Reflections on how (if) data management can improve my research practices:

Although our group (ReadingRebus) chose to manage our project data through a combination of Google Folders/Docs and a Google Sheet tracking each team member’s contribution on a timeline, I thought I’d explore further a more task-designated tool that I came across when we were still in the project planning stage.

Trello’s design appealed to me because it looked as if it might replicate my ancient dissertation-research logging practices: writing each quotation or idea on a 4×6 index card, with a bibliographic shorthand in one corner and the topic/chapter designation in the other.  I shuffled them endlessly as I reorganized my argument and its supporting materials, bound them with elastic bands, and stored them in shoe boxes.

And then I threw all the cards away when the dissertation was done.  For some time, I regretted that I hadn’t used pre-punched catalogue cards so I could claim a discarded library file cabinet to house them, forever, hauling the wall-sized furniture around the world with my increasing boxes of books and dead-tree teaching files . . . . (The cards would still be valueless but the cabinets have appreciated considerably.)

Optimistic for a lighter equivalent, I sketched out two projects on Trello, one where I created my own board, another where I used a template.  The former is for a manuscript that I’m revising, but where some of the material will need to be broken up into smaller sections or go into a different chapter.  I can see how the column-of-post-its design could help me imagine different sequences and move the bits and pieces accordingly.  The latter is a new project, based off a short presentation that I both need to expand and to write up in a different form.  Again, having a preexisting structure (in this case a sequence of slides), makes it easy to envision the project as a growing series of equal components or steps.

However, trying to use Trello in the early stages of a project, where I don’t know where I’m heading, may result in one endless data column that can only be sorted after I start understanding my claims.  Before that I just need somewhere to dump things and perhaps a DM program will just require unnecessary preemptive organization.  For example, the Trello templates are a wash.  There are far too many options, most of which are meant for non-academic projects or daily tasks.  And even if one opts for a very simple template, as I did for my second project, one wastes time eliminating features that one doesn’t want or need (inspirational photos of up-tilted faces for the “TODO” (sic) column or images of human cartwheels for “DONE”) .

None of this addresses the real challenge: envisioning the “deliverables” of a scholarly research project and approximating how long it will take to find the data to support one’s hazy vision of a possible conclusion or to replace it with something more plausible.

If a project starts with a question (i.e. “Might early modern women have become literate by sewing letters rather than writing them?”), one might be able to chart the areas where one should look and assign them to a timeline, but one could hardly work backwards from an anticipated answer (beyond ‘Yes/No”) through the stages of the project to a fixed start date.  A program like Zotero, that uses data that won’t get tossed, in a preexisting structure (i.e. a standardized bibliography of works consulted), might be a better tether for the amorphous beast of potentially useful/useless matter that is raw research.

Hence the short answer for me is that I’m not sure data management–at least as found in conventional data management programs–can improve my research practices.  However it certainly should help shape that accumulated research into a legible form by a fixed date–say–into a conference paper due March 15th?!  We’ll see . . . .