Oh, why hello there!

 

Long time, no post! And not just posting, I've been completely away from my Utopia project/history research for this long! 😮 I've miiised it! I think the second half of 2019 I just got caught up with my cogsci/executive dysfunction project, and then 2020.... well. Everyone gets a pass for that year. 

(Tho for real I got covid super early on, I think exactly a year ago in fact, and the longcovid was awful, and my brain just could not read a paper on any subject for basically the entire year.)

But I've started back up on my utopia stuff (and another history project I'm v excited about but not sharing quite yet!), and so I'm back here (& on twitter) again, too! 

And, since I'm on a different computer set up from last time and I have h̶y̶p̶e̶r̶f̶o̶c̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶d̶u̶c̶t̶i̶v̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶s̶i̶t̶e̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶o̶l̶i̶d̶ ̶w̶e̶e̶k̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶w̶o̶ ̶w̶o̶o̶p̶s̶  had to re-figure out all my organization and workflows and so on, so I've got a bunch of things to post about here once I'm more confident with it all. 

I especially want to talk a little bit more about researching and otherwise being an info nerd with ADHD and how I'm learning to accommodate my brain so I can get the best out of it! I'm in my early 30s now, and I was diagnosed in my early-mid 20s, and this is still very much a learning process. One which is not at all helped by the lack of academic resources specifically available for adults with ADHD who are in grad school or academia in general, or do similar stuff (like me). 

My Current Note Taking Routine

I haven't posted in a while because my history research has been put on hold for another project. I'm currently building a website for a future-non-profit I'm building, called Executive Dysfunction Research and Advocacy (Facebook, Facebook Group, Twitter). Basically for the last 5 and a half months I've been neck deep in research papers about Executive Functions, and taking infinite notes and doing a bunch of writing. And someone in a different Facebook group (Ologies Podcast) today asked folks for academic writing advice. I started to answer it over there, until I realized that I should probably just turn it into a proper post here. It took me a couple months to develop this system, but it seems to be working well for me now!

First off, I put the paper into Mendeley and I have been using Microsoft OneNote to take my notes. I have Mendeley downloaded on both my windows computer & my boyfriends Macbook which I occasionally borrow, and I have OneNote downloaded on my desktop, and use it via the browser when I'm on on the Macbook, so I can work from either device, which is nice!

I have different sections for the different executive functions (EFs), and then within each section, I have notes for each source, and I also do my writing drafting in there too.

To be honest, most of my notes at this stage is just me copy/pasting parts I think I may reference or quote later, and putting it into OneNote. I try to bold the parts that will help me quickly see where I should put that bit of text in my note outline later.

After MONTHS of dealing with some papers being horribly formatted so that when I copy/pasted text it included excessive and nonsensical line breaks. For a long time I was using Notepad++. When I pasted something and it looked like that, I would then cut it again, then paste it into Notepad++, then selected all, then ctrl + J to remove the line breaks, then I'd paste it back into OneNote. That's incredibly tedious though, and just last week I found something else instead!

Now, I've installed PDF Copy Paster, and instead of reading within Mendeley itself, I just right click a paper and select "Open File Externally." That opens the pdf with Adobe Reader. Then, when I copy/paste, all the line breaks are AUTOMAGICALLY removed! So, that's a nice time saver. But I still have an unbelievable amount of ex- essive hyph- enizations like this that dr- ive me ban- nanas, but since I don't feel like adding another step to put the text into Word or something and doing a search & replace (does that work if you just want to delete a hyphen and the space after it?), I just suffer with it for now. (And I do mean suffer. UGH the red squiggles make it even worse!)

Anyway, the next step involves another new find of mine, Dynalist. I have folders for each EF, and then a page for each eventual page on the website. I can use bold & check boxes

On each page I start with a general structural outline for the page. Then, after I read each paper (or sometimes after a few), I then put Dynalist on one half of my screen and OneNote on the other, and start copying the text into the outline. I put it in the correct section, and as I find patterns in the notes, or new ideas, I will add new sections to the appropriate pages as needed. I will group quotes into sub-sections based on theme/idea just to make it easier to reference when i get to writing, and to make the notes better managable (as you can collapse sections). So the sub-sub-sections don't necessarily mean they'll have their own bit/section in the writing, it just brings together the bits about the same thing from various sources so I can choose the best quote or better reference the idea when I mention it in the writing (if I do at all).

I don't know if this is the most efficient method or not, but currently, before I start copying my notes over, I type & copy to my clipboard " (1st Author's Surname) ". Then, after I copy the text into the note outline (ctrl + V), I hit (ctrl + shift + v) and then hit the number the author is on (for me it's usually 2). I use ClipX clipboard manager so that I can have multiple things in my clipboard at once. But this way, even if I move the notes around, I never lose the source.

Then, as I write, I keep my screen split between Dynalist & OneNote, and I work from my notes as I go, checking off the ideas/quotes I use. For me and how my brain works, this is working quite well for me so far! If my system changes in the future, I will update here.

Oh and one last thing! I also have been using Focus To-Do as my pomodoro timer. It helps me keep track of the passing of time and thus helps keep me from spending too much time on certain tasks, and reminds me to take small breaks throughout the day so that I don't burn myself out.

Women in Wikipedia, Woman's Commonwealth

Women & Wikipedia entries have been on my mind, for whatever reason, lately. Just last week I sent out these tweets:

I have a bunch of women I'd love to add, but I'd like some help figuring out how to make pages (with the people info boxes)! and just have company doing it...

Would anyone be interested?#twitterstorians

— Ameya Warde (@ameyawarde) December 4, 2018

And now I just came across this article in The Gaurdian: Female scholars are marginalised on Wikipedia because it's written by men.

I am thrilled to see that there's already an active tag for this on Twitter (#WCCWiki) though it is classics-specific and I'm no classicist. There is also this project on wiki called Women in Red which looks interesting, but I'm not used to Wiki projects formatting so I'm still scrolling through and trying to make sense of.

I am constantly searching for women who have no pages of their own (or are stubs), so this is a thing that I notice a lot and really bothers me. Most recently, it was learning about the "utopian" (broadly defined) community of the Woman's Commonwealth, a long-lasting (though single-generation), financially prosperous community of almost exclusively women. HOW does this not have it's own page?? Currently it's just a section within the Womyn's land page.

My mind is BOGGLED. The community lasted DECADES. Fruitlands (founded by Amos Bronson Alcott), by contrast, lasted less than one year, and look at the size of it's page:

I pictured working on Wiki pages after I wrote some publishable things, but I feel like the right thing to do is to actually start now.

And, since I'm overwhelmed with learning the coding parts of Wiki (I know it's not hard to figure out, but it does take time (I tried before) and I'd rather focus on the research/writing right now), I think I'm going to resurrect my research wiki and start working on pages for the Woman's Commonwealth and other women/women's groups there, until I get something worth publishing on the Wiki site, then I'll figure out how to do it.

Research update, week of Nov 12, 2o18

So, what am I working on these days?

Last week I finished extracting the people & communities (and a few other entires here and there) from the Utopia & Utopians: An Historical Dictionary (Trahair) and The A to Z of Utopianism (Morris & Kross) into my Heurist database. This took me about a month. It included:

• Making pages for the people 
• Making pages for the communities
• Making pages for the philosophies/religions, organizations, etc
• Making pages for the sources
• Creating & constantly tweaking the templates for each page, creating fields for the information I wanted to record, moving the info around the pages, making fields that connect to other pages and thus building relationships between them.
• Copy/pasting the blurbs form each of the (e)books into the correct pages
• Filling out the basic fields, including all the ones in relationships with other pages. 
• Often but not always copying the pertinent lines from the dictionary blurbs into the correct field sections (i.e. “Early life” or “marriage” or “community life,” etc)

I’m pleased with how many pages I have in there now (318 communities, 411 people, 118 philosophies/religions, etc) and I ran my first network connection graphing… thing… to see how all these were connected (as this was a major reason I chose this software for my research)— and was surprised at how many entires had no connections at all, so then I spent a day or few last week going back through and checking for/adding connections— plenty more work to do there, particularly in future research in general, but I assume some from the copy/pasted blurbs that I haven’t gone through properly yet, too. 

Monday I had a combined 5 hours of bus/train/lyft commenting to get to a doctor’s appointment, and I took the book Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia. I was trying not to mark it up too much, but I was unsuccessful. The marking is excessive— just so many things to add to the Fruitlands, Amos Bronson Alcott & Charles Lane pages, but also to the pages of so many people he’s has been in connection with so far, and I’m barely into chapter 2! 

The internet is currently still down at my house and I’m actually very much looking forward to getting it back largely so I can add some of this new information to the pages for these folks, most of who I already had, but not all! This is an actual paper book, so let’s hope I am able to moderate myself so I don’t spend a year just retyping nearly the whole thing! It’s hard to know what I’ll want to know later at this stage of my research, though, as I’m still very much in the information-collection phase, with only vague ideas of what I want to write about in the future, so I'm basically saving everything that could maybe even possibly be useful in the future.

Speaking of, maybe I should write some of that out to help me start figuring out where I’ll want to go with all this first. 

So. Topics I’m interested in writing about at the moment:

• Women in Utopia. Individuals in particular. For how women’s-rights-centric so many of these Utopian communities were, it’s interesting just how heavily male the well known of this group skews. Certainly Marie Stevens Howland, who I started researching in particular earlier this year, before deciding to expand my research at this stage so I could have more context for her life. Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well, though she’s not really a part of this crowd— she lived in a communal home in NYC as a teenager and LOATHED it, but Its actually her work in the cooperative housekeeping movement that lead me into researching these utopian communities too. To a small extent I almost consider my utopian research as background to my future work on the cooperative housekeeping movement (of the past, and how we  should bring it back in the present/future). 
• I’ve come across quite a few women in my research so far that there seems to be nothing (or next to it) done on them, and I would really love to flesh out some of their lives as well. 1. I want to get more of these interesting women on wikipedia, with good pages! 2. I’d like to write papers about them, get their name out to the wider Utopian Studies/American history communities 3. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could turn them into a book? Maybe if I can find some coherent strings between a few of them I could make a group biography (which I love to read) or few. 

• Alcander Longley. I keep finding him mentioned all around, and he started 5 communities (all which failed rather quickly) in Missouri, but I haven’t found much work done on him specifically somehow. 
• Before he started his communities he seems to have lived in/visited a few. Seems like a good story there! The reader could experience the different communities through his eyes and see how they influenced him and then watch as he kept trying, and failing, to make his own successful communities. 
• A.J. Macdonald. I haven’t looked into this yet, but I’d be interested to see how much work has been done on him. As someone who travelled to most of the still-known communities and met all the big names, he could be a great subject for a book project…
• Josiah Warren & Modern Times. There has certainly been work done on him, but no modern work aimed at a general audience. I have some friends who consider themselves anarchists so I think it’d be interesting to share the story of the “first American anarchist” with them. 
• Josiah the person is very interesting. A quiet, introverted inventor, musician and publisher who lived at New Harmony and knew Robert Owen, only to turn Anarchist instead and make the nation’s first anarchist paper and a string of the first anarchist communities, utilizing his concepts of Equitable Commerce and the Time Store (which might be of interest to those who are involved with Time Banking these days, as well). Plus he’s connected with the always colorful Stephen Pearl Andrews.
• The Women’s Commonwealth- I was shocked to find this only when combing through the utopian dictionaries. An community of women who largely all left their husbands and raised their children communally seems like a pretty notable thing, so how had I not come across it before? I just did a quick google scholar search and there are certainly some writings about it, but they’re all pretty dated. Perhaps I can bring them back into the modern Utopia discussions! They weren’t, as far as I know now, trying to make a template for the rest of society to follow as is my current definition of utopian societies, but the gender dynamics might be important enough to override that and make it worth bringing back into the discussion. 
• Urban Utopian communities. Most were rural, and most failed because no one knew what they were doing (among other reasons, especially fire), but there were at least a few Urban experiments that didn’t rely on agriculture (like Unity House). What are the stories there? What worked/didn’t work? This could be of particular relevance to folks in modern co-housing communities. 

Now that I have the basis of my research database done (though plenty of work is needed to tidy up the pages!) I feel like I have a few options as what to do next. 

1. Go through and tidy up the pages A-Z. Make sure the right quotes from the abstracts are in the right text boxes, make sure all the connections are there— make it generally “presentable” (though I have no intention of sharing it with anyone else anytime soon, but I do intend on using these pages to create (or flesh out) the wiki pages for those that don’t have them (or robust pages) yet. Tidying up the pages would help with that a lot
1. After that I could actually start editing their Wiki pages. It’d be good writing practice for me, but I don’t currently know how to do all the wiki-specific coding, so that would take some time to learn, I imagine, and I’m not sure the easiest way to do that at the moment. 
2. Add the info from the Fruitlands book, and tidy up those pages as I go. 
1. I could then go back through and add the notes I took while reading books on Marie Stevens Howland (I still haven’t finished that one), Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Josiah Warren as well. But I’ll have to hunt those things down, as that was about 8 months and 3(!) houses ago (it’s been a rather hard year). 
2. OR I could then just double down on reading this book & extracting all the info and work on these related pages specifically, so as to stay on a specific topic for a while. I could then focus my readings on the People/Places/Things/Ideas related to that for a while. 
3. OR… I could finish doing the thing which I had somehow forgotten I am already in the middle of doing right now (weekends confuse me, apparently), which is to continue going through John Humphrey Noyes’s book (which is mostly work of A.J. MacDonald) and extracting the info of all the communities there into the database. 

Whoops, I can’t believe I forgot I was already doing that! SMH. Ah well. It probably won’t take but a few days, and then I’ll be at this point, anyway. 

So, what should my next steps be? (I’m writing it out in order to figure it out) Perhaps this:

1. Finish extracting the info from the Noyes book (History of American Socialisms)
2. Extract the info I’ve read in the Fruitlands book already, but perhaps leave it for now as a “I’m going somewhere and I need a book to read” book.
3. Read this paper I just downloaded on my phone & extract the info: “The Woman’s Commonwealth: A Study in the Coalescence of Social Forms”
4. Contact the writer of the 2008 Masters Thesis @ MSU, “The Communist and the Altruist: Alcander Longley’s Newspapers and Communities” and ask if I could have a copy. 

And then I can go from there!