Tools and systems

This page describes Chris's practices for organizing filesystems. These are the result of over a decade of iteration, so there might be some wisdom baked in. But use whatever works for you.

Principles

I agree with the principles of Kieran Healy's Plain-text social science. For your own sake, to be a good collaborator, and to be a responsible steward of other people's private data, you should give some thought to how you work on and store information. You should be aware of and comply with UB's Data Risk Classification Policies.

Which filesystems

Laptop
Google Drive. Good for collaboration. Don't use your university email address.
Box. You can't organize shared content (e.g. move it into a folder), so it turns into a mess. But it's a place to store large files. I use it for shared research corpora (e.g. videos) and nothing else, unless I don't have a choice.

Layout

At a top level, I think it makes sense to distinguish your doctoral work from your previous professional work and from your future as an academic, if that's your thing. Here's a partial example of Chris's laptop filesystem.

~/Documents
├── Academic
│   ├── Career
│   │   └── 2019 Job Search
│   ├── Consulting
│   ├── Identity
│   │   └── CV
│   ├── Network
│   ├── Research
│   │   ├── Grants
│   │   │   ├── 2022 NSF CS for All
│   │   │   └── 2022 NSF CAREER
│   │   ├── Projects
│   │   │   ├── 2022 NSF CS for All
│   │   │   ├── Making With Code
│   │   │   ├── Minecraft Utopia
│   │   │   └── Unfold Studio
│   │   └── Publications
│   │       ├── 2021 AERA identity as interface
│   │       ├── 2021 CS Teaching Book Chapter
│   │       ├── 2022 CSCL Minecraft
│   │       └── 2022 Encyclopedia CT
│   ├── Service
│   │   ├── Letters
│   │   ├── Reviewing
│   │   └── NSF
│   └── UB
│       ├── Admin
│       ├── Service
│       │   └── Advising
│       └── Teaching
│           └── LAI 615
└── PhD
    ├── Admin
    ├── Coursework
    └── Research

Note the recursive structure. Academic work is organized into research, service, and teaching, so these are top-level categories. There is service which is UB-related, and service which is not. I don't keep research under UB.

I like to organize my research into grants, projects, and publications. Grants contain everything related to grant applications. Projects are ongoing engagements with a set of ideas, a corpus of data, and/or a particular site. Once a grant is funded, I create a corresponding project. Finally, a publication contains everything related to one particular publication.

File formats

Text

My preference is to store text in markdown, odt, or latex.

Video

I often want to save videos from presentations and course lectures, however video content can be huge. High-quality compression can substantially reduce file size. I use the webm format, and use the following shell script to convert videos:

# videocompress
# Converts a video to compressed webm format
# Takes two passes, optimizing for space compression.
# If you have this script, videocompress, on your path and executable, 
# you can run: videocompress video.mov video.webm

# ffmpeg documentation: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/VP9
ffmpeg -i "$1" -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 0 -crf 30 -pass 1 -an -f null /dev/null && \
ffmpeg -i "$1" -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 0 -crf 30 -pass 2 -c:a libopus "$2"

Video compression is also provided as an invoke task in the computationalliteracies web site repository.

Qualitative coding

Chris uses qc as a primary tool for qualitative coding. Here is the project's documentation.