cut and paste

[calimac]

Some years ago now, I was flying a computer terminal at a library for a living, when I noticed my colleague at the next desk trying to design a poster on hers. She had the text all laid out nicely, and a space left for an illustration. But every time she pasted the illustration in, even though it was the correct size for the space, it pushed the text all wonky and out of alignment.

After she tried this several times, I suggested that she print the poster master out without the illustration, and then paste the illo in the old-fashioned way, physically with scissors and glue. That solved the problem.

I thought of that incident when faced with the bibliography I'm now assigned to compile. My colleague who did the basic searching in professional databases sent me the raw results in no particular order, which is what I'd asked for, since there was no point in asking her to put them in final alphabetized order. It's easier for me to verify the results and catch missing items if they're in classified order, e.g. all the papers from one theme anthology or from one journal together, so I'd have to re-sort them anyway.

So I get the results: a Word file with 230 Web database entries pasted in. I need to sort them into uncertain kinds and an unknown number (it turned out to be 16) of categories, in particular order within each. I could do this by opening up a random number of blank Word documents and cut and paste all day, but that much repetition of Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V and Alt-Tab would be wearisome, not even counting the easy possibility of accidentally cutting without pasting and losing an item, and not finding this out until I count them all up again on finishing, and then pawing through the saved copy to look for what's missing.

No. It was much easier to do this the old-fashioned way, physically. I printed out the whole shebang. I made a big open space on the kitchen table. (My desk? Don't be ridiculous. Even if I cleaned everything off, which isn't going to happen, there's not enough room.) I cut the entries all up with scissors, put them into piles, regrouped and subdivided the piles, laid each related group out in order and then laid down rows of Scotch tape to fasten them together. This gave me a series of what looked like paper-and-tape Venetian blinds. I carefully inserted these delicate objects into a manila folder, I took them to Kinko's, and I photocopied them all onto fresh, uncut paper.

And there's my working bibliography, all sorted out and ready for notations, corrections, insertions, and any other editing. After which I'll type it all up afresh. Much easier this way.

Comments

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

No idea how often you do bibliographies of this type, but if it's a frequent thing, you might check out EndNote, an extremely powerful tool for bibliographies, footnotes, endnotes, etc. It integrates with Word. I don't know what its sorting functions are like, however.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Could be useful for managing an even larger bibliography if one is creating it from scratch, and sorting it in a list fashion either purely alphabetically or in pre-determined categories. Not for the sort of minute classifying function I was doing here.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

It's pretty easy to scan something like that on a home printer/scanner, and generate a pdf, if you have a home printer/scanner. I've had one for a couple of years now and I find it handy. I haven't looked into OCR, so I don't know if that would be helpful or too much trouble.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And if I have to send the corrected and amplified version off to the next set of editors before I have time to type it up (the corrections will be by pen and the amplifications by typed material pasted in), that's exactly what I plan to do with it. For sorting the entries as I received them, the task I was describing here, Word (the form I got it in) would have been easier to handle than a PDF.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I tend to Copy and Paste, then delete the copied bits after I'm done. That may be messy, but I don't accidentally delete something.

While I'm guessing at what your project looks like, I'd probably try something like Select All --> "Export as text, tab delineated" and make one Word document of 230 paragraphs. Much easier to copy and paste (and keeps the original around, Just In Case).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Then you're still flipping back and forth between files, and since the material is in entirely different orders, it adds Ctrl-F to the macros that must be used. Working with single physical copies (of course there's backup, in case the cats grab them all or something) saves me a whole host of trouble.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

i would have copied the entries into a spreadsheet and used drag and drop within the spreadsheet to reorganize them. Virtually the same.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've done that. Spreadsheets are a brilliant timesaver for sorting, but I find them absolutely agonizing for classifying. I'm using a mouse, a tool I find clumsy even for the uses it's best suited for, for a job that's much better suited for picking up and moving physical objects around, and there isn't enough room on the screen to both show all the piles and make their contents visible.

I should add that to describe that as "virtually the same" sums up what most annoys me about computerization. Some jobs of this kind are so much easier on the computer, it's breath-taking how much work they save. Others I find just get clumsier. Inability by the promoters to grasp my problems with the latter makes their descriptions of their tools and their recommendations for particular ones useless to me. It's frustrating.

A better possibility would be to create a column in the spreadsheet for the categories I perceive, label all the obvious cases, sort the file, consider the remaining problem cases, and so on. But that still has the problem that I can't look at all the piles at once. The unlabeled ones are at this end of the file, the categories extend for pages backwards. I'd rather have piles.