- Currently Listening to:
- Barenaked Ladies — It’s All Been Done
A literature review is a standard part of any postgraduate’s endeavours, and usually makes up the majority of your first year or two. A good review sets up the landscape that you’re going to work within, saving you from duplicating effort and allowing you to identify the key players in your field. You don’t necessarily have to reel off a big document summarising your reading, but if you do it’s a fine head start on the first chunk of your thesis.
I had started my lit review last year, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of merely printing and filing papers without having read them. Then, in December at our second annual SRG-fest Joe gave an inspiring talk about structuring a literature review intelligently. Among his suggestions were to choose a handful of key conferences in your area and read every paper published in their proceedings for the last few years. For me, these conferences are places like InfoVis, ICAC, Pervasive and CHI.
Secondly he suggested building up a “mindmap” of the research areas that you’re actively engaging in. This has proven to be a very worthy excercise.
My (intimidating!) PhD mindmap
When drawn up like this my research interests seem both nicely structured but also worryingly broad. And I left out the stuff I’ll likely need to understand but currently have no interest in, like semantics, embedded systems and parallelism. My reading has been branching out a bit recently too; since I’ve started tracking my bookmarks on del.icio.us I discovered that I’m actually more interested in things like sociology and psychology than I thought.
If you imagine all the possible research that could be done in our field as a pie chart, the area I’m going to explore will end up being a thin sliver in that chart. Aaron always said that his job as my supervisor was to keep me anchored in that segment and not wander too far outside of it. Looks like he’s got his work cut out for him.
- Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.
"Why won't it just tell me what it's about?" said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. "There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I've looked everywhere—there's nothing here but words."
- HOWTO: Read more books (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
- iPhone’s Missing Feed Reader – Shawn Blanc
- The Researcher's Bible
- Is the endless data stream eroding our attention spans?
"The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell. I’m told that Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. Twitter sounds less like sipping than drowning."
- johnaugust.com » How screenwriters will use the iPad
A few thoughts on Apple’s new tablet, and how we’ll be using it in a few months.
It should be terrific for reading scripts. Right now, the big Kindle DX does a credible job with screenplays. It’s $489. The iPad is only $10 more, and can handle mail, web, video and a lot more. A few weeks ago, I wrote about reading scripts on laptops turned sideways. The iPad is the elegant version of this solution.
- Metagames and Containers – Sleepover
My favorite video games tend to have a very par tic u lar, yet highly abstract, aspect to them. I love games with a clear set of rules com bined with an envi ron ment to sup port the explo ration of those rules and the dis cov ery of their boundaries. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sleepoversf.com%2Fmetagames-and-containers
- Marco.org - A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel,...
A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.
- The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
So where does all this information we consume come from? Everywhere, it turns out. The report suggests the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day. (Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is only 460,000 words long.) This doesn’t mean we read 100,000 words a day — it means that 100,000 words cross our eyes and ears in a single 24-hour period. That information comes through various channels, including the television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games.
- YouTube - Reading Processes in Adults
- YouTube - Eye Tracking Reading Study
Child being Eye Tracked while reading a text. Gaze replay shows fixations and saccades.
- Hacker News | In grad school I managed to take advantage of the pacing effect in an educationa...
- The List of N Things
The list of n things is easier for writers as well as readers. When you're writing a real essay, there's always a chance you'll hit a dead end. A real essay is a train of thought, and some trains of thought just peter out. That's an alarming possibility when you have to give a talk in a few days. What if you run out of ideas? The compartmentalized structure of the list of n things protects the writer from his own stupidity in much the same way it protects the reader. If you run out of ideas on one point, no problem: it won't kill the essay.
- ongoing · Less Like Oration
The Net has had a twofold effect on short-form publishing: First, it’s cheap, verging on free. Second, it enjoys many routes to potentially large audiences. It’s the second that’s interesting. Until recently, you simply couldn’t find a large audience for your thoughts unless you had books on shelves in stores, and books had to be a couple of hundred pages long (usually more) to get on shelves in stores. This resulted, among other things, in many unnecessarily thick books.
- How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com
Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article - sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.
[As reading shifts to networked devices,] I fear that one of the great joys of book reading - the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas - will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
My (intimidating!) PhD mindmap
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