Academia: Stephendann.com

File management: Wrangling 4000 pdf files is not a fun task

I am a digital pack rat. I have 4000+ PDF files as I have a tendency to save to disk rather than print, and I like to build up an archive around my various marketing papers, books and other research. The downside has been that I originally saved files by project keyword (eg telepresence_04), or by paper title (Technology and its impact on polychronic time use). I’ve now migrated to saving by author/year (Price, Leong and Ryan 2005). Renaming the entire library is a task that’s underway in serious earnest (and will result in Smith 2006a to Smith2006z I suspect), and I’m working through various methods to make the management possible.

Currently under trial is the Adobe Bridge software that comes with the professional version of most Adobe packages other than Adobe Acrobat. It’s handling previewing and renaming really well in the first instance, and it looks to be the goods for managing a large PDF library. I can’t understand why it’s not part of the Acrobat Suite, but since I have CS3, I have the whole Adobe toybox.

What I need next is an automated PDF metadata tagger. Scan for keywords (and flag the image only scans I have in the collection), and append a tag cloud the PDF file.

Never want to come back down

A day worth remembering.

A Phd Student completed her thesis

A second PhD student submitted her thesis

A journal paper was submitted with a good friend and coauthor.

A journal sent me an edited version of my paper for my approval. Normally authors do the edits for the approval of the editor, not the other way around

Then came the news of the day – a Tier 2 journal put a paper into the revise and resubmit round which means the once we make the changes required, we’re good to go for the highest ranked journal publication I’ve ever had.

I don’t know what tomorrow will hold, but I do know that today was bloody legendary.

Super happy fun slide decision making model

Superhappyfundecision making model!

This is how I’ve taken to deciding if I should respond to a call for papers, or a research project, or an offer to go for lunch.

Conflict between the principles of the discipline, and the principles of the academy

I have a distinctive voice when writing in marketing. Dark cynicism and pop culture references are infused with a certain world view of marketing that few others in the academy have, and even fewer are prepared to commit to paper. As a marketer, this distinctive branding of my work, and the establishing position in the minds of the reader is the outcome of considered IMC, careful edits and a lot of hard work.

The downside is that I work in some distinctive fields (social marketing, internet marketing, political marketing), and I have a recognisable voice, plus a fast uptake of new ideas so that I frequently am the only authority in the field I’m publishing the third, fifth or seventh paper on, and it’s quickly obvious in double blind peer review when it’s my work, and when it’s not.

The strong brand is the antithesis of the double blind review which really seeks the strong bland in the pretence that somehow, a monotone of academic voices is the desirable future where novice and veteran voice reads alike, and you can’t figure out the author because you’re as verse in the field of their work as they are… either that, or I need to move out of the specialist field and hang around similar sounding authors for a while.