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Webstractor

In one of my larger research projects this last year, I had the chance to put a tool called Webstractor (Mac only) to the test. Webstractor is an elegant assistant to web based research. It collects web clippings which you can then edit, keeping the reference URL, but removing all the extraneous navigation, branding, and advertising content. You can search your material, reorganize it, annotate it, save it to PDF, and give it a table of contents. It's ideal for keeping highly directed research in one place and readying it for analysis and publication. Posted: 1/13/06; 1:03:30 PM #

TAMS Analyzer

I lot of the research work that I do involves text, sometimes very large quantities of text. Sometimes, it's critical to be able to mark up that text in ways that reflect my research questions. That's when I need a tool like TAMS Analyzer (Mac and GNUstep). TAMS (Text Analysis Mark-up System) is an open source application for analyzing themes in documents. It is particularly useful in media analysis and similar sociological investigations. If you are ever in the position of wanting to genuinely understand trends in your field, you would want to give TAMS Analyzer to a trained group of volunteers (or graduate students) and use it to build a coded understanding of the documents (or web sites) that mediate your communities of practice. Posted: 1/13/06; 12:51:29 PM #

DevonThink

If you do research or writing, or you are just an information hound, you may want to consider a remarkable piece of software that I have spent more than a year trying to incorporate into my workflow. It's called DevonThink (Mac only) and it's a desktop file management and information discovery tool. It blends classic taxonomic organizing with full text search, wiki style cross links, concordance, and an inference engine that learns from how you categorize things. It's a smart tool for writers and researchers who work with a diverse range of information nuggets. It is extensible, scriptable, and capable of organizing, viewing, and editing a huge range of data types. The company behind it provides solid support and the user community if vibrant. Finally, it's easy to get your data into and out of it, which is to me an sign of great respect for the user. Posted: 1/13/06; 12:33:28 PM #