Methodology of Occult and Beyond

Every researcher knows that keeping track of your documents, papers, essays, photographs, notes, etc is not a trivial task. I can not imagine how it was done before the availability of computers. After collecting a considerable amount of material, however, one comes to realize that organizing all of those is equally troublesome. Soon, you start looking for a software that can manage it for you because having them in electronic form is hardly practical if you can not make the connection among them.

I was luckier, though. I have never attempted to look for a program to organize my pile. I was already running two weblogs, so running a third one, this time to organize myself seemed like a good idea.

If you think about it, writing a blog about your research has many advantages over traditional methods: You can make it public or private, you can share it with your colleagues in order to facilitate collaboration just to name a few. But where a blog shines most is the interactivity, its commenting system. Readers can point you to what you are missing, correct your mistakes, and even thank you for your efforts. Has there ever been a better motivator than appreciation?

After writing three posts, I suddenly realized that I have been creating another monstrosity where it would still be difficult to find what you needed and to build and establish missing links. So, I decided to give a second thought about the design of the blog.

First, I had decided to use the "labels" function of Blogger exclusively but came to the conclusion that it would not be enough. It only listed my posts whereas there could be other material available on the net. If I added a "tags" function, I could make use of those, too. To my knowledge two social bookmarking sites had the capacity to crawl most of the net and they were Del.icio.us and Technorati. If I could dump all those related posts into my blog, it would be wonderful. Alas, it proved too difficult for my skill set among other things. So instead of reproducing them here, I took the easier approach and decided to go (take you) there.

So, which one was I to choose? Personally, I like the interface of Del.ici.ous more, it is not cluttered, clean and easy to navigate. But it has a flaw (with respect to what I intend): it does not have a summary or excerpt area that posts are automatically fetched or I missed it. Whereas Technorati has this feature and it is as commonly used by bloggers as the former.

In the days to come, I will slowly but surely upload everything I have, notes, articles, pages or excerpts from the books, photos, tables, diagrams, etc, and carefully tag them. The downside of this approach is some of the material will inevitably be duplicates where you can find elsewhere on the net. That is bad. Yet, if you are interested in the subject, or suddenly take interest, the tags will be there for you. Clicking on one of them will take you to all the blog posts tagged with your choice of keyword. This, I hope, will slightly correct the annoying problem of duplication and give all a better user experience. Some, although available in hard copy, will not be on line and in that case, you will be reading the first electronic copy of something.

Of course, my idea is not to dump everybody else's work here and do nothing else. I will post my own articles in between

One final clarification: the label "uncategorized" is reserved for posts similar to this one whereas the ones under the label "unsorted" will be later - you guessed it - sorted.

Technorati Tags: methodology, occult, Occult and Beyond