Let’s talk about how we’re doing this work.
Once a week or more, I talk by Skype to the mentors, the other people on the project. Sometimes they’re not all there, but generally the calls last around an hour. We plan out the schedule for the next week, assess where we are currently, and think about where this project might be going. From what I gather, it’s pretty open-ended – we’re looking at ways to characterise workflows, but how they might be characterised could drastically change the output of this research.
Over the course of the week, we communicate via email, and occasionally individual Skype chats. We also can communicate more opaquely by looking at edits to various Google Documents and EtherPads that tend to proliferate with to-do lists, small databases of work flows and work flow systems, and more official mentor plans. Of course, they also see what I am doing by looking here (or will shortly – this has only been up for two days.)
There’s a lot of research going on, individually, particularly by Karthik and me. We upload our papers to a DropBox, but also to a private Mendeley group. Mendeley is a new-ish site that’s a wonderful way to share what papers you’re reading and interests with other scholars, and it is very much in the spirit of this research. I’ve linked my profile in the sidebar – add me if you read this! Always looking to see what others are doing.
All of these different things make pretty good backups. For instance, I just accidentally deleted my entire folder of readings for the past week (which happened while I was trying to delete all of the Pegasus stuff I’ve loaded onto my machine, as I’ve found the installation entirely obtuse and the documentation inscrutable.) But all that means is that I need to redownload a few .pdfs I lost.
And that’s our set up, at the moment. Comments?