Research Journal

On the MSc course at Glasgow we have all been asked to buy a hardback ledger in which we are to keep a diary of what we are doing in our research. That’s fine, but I’m a computing scientist, writing things down goes against the grain – I want a computing related solution to this problem.

After a while contemplating I concluded that alternatives to having a hardback book would be:

1. blogging software (i.e. WordPress)
2. wiki software (i.e. MediaWiki)

Blogs

Blogs lend themselves to chronological recording of data, after-all they are in necessity online diaries. Blogs can be a simple way to record ideas, dates of events and so on.

Wikis

Wikis, although not strictly ordering entries by time and date, allow for very easy addition and formatting of new content. Most wikis will allow you to create categorised or special pages. For example in MediaWiki pages can be prefixed when naming them, this can be used to categorise the pages.

Combinations

Both blogging software and wikis can be used in combination of course, blogs giving the chronological progression between different research papers and wikis showing the resulting thoughts, summaries and so on that you generate.

Why do it?

Keeping a digital version of this information means we don’t have any issue with loosing the research journal or spilling coffee over it (note: don’t spill coffee over your computer either).

Project co-ordinators can see how you are progressing, comment on what they think of your research via comment mechanisms in a blog and talk/discuss pages on a wiki.

Collaborations

Online versions of research journals can help in collaborative projects – the research journal becomes a platform for collective reasoning, interaction, and the sharing of ideas.

If you don’t want to do it electronically

The real lesson to take away from this post is that a research journal is a good thing to have, be it a bound book, wiki, blog or whatever combination.

My Wiki usage

I am currently doing research on my project for the year, which is what sparked this article, SonG. For the project I use a wiki to manage my research, post ideas, and transcribe meeting minutes to mention a few things. I thought it may be useful to share the page title formats I use for doing so.

Meetings:

• Index: Meetings
• Meeting: Meeting:[YYYY][MM][DD]
• YYYY = year, MM = month and DD = day

Papers:

• Index: Papers
• Paper: Paper:[KEY]
• KEY = the bibliography key for the paper

Project specific:

• Title: [Project]:[Title]
• I.e. SonG:Links

I hope this is useful to anyone doing a project involving any type of research, although this type of journal is not restricted to only research based projects.

- Chris

I’ve only been playing with it for a short while, but my initial impressions are that it’s pretty damn sweet.

It allows you to post things straight from flickr, downloading your photo stream and showing it to you, so there’s no need to go to the flickr site and grab the photo url or the code you want to paste into your post, you simply have to drag in the photo!

Anyway, I’m impressed and you should get yourself a copy to try it out.
- Chris

I thought it was high time to start looking for some funky plugins for my new WordPress install. After a few minutes of looking through the WP site I had found a list of likley candidates for install:

• Smart Archives
• Weighted Categories
• FancyTooltips
• Flickr Gallery 0.4

Smart Archives

This plugin allows you to generate a full archive page which is not available in WP by default. It lists all the archives by year and month, then lists all the posts in each month. The output of the plugin can be seen here.

Weighted Categories

This is a plugin which allows you to have weighted category links much in the same way which flickr does the weighting of tags. The output of this plugin can be seen at the bottom of the archives page.

Fancy Tooltips

This plugin makes the tooltips which appear whilst hovering a link, abbr tag etc., nicer looking. You will be able to see it if you hover a link on this page or in the image below.

Flickr Gallery 0.4

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to install this properly and get errors when trying to run it. I will have to try a few other things to get it working – more news when (or if) I get it working.

There’s a lot of cool plugins available for WordPress,
- Chris

Since updating to WordPress 1.5, I’ve been meaning to recreate the style of the site as a WordPress theme. I decided that rather than doing so (and due to the large differences between WP 1.4 and 1.5) I decided to create a new structure for the blog and the site and also to update the style at the same time.

From this the Simply Blue theme was born.

Because WP 1.5 does things in a different way to 1.4, I decided that rather trying to recreate the same style in 1.5 it would be easier to create a new theme based upon the WP default. Using this new theme I changed the rest of the site to match it.

Hope you all like the new look,
- Chris

I have just reacently updated my version of WordPress to 1.5. The way that this version displays it’s content is slightly different than the earlier version I was using.

The style of the blog will remain as it is for at least a while until I recreate the original style in the correct format. After I’ve done that I’ll give a full review of version 1.5 as opposed to the earlier version.

Reborn and reloaded,
- Chris