Two Q [writing, DW]
Sep. 26th, 2025 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
siderea1)
Is there a term for the part of a large non-fiction writing project that comes after the research – when you have a huge pile of sources and quotes and whatnot – and before the actual "writing" part, the part that involves making sure you have all the citations correct for the sources, maybe going over the sources to highlight what passages you will quote verbatim, organizing them (historically by putting things on 3x5 cards and moving them around on a surface), and generally wrangling all the materials you are going to use into shape to be used?
I think this is often just thought of as part of "research", but when I'm doing a resource-dense project, it's not at all negligible. It takes a huge amount of time, and is exceptionally hard on my body. I'd like, if nothing else, to complain about it, and not having a word for it makes that hard.
2)
I don't suppose there's some, perhaps undocumented, way to use Dreamwidth's post-via-email feature with manually set dates? So you email in a journal entry to a specific date in the past? This doesn't appear among the options for post headers in the docs.
I am working on a large geopolitics project where I am trying to construct a two-year long timeline, and it dawns on me one of the easiest ways to do that might be to set up a personal comm on DW and literally post each timeline-entry as a comm entry. But maybe not if I have to go through the web interface, because that would be kind of miserable; I work via email.
Is there a term for the part of a large non-fiction writing project that comes after the research – when you have a huge pile of sources and quotes and whatnot – and before the actual "writing" part, the part that involves making sure you have all the citations correct for the sources, maybe going over the sources to highlight what passages you will quote verbatim, organizing them (historically by putting things on 3x5 cards and moving them around on a surface), and generally wrangling all the materials you are going to use into shape to be used?
I think this is often just thought of as part of "research", but when I'm doing a resource-dense project, it's not at all negligible. It takes a huge amount of time, and is exceptionally hard on my body. I'd like, if nothing else, to complain about it, and not having a word for it makes that hard.
2)
I don't suppose there's some, perhaps undocumented, way to use Dreamwidth's post-via-email feature with manually set dates? So you email in a journal entry to a specific date in the past? This doesn't appear among the options for post headers in the docs.
I am working on a large geopolitics project where I am trying to construct a two-year long timeline, and it dawns on me one of the easiest ways to do that might be to set up a personal comm on DW and literally post each timeline-entry as a comm entry. But maybe not if I have to go through the web interface, because that would be kind of miserable; I work via email.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-27 12:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-27 03:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-27 02:06 am (UTC)I believe the term is Synthesize.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-27 03:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-27 03:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-27 04:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-27 10:52 am (UTC)With qualitative data, data cleaning is the part where you go through everything, ensuring that your quotations are accurate, and whittling down to the data that are actually relevant.
Analysis is part where you move the index cards, noticing trends, and putting the data that support them into the relevant buckets.
Synthesis is making sense of it all so that you can actually start writing.
There's some good software out there, but I'm not sure how relevant it would be for your work. Also, personally, I like getting myself elbow-deep into the data, so I liked physically moving stuff around and re-writing by hand. I felt it gave me a better feel for what I had. Once I got past the 100 pages of notes point, that became a bit overwhelming and I was grateful for NVivo and Atlas.ti.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-27 10:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-27 11:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-27 11:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-28 02:47 am (UTC)I don't know the answer to your DW question, but in case this helps, another way to do that could be to set up a blog-style site with an SSG and use a text editor and
gitto manage the posts. The one I use automatically orders posts by the date I wrote in the file, regardless of file write dates. (I assume this is a common feature but have not surveyed current tools.) I've been gradually backfilling my personal blog site from DW entries this way, without creating noise from 2005 on the main page. This, of course, only works if you have a place to host a web site. I commit and push on my personal machine, and publish by pulling on the server, all of which I can do via command lines.(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-28 03:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-09-28 01:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-06-18 02:14 am (UTC)