I just found a free, open source Windows word frequency counting tool. If you are afraid you are using the same words over and over you can see for yourself, or you can figure out who your favourite theorists are based on the number of times you mention their names. The uses are endless. You do have to export your writing to a text file, though (or paste the text in) and it can be a little slow to generate the list. Enjoy!

Update: by an odd coincidence I just ran across a similar tool but Wordle is web-based and produces “word clouds” which are less precise but certainly prettier. Here’s a Wordle map of my draft theory chapter:

If you are writing with a word count in mind you should know about something which I just discovered - the word count in Word seems to consistently count more words in your document when it has field codes in than when you strip them out. I just tested this on a document which (according to Word) contained 7179 words before field codes were stripped, 6,473 without (the document had 690 words of bibliography in it). I assume that the latter figure is the correct one. (Note: I am using Endnote 10 on a Mac with Office 2004 - different versions of either application might give different results). It’s worth checking with your own documents before sending them to an editor!

David Brake

I just read about a new program called Kip which lets Mac users easily add tags to their PDFs and enter them in an easily-scannable database. It’s still at a fairly early stage (it’s free to use now and will be commercial later) but it struck me this is the kind of thing any Mac-using academic might find really really handy…

A fellow blog researcher has provided a handy list of her own favourite Internet and software productivity tools and has invited me (and some colleagues) to respond (one has already given her own list).To be honest though I think of myself as a near-compulsive collector of this kind of stuff, almost everything I use is already on one or the other of the two lists already. To their collection I would add:

• Netvouz, a more feature-packed way to share and store bookmarks than any of the others I have looked at including del.icio.us - my collection now numbers 6540 - the public version is here and my collection of bookmarks tagged “academic” may be worth browsing.
• Scopus from Elsevier is a better journal searching tool than Web of Knowledge with a much easier to use interface (though you need a subscription to be able to use either)
• A9 from Amazon is a handy way to access the ‘read inside the book’ features offered by Amazon with fewer clicks.
• I find Bloglines’ search seems to find links to blogs on a given subject area that other blog search engines miss but in truth I haven’t experimented extensively with the wide range of blog search tools available.
• I did the survey that formed part of my thesis work using QuestionPro which has lots of handy features and offers academics one free unlimited use survey (though eventually your access to the results will expire so don’t forget to download them to SPSS!).
• Go Digital and other “techtalk” podcasts (see the podcast section of the extensive resources along the right side of my personal blog). Primarily because they enable me to keep up with the tech news including blog-related stuff while I am doing the dishes or cycling around town rather than reading until my eyeballs bleed (though actually I do both!).
• On that resources list you will also find a number of free PC software tools like anti-virus software and a link to a blog posting I made, gathering all the useful cheap and free Mac software I use (academic and otherwise).
• Update: If you want to manage your thesis like you would a business project, you could use a web based project management tool like Basecamp or open source software like GanttProject 2
• Not strictly a research tool but something absolutely necessary to the future of my research nonetheless - Synk - a piece of Mac software which helps me back my entire hard drive to a separate drive which I keep at the LSE so if our flat burns to the ground with my laptop in it I will still have a thesis to complete!

I hope this collection of goodies helps someone out there…

A big “thank you” is due to Hanna (who are you? Why not add yourself to our little map and tell us about your research?) who brought Transcriva to my attention - a lovely little Mac application for transcription. It costs $19.99 but you can try it out with few limitations and it works better in some ways than the software I had been using - Transana - in a number of respects (though Transana does much more than transcription alone). She also reminded me of the existence of Express Scribe which was a commercial product and is now free. It is available in both Windows and Mac versions and claims that it, “works with speech recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to automatically convert speech to text” which is, of course, the holy grail for transcribers. I wouldn’t expect an interview to work though since you would have two different speakers and background noise to contend with. Windows users may also want to check out Dictation Buddy but it costs $33 and as far as I can tell doesn’t offer any important advantages over Express Scribe.

Or of course if you have the money you can always farm your transcription out to Katwa or another commercial transcribing company (for $50 per hour of transcribed audio). Since it takes around 4 hours (for me at least) to transcribe an hour of audio it may well be worth considering!

Update: I spoke too soon - you should still keep an eye on Transcriva (and Transana is still in Alpha for the Mac so if you are a Mac user you have to ask the programmers for a copy) but I am going back to Transana for the moment as Transcriva has some niggling irritations (eg it doesn’t handle recordings longer than 1hr well for example and doesn’t let you do any text formatting as you type to indicate emphasis).

Ten years ago in my earlier life as a tech journalist I remember visiting Microsoft Research and being told that they were investigating all kinds of alternative ways of visualising and navigating through your computer data, harnessing the increasing power of desktop computers. Why is it then that even when the next major Microsoft OS revision emerges we will still face the "venerable shell metaphor of a desktop with overlapping windows"? And why, more to the point - the original impetus to my post - does SPSS 11.0 for Mac OS X still limit variable names to eight characters??!! I mean when Apple launched the Mac more than 20 years ago it already supported file names longer than 8 characters. Even PCs allowed you a three character extension to eight chars!

Update: … and I just discovered you can’t start the variable with a number (like the question number, say).

I know the answer why of course - backwards compatibility - I didn’t spend a year doing the LSE’s MSc in New Media, Information and Society for nothing… Nonetheless… Aargh!

First some things you shouldn’t do:

• Use Audacity for this - it seems to crash when asked to save long files as MP3s - at least on my machine.
• Rely on just one device to record anything important. Fortunately, I was also recording my interview on a minidisc which worked so I didn’t lose my data when Audacity crashed.
• Pay for shareware software - it just seems wrong to me that I should have to pay for an application just in order to save audio from my built-in microphone to my hard disk!

Luckily I found advice on Transom - a handy website designed to help would-be amateur and semi-pro radio programme producers to get started. The somewhat convoluted answer to my problem appeared to be to use Apple’s "Garageband" which comes with new Macs - as recommended by MacWorld. Even this stopped recording for some reason after an hour and 11 minutes of my latest interview but at least let me save the results.

Any idea why that might have happened or what I should use instead?