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haptalaonThe other major life update is that I've started using a Bibliography Manager to keep track of my Fencraft references, and I'm feeling a lot better. Until now, it's been duplicated all over the place, on scraps of paper and various files, and that itself has been a source of panic; but what actual academics do is they download a program to do this for them.
Just to put into perspective why the lack of organisation was making me panicky, my Bib file currently contains 102 sources. And I haven't yet put in any television or music, both of which I lean on a lot.
It is such a relief to get it out of my head and into some kind of structure.
I use JabRef. You can set up and adjust what you have to enter for each document type (book, album, etc) - adding and removing new fields as you need them; and it has has room for a review. There's also nice features to tag read/to-read/skim-read; starring the best resources; giving a rating. You can also link directly to URLs or to files, which has been useful for imposing some order on my unwieldy document-saving structure.
The one thing it can't do afaict is associate a picture with each reference - say, a book cover - but then its not really supposed to do that. It's just a visual interface for working with a database, very functional - and I like that, it's clean and unfussy.
And then - although I've not done this yet - you can export it in all kinds of formats. I'm hoping to make this my next major update. Wrangling the Reading List is taking a lot of time, and I don't really have the hours to write a fully formatted review blog post on all of them - so my hope is that a sparse bibliographic reference and a couple of words of advice will allow anyone to start following up my rabbit holes at will, leaving me free to develop the more "functional" parts of faith and also maybe grab a few hours to actually engage in prayer, if I'm lucky.
(it's also very soothing. Between this, my ebook library and my mp3 collection, it's been satisfying a relaxing librarian's itch to catalogue - the perfect lockdown task, repetitive but fulfilling)
So yeah. Bibliography managers, everyone. Basically, the only way to get on top of a project of this scale.
Just to put into perspective why the lack of organisation was making me panicky, my Bib file currently contains 102 sources. And I haven't yet put in any television or music, both of which I lean on a lot.
It is such a relief to get it out of my head and into some kind of structure.
I use JabRef. You can set up and adjust what you have to enter for each document type (book, album, etc) - adding and removing new fields as you need them; and it has has room for a review. There's also nice features to tag read/to-read/skim-read; starring the best resources; giving a rating. You can also link directly to URLs or to files, which has been useful for imposing some order on my unwieldy document-saving structure.
The one thing it can't do afaict is associate a picture with each reference - say, a book cover - but then its not really supposed to do that. It's just a visual interface for working with a database, very functional - and I like that, it's clean and unfussy.
And then - although I've not done this yet - you can export it in all kinds of formats. I'm hoping to make this my next major update. Wrangling the Reading List is taking a lot of time, and I don't really have the hours to write a fully formatted review blog post on all of them - so my hope is that a sparse bibliographic reference and a couple of words of advice will allow anyone to start following up my rabbit holes at will, leaving me free to develop the more "functional" parts of faith and also maybe grab a few hours to actually engage in prayer, if I'm lucky.
(it's also very soothing. Between this, my ebook library and my mp3 collection, it's been satisfying a relaxing librarian's itch to catalogue - the perfect lockdown task, repetitive but fulfilling)
So yeah. Bibliography managers, everyone. Basically, the only way to get on top of a project of this scale.
