Thread by @EmilyAPrifogle

Inspired by folks at #phdskills, I've been thinking about my own research & writing flow as I finish the dissertation. I enjoy reading about others' workflow hacks & thought I’d share my own system +tools. I hope you'll add your own workflow experiences to the thread! #phdchat 1/

I’ll start in the archive for this thread. I use two apps, @TurboScanApp on my iPhone and @devontech (DEVONThink) on my mac to recreate the physical archive on digitally on my computer. 2/

I use @TurboScanApp on my iPhone to copy in individual folders as single PDFs. Eg I open the app, start a new scan, take a photo of the box id, a photo of the folder id, then scan each page into a single PDF. 3/

Once, TurboScan didn’t work with a new iOS update so I tried out several other apps in the archives. Check out this thread for my thoughts on other options:

https://twitter.com/EmilyAPrifogle/status/985890564733374464

4/

TurboScan allows me to easily do 1000+ individual page scans a day. That’s my strategy to maximize research funding—prep in advance for which materials I want, then scan everything I can touch, saving MOST analysis for home. Some archives are better set up for this than others.5/

Each evening after a day in the archive, I download my PDFs onto my computer where I recreate the archive using DEVONthink. 6/

First, I name each file: Archive, Manuscript Collection, Box, Folder. I create a folder system that echoes the archive too: folder for archive materials, subfolders for each archive, sub-subfolders for each manuscript collection, sometimes even subfolders for box levels. 7/

Then I back them up to the cloud. Now I’m sure I haven’t lost my day’s work in the archive. 8/

I work on 20c materials. That means most of my documents are typed and I benefit from OCR. For that (and a whole lot more) I rely on a paid version of DEVONthink (devontechnologies.com/products/devon…) 9/

I import the same folder structure into my DEVONthink dissertation database where I run the OCR scan on each imported pdf. That takes a while, but at the end of the day in the archive, I’ve recreated my findings in digital and searchable form. 10/

Using this system to recreate the archive digitally from my first PhD research trip has been key. You don’t need to use the same apps or workflow, but figuring out what works for you from the start of dissertation research is really useful. ... 11/

… For example, I know lots of historians are starting to use Tropy. I’m not convinced it’s better than DevonThink, but it doesn’t matter for me either—I’m with DEVONthink until the book is done because that’s what I used at the start. 12/

Soon, I’ll create a (shorter) thread about using DEVONthink for analysis of primary sources, and I hope to get in some reflections about writing workflow and map making soon, too. fin.