Making a Decision

Part of being a researcher and academic writer is that you are making a decision at some point in time that will impact or shift the direction that will impact your work down the road. Sometimes, these decisions can significantly change the course of the research, the outcomes, or the amount of work needed to correct the decision when you realize that you’ve made the wrong choice and need to reverse or adjust things in mid-stream. Let me explain a bit more about two decisions I’ve made that are impacting the amount of work it is taking to complete the comprehensive portfolio.

First decision – seems simple, but is having implications now that the work is nearing conclusion. I chose to use Scalar software to create the comprehensive portfolio. This means that I am crafting the document in a medium that shifts how the information looks and feels, not only for myself as the writer, but for the committee members or any other ‘reader/viewer’ of the portfolio. Since it is an open web space, anyone could read/view this work in progress. As yet, I have only shared with a few other people whom I trust, knowing that they know that its an imperfect and incomplete work-in-progress. While this decision appeared to be a simple one, it has now impacted my ability to apply citation and bibliographic management in the ways I’ve done in the past. Previous writing has been done in a Microsoft Word document, linking citations to Zotero as I write, and then creating the bibliography once the document has been fully edited and revisions are completed. This is not possible in the Scalar environment.

When writing in Scalar, I am able to build in notes that pop-up when clicked which helps provide an explanation to terms, concepts, or could even provide bibliographic information for a specific citation. These are not the same thing as a footnote or Zotero link. So I am now required to manage citations ‘manually’ unless I export/copy & paste all of the text from the Scalar pages into a Word document and rebuild all the citations in this secondary location using the Zotero interface. This will allow me to manage the final bibliography production, but is doubling the work I’m doing in the writing phase, particularly as I am continually editing and adding or deleting citations within the text.

Another Scalar decision relates to where the bibliographic material resides. For most academic writing, the references fall at the end of the document. For Scalar pages, each page is an individual document which is linked to other documents within the document. The decision I made was to include bibliographic information on each and every element within the portfolio, including the notes that I’ve created to explain or explore key concepts. Now, this decision is coming back to haunt me as I’m working on the literature review section of the comprehensive portfolio. Each page, along with the bibliography for that page, made sense when there were two or three citations to a page. But now that there are extensive citations and reference links, it leaves the bibliographic information significantly lengthening and extending the page. Since the pathways, tags, and content links are located at the bottom of the page, it requires the reader/viewer to scroll past the bibliography to get to the navigational tools. Plus, many of the citations I use on one page may also be used on subsequent pages, thus creating duplication of bibliographic information that may be inaccurately recorded and will require time consuming verification, editing and management.

SO… these decisions I’ve previously made have now impacted the flow, clarity, ease of production, and complexity of the writing process. I’m not sure there are easy solutions, but I better make the right decisions to correct my previous decisions since they may impact the future of not only my comprehensive portfolio, but that of other PhD students who wish to try using Scalar for their academic writing. I will not give up on Scalar for this comprehensive portfolio, but using this digital resource for the final dissertation may be a question requiring some thoughtful reflection before making a decision. I will reverse my decision to include a bibliography on each page in order to remove redundancies and duplications. However, the idea to insert each bibliographic reference as a pop-up note attached to the citation is unwieldy and time consuming, so may not be the best way to include references to this project. Now that I am nearing the end of the portfolio production, I will rely on previous strategies of using a Word doc with Zotero citations to create the bibliographic references, which I will then include on a single reference page in Scalar.

There! Decision made!