When I was working on several papers in my senior year of University, I developed a research tool that allowed for structured note taking which was cross referenced to my bibliography. Essentially, it was an automated version of the old 3 x 5 cards to track my bibliography and notes for a paper. It worked fairly well, although I dropped the project because at the time the amount of work I had to do to manage the database component was too much.
Enter now the idea of combining a bibliographic database with a blog/wiki for note taking. This is an idea from darcusblog that I think has tremendous potential.
I've come to the conclusion that weblogs, wikis and bibliographic databases ought to blur together. Weblogs provide a good way to distribute content (including one's own notes), and wikis a superior way to author linked structured content.
The potential for effortless autolinking for citations a la wiki has me drooling!
I have had a passing interest in academic publishing, bibliography management and research tools for the humanities. Recently I have taken up my hobby again and wanted to get caught up in the field. So I have been tracking various feedster queries for the last month looking for good blogs about those topics. Today I hit pay dirt. Feedster churned up a post to Clay Reddings Blog entitiled Bibliography creation and XML.
Now, I haven't yet absorbed his comments yet, but his entry pointed me to Bruce DArcus blog which is a treasure trove of thinking around what bibliography management tools should look like today. I find his WikiBibBlog idea facinating (combines a wiki, a blog and a bibliographic database). From there, there are all kinds of links into the topic.
This really shows the value of something like feedster. It may not be as comprehensive as Google, but what it can do is provide a link to an intial blog which in turn links to others etc. And that allows you to find something far more important than just a static page somewhere. You can find an active community talking and publishing around your search topic. Feedster is an amazing personal research tool.
Chris Karakas has put together a huge resource on publishing with Lyx and SGML. This is a tremendous resource.
A method for single-source publishing using LyX and SGML is presented: LyX is used as a comfortable graphical SGML editor. Once the document is exported to SGML from LyX, it undergoes a series of transformations through sed and awk scripts that correct the SGML code, compute the Index, insert the Bibliography and the Appendix and take care of the correct invocation of openjade, pdftex, pdfjadetex and all the other necessary programs for the generation of HTML (chunked or not), PDF (with images, bookmarks, thumbnails and hyperlinks), PS, RTF and TXT versions. All aspects of document processing are handled, including automatic Index generation, display of Mathematics in TeX quality both online and in print formats, as well as the use of bibliographic databases with RefDB. Special care is taken so that the document processing is as transparent to the user as possible - the aim being that the user writes in LyX, then presses a button, and the lyxtox script does the rest.
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