Read, Writing, and Research

For weeks my Extreme Writing Makeover lessons have been about research.  This week the assignment wants research on something I know nothing about. 

An earlier assignment had me create an electronic booklist. The purpose, read widely, and keep track.   I explored a simple PC application called Evernotes.  I didn't like it, so I went back to something I knew, I created an Excel spreadheet.  Another assignment encouraged us to take electronic notes while browsing the Internet, or simply to collect inspirations as we write. Last week, as I looked through my Windows Explorer Documents folder, I found OneNotes.  A month ago I tried an Internet browser called Opera.  It's Norwegian, so I liked it right away.  In the narrow left side panel of the browser I found a Notes icon, similar to one of the features in OneNotes.  Facebook has Notes.

Zero in on OneNotes.  The first time in you find a Personal Notebook, a Work Notebook, and another devoted to Getting Started with OneNotes.  Each Notebook has tabs across the top.  Your Personal Notebook has tabs for private information nobody else should see, and others for recipes, books, movies, travel, and so on. Guess what? The notebook and each of the tabs is a Microsoft Template.  Click a link to Microsoft online for more templates.  I was overwhelmed by all the people who create templates. I did what I always do, I took the template and adapted it to things I want to track.

Research something I don't know about?  I'm familiar with most of the features in OneNotes.  Many are common to each Microsoft Office product. I simply haven't used them.

I did come to the same dead end both with Opera and OneNotes.  If you want to synchronize notes files between two or more PC's you must send a link by email.  Try it.  You need to be your own IT administrator to finish.  Both want to know the Pop address and the SMTD address from your Internet Service provider for sending and receiving email.  Now try to find those addresses for gmail or Yahoo mail.  Things have changed since the last time I had to know how to do this.  My first try to set up gmail to work with OneNotes froze the PC, and I had to reboot.  Having spent a whole evening with my family IT expert (I'm supposed to be that at home) trying to restore the settings in the Dlink Router that serves the Internet to all PC's in our house, setting Pop and SMTD addresses gets into a level of IT expertise I don't enjoy.

Simply put, Microsoft and Opera both work with the Cloud. You should not have to send a link via email.  You should not have to know about advanced settings. You should store the files out there on the cloud.

Let's try the cloud here. I could have done the same with a link from OneNotes had I prepared the review there.  Following is a book review I posted on Goodreads this afternoon.  In a sidebar to my review, HTML code was provided. I insert it here.

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 by Mark Twain

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read only the free ebook sample from the Amazon Kindle Store.
I may purchase the printed hardcover edition.
More importantly, I registered online to http://marktwainproject.org. 
As you will find on the home screen, they have the latest electronic edition of the entire first volume of the autobiography, complete with annotations, commentaries, and appendices.  It's free.

The sample I read prepared me for the online features.  Besides the text of the autobiography, you get highlighted links to every supporting document. Every Mark Twain electronic book prepared by the Project is available.

Read the Introduction.   You will learn that Twain worked on autobiographical materials for nearly forty years.  What appear to be many starts and stops, became a valuable resource, thousands of pages. Every work of fiction is autobiographical, as are the travelogues, such as Innocents Abroad.  Each autobiographical topic has an original annotated version that was published in magazines or newspapers.  Each book he published allowed for extension of the copyright by adding fresh material to newly released editions from expanded versions of the original autobiographies.

If you hold a bias against historical fiction as a reliable interpretive resource, put your bias aside.  The background supporting material is here.  For example, I have an Edison Amberola (cylinder record player), a 1908 model.  Mark Twain wanted to use a much earlier version of an Edison recording device, but Edison told him to wait his turn to get one.  Eventually, Twain used one for dictation, but gave up after a few days, having already recorded over four dozen cylinder.  Each cylinder holds only about 3-5 minutes.

My real interest is in writing my own memoirs.  Like Twain, I have all kinds of autobiographical material published already in five blogs.  I have more than twenty years of handwritten journals. Should I emulate Twain or Benjamin Franklin for storytelling? Either might be a smart move and good practice. Twain hated Franklin's style.  I wouldn't try to emulate Twain's Eastern Tennessee dialogue.



View all my reviews

More Things- Nbr 35 Books

This will be my third and final post on Thing Nbr 35. Certainly it will not be my last visit to items found in the Learn reading list.

Library Thing looks promising for creating a book catalog. The rest of the content, as well as other social catalog services of the kind, are variations on apps I started using on Facebook. weRead was my first. Overbooked Ning is my favorite, and may be the best way to organize a small online book club.

This weekend I registered on Bookarmy. I used the search function to load 39 titles from my own shelves. I published reviews of three of my books. I began socializing by oversubscribing to several like-minded forums, and providing feedback to the developers of the site.

I skipped books on your phone. Can't imagine it.

Reading Trails is like the way I choose books to read. The Browse Tags is useful.

The Book Calendar daily feed looks interesting. It would go along with a link to the New York Times best sellers. I read USA Today best sellers lists every week.

Living Social, as I use it on Facebook, has an unfortunate tie to IQ Quizes, which can easily cost you $19.95 a month for an unintended cell phone subscription. Only the fine print tells you the cost and how to avoid it.

Podcasts are the way to go for audio books, although tapes and cd's are still popular. I don't do that.

Book Swap would be useful if you can localize it to your own community.

I think one of the most supportive things a small town library or a branch library can do is host a book club. There are two in Silver Bay. One keeps the library open after hours one Monday night a month. The other meets off site. Six to ten members is sustainable. Some members walk to a meeting, others drive an hour to get there. The same people who show up for book club often volunteer for everything in the community. The active community is wide and influential, and becomes a justification for library support by the city and county. We need the Arrowhead Library System to get ten copies of the same popular title at once.

I have a peeve about the search schemes provided by online book clubs. The book cover graphics and publishers are not the same as the ones on my shelf. If you were a commercial seller hoping for a hit on the edition you are selling, I skew the statistics by selecting the first cover that appears. Seriously, some of my favorite editions are long out of print. Dog-eared or not, they are classics. The volume of Tennyson poems I borrowed from the Duluth Central Library probably should have been secured in a rare books room. The illustrations were that good.

Netflix is great not only for ordering and rating movies, but sharing with family and friends, and for adding content to My Yahoo or iGoogle.

CatVids is a costly software package that catalogs any kind of media, including archived hardware. It's rich in features you would recognize in web 2.0; links to capture an online album cover or a film trailer; stores whatever data element you want in a standard database field or a freeform field of your own creation. Search with boolean logic, or sort and browse pages of records. Anyone can use it without fear of breaking something. It's great for a nonprofit wide area network, but how would you port thousands of records to something better on the web?

Over ten years ago, my wife and I were part of a team that used CatVids to catalog the entire Baha'i Media Services collection at the House of Worship in Wilmette, IL. Several thousand items were relabeled with a numbering scheme that pinpointed their location, whether they were in use on someone's desk or in the rafters of the archives. The staff was there to help; an archivist, an IT professional to set up file sharing, producers, editors, supervisors, and volunteer library professionals from around the country. I customized the application to meet staff requirements. None of that crowd can be described in plural today, because of severe budget cuts. The system outlived the missing, and is maintained by two or three people. We'll return as volunteers to clean it up.