This is a list of the software I use to carry out and publish research in philosophy. I will add some notes and links in the course of time. I publish this list because so many people asked for it. Note, that the list is descriptive. I do not pretend that this is the best software to get the job done or that it is the software I like most. The software runs on an 17 inch iMac G5, 1,8 GHz, 512 Mb RAM with Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger).
Don't forget to look at the section with recommended utilities in my list of Apple Macintosh links.
Word is a difficult program and I would never recommend it to people who want a user friendly program to write an occasional text. If you use Word you should spend several days to learn it and to adapt it to your needs. If you do not do so, you will spend your time moaning and groaning about Word's capricious behavior. However, if you take the time to understand and tame Word and if you have the wisdom not to use it for things for which it is not fit (but pretends to be) you will be able to live happily with Word.
Unfortunately, books are not useful to understand Word. They tend to ignore bad features and bugs, especially if these are pervasive. Even worse, most books treat the most basic thing to learn about Word, styles, as if it were an advanced feature, useful only to a handful of professional users.
The good news is that much of the information you need to tame Word is available for free on the web.
Good places to start:
More recommended articles and guides:
Recommended collections:
Unfortunately, Word's default configuration is terrible. In order to tame Word, one should start by disabling all the irritating features Microsoft put there to impress first-time users. This may take 30 minutes but it it will save hours of work in the future, your peace of mind, and your face (my telephone company makes a fool of itself by not being able to prevent Word from changing the name of the little town "IJsselstein" into "Ijsselstein" on their invoices; many other companies show their incompetence by writing "Ysselstein"). Don't hesitate. Do it. NOW!
When you are a more experienced user you may want to customize your keyboard shortcuts, toolbars and menu's.
The most important thing to do in order to tame Word is to learn about styles and templates and to apply styles consciously and consistently. Word is organized around styles. Everything you do in Word has a style attached to it, even if you haven't applied one explicitly. As a result you will never be happy with Word if you refuse to learn to use styles.
If you know very little about styles you should really read Shauna Kelly's Basic concepts of Microsoft Word mentioned above. You may want to start with the section on styles, but read on after that. You will find out how and why many of the things you do by direct formatting (indenting paragraphs, bulleting lists, numbering lists and paragraphs, changing the appearance of large parts of text and so on) should be done by means of styles instead.
More on styles and templates:
Some, other articles you shouldn't miss:
I never stop wondering why so few of my colleagues use EndNote or another bibliographic manager. EndNote saves me days of searching for citations, of typing and formatting bibliographies and of reformatting them when I have to submit my paper to another journal. It also makes my references more consistent: no formatting errors, no missing or orphaned entries in the bibliography, no bibliographic corrections carried out in only a part of the paper.
The heart of EndNote are 'libraries' of bibliographic data ('references'). You can add references to a library by hand, but it is much faster to import them from library catalogues and bibliographic databases (such as the Web of Knowledge) on the Internet or your local network, using EndNote's connect and search functions. In addition, the online versions of most journals offer a button "save citation" that allows you to save selected citations on your computer and import them in EndNote, usually by double clicking on the saved file. Locating citations in an EndNote library is much faster and much easier than searching through card boxes or through piles of papers and books. If you have found a citation you can add a reference to it in your paper in progress (when you use MS Word or an RTF based editor this can be done by means of one keystroke combination). EndNote can subsequently be used to format the citations in your paper and generate a list of references in the style of your choice (styles of all leading journals are included). It can do this automatically while you write (if you like). Changed your mind? Need to submit your paper to another journal? With a few clicks EndNote will restyle all your citations and references.
TAO is what might be called an advanced dedicated outliner. I use it for keeping reading notes and for preparing lectures and papers.
Basically, outliners are pieces of software for organizing items (headlines, text paragraphs, notes, tasks, photo's, papers, slides, files, links and so on) into a hierarchy. You will find outliners (in this broad sense) everywhere on your computer. For example, the Finder's list view provides an outliner for organizing files and folders, KeyNote and PowerPoint offer outliners for organizing slides and MS Word has an outline view for organizing headings in a text. However, there are some programs that focus on outlining as their main business. Such programs are called 'dedicated outliners' or simply 'outliners'. Their main areas of applications are: creation of texts (such as an essay or a speech), brainstorming, notekeeping, and planning. The main dedicated outliners for OS X are: Opal (basic and intuitive), OmniOutliner (has both basic and advanced versions) and TAO (advanced). If you need to carry your outlines on a Palm, BrainForest (very basic) is your only option.
I use TAO mainly to organize ideas. When I prepare a paper or a lecture I often start just jotting down my ideas in random order and TAO allows me to arrange them into a coherent whole. This can be done during the proces of writing down my thoughts, or after I have written all I have to say. If I already have an idea of the organization of the text (e.g. introduction, notions of function, kinds of functional explanation, conclusion), I start by outlining this organization in a hierarchical manner and add ideas under the relevant subheadings.
Basic outlining (a bullet indicates that an item has no subitems, a triangle pointing to the right indicates that the item has subitems that are not displayed).
Of course, I could use a word processor to do this, but a dedicated outliner is much easier. It neatly displays the hierarchy and it allows me to rearrange my thoughts simply by dragging them around. When an item is moved, it takes all its subordinates with it, which makes it very easy to move large clusters of ideas. In addition, I can hide the subitems of an item so as to display only part of my thoughts but still keep sight of the context.
This functionality is provided by any outliner, but an advanced outliner like TAO provides many more useful features to reorganize and view items. The ones I use most:
Ted Goranson's On This Particular Outliner is an excellent series of articles about outlining on the Mac.
NoteTaker helps me to keep, organize and recover all sorts of notes: ideas, lists of useful urls, conference announcements, tips and tricks, a list of important dates in the lives of philosophers, information about computer programs, whom to contact for what, lists of relevant literature, and so on.
Like most notekeeping programs, NoteTaker provides an outliner of notes. Two important features distinguish NoteTaker (and the similar NoteBook) from those other notemanagers. First, NoteTaker and NoteBook organize the notes as if you work in a spiral notebook with section tabs, an index and a table of contents. Second, the notes themselves (that is the pages of the notebook) are outlines.
I have two basic notebooks one for philosophy notes and one for computer notes and I have some smaller notebooks for specific projects or subjects.
The notebook metaphor works best for information that fits into some structure. Random thoughts are more difficult to retrieve.
This page was made by Arno Wouters.