Apart from knowing your topic and reading the literature, a lot of academic writing comes down to plain and simple organisation and knowing which tools to use. Organising your quotes and literature references so it’s easy to find them again is one important aspect of that, but there is also the writing and layouting side of things. Microsoft Word is everywhere, but for writing long academic texts, possibly with ᛌᛔᛂᛍᛁᛆᛚ characters, it’s… not great. Which you may already know. Perhaps you’ve even heard about “markdown” and “plain text” or someone mentioned “LaTeχ” to you, but that looks way too complicated. Maybe you already use Zotero, EndNote or a similar tool to organise your references, but all of the relevant quotes are still in one single big Word file.
The world of software tools for writing, academic or not, is big, confusing and can be as intimidating as writing an essay, and just because you use one tool doesn’t mean you know how to use another.
Course Content
This course is an introduction to how the workflows in the background can be organised to support essay writing rather than stop it. The course will cover
- Literature reference and quotation management software
- Citavi
- Bibliographix
- Desktop Wikis for collecting ideas and quotes
- ZIM
- What You Get Is Way Better Than Word text editors
- Lyχ
These three areas are all interconnected, so figuring out early on in your academic life how you can best manage all of these aspects can save you a lot of headaches later on. In the course, you will learn the basics of each program and how you can efficiently use it to help your writing process, in addition to how to create clickable (back)links in your PDF, making the computer count your illustrations, creating tables that look good even broken over several pages, and printing a To-Do-list directly with your document. And, as a treat, how to create two documents using the same file, one for you, one for your supervisor.
Preparation and Requirements
You will need to bring your personal computer to the workshop and install the following software in advance. If you are able to access the Software Centre/Library provided by UiO, several of the programs mentioned below can be installed directly from there.
- Citavi (several downloads are offered; the latest version is usually only for testing purposes, installation of 5.7.1 is therefore preferred)
- Bibliographix [bibliographix.de/doku.php]
- ZIM
- one of the following LaTeχ distributions
- Lyχ
If you struggle with installing the required software, please write to the instructor at e.m.magin@khm.uio.no in advance of the workshop, as there will not be enough time to go through the installation processes during the workshop. You are however welcome to attend the workshop if you don’t have the software installed, but you will likely get less out of the course if you can’t directly do the exercises.
Schedule
| Time | Module |
|---|---|
| 10:00 | Introduction |
| 10:20 |
Plain text |
| 10:30 | Citavi |
| 11:00 | Break |
| 11:10 | Bibliographix |
| 11:35 | ZIM |
| 12:00 | Break |
| 13:00 | Lyχ (with a break somewhere) |
| 15:30 | Tips & tricks |