. Really, life’s too short.