Making "editable text"___OCR and pdf converters

Making "editable text"___OCR and pdf converters

10:58 AM   Software,

There will be times when you wish to make a quote that will be longer than just a few words. (Although you should always keep in mind that long quotes are not too desirable, instead you should be integrating the author's words into your own text flow and only quoting a snippet from it). But again, even when you do this, you may find that re-writing what the author wrote is easier if you can base your writing on their original text rather than doing it from scratch. For this you will need editable text. If you are reading a book or any kind of hard copy publication you will need an OCR system that undertakes the electronic conversion of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. 

Continue Reading

Reference management systems

Reference management systems

4:38 AM   Lit. Rev., Reference, Software,

Very special thanks go to Burcu Avcı who alerted me to these - and they will in fact make your lives a lot easier when it comes to doing your literature reviews, which you will be starting on quite soon.

One of the biggest challenges when you are conducting a literature review is to keep the texts that you are going to be citing from in some kind of meaningful and easily accessible order. These pdf files will add up, regardless of whether you bookmark them on your browser or whether you download them to your hard drive. Another problem is that they will usually have numerical titles that make no sense whatsoever when you go back to look for the material that you stored. And a further problem is that oftentimes the metadata (the part that will actually make up your reference) will be hard to extract from the pdf file itself. A reference management system resolves all of these problems by running an OCR based check inside the document and then inserts all the information, such as the title, the author names, the publication data etc, so that you can easily see what is what when you look at the list that you have compiled inside the application.

Continue Reading

Using mindmaps for structuring a paper

Using mindmaps for structuring a paper

4:03 AM   Mindmap, Software, Structure,

A very handy tool whilst setting up the structure of your paper are mindmaps. While you can also draw a mindmap on a piece of paper or on a white board, mindmaps as software that you fill and manipulate on your screen are especially recommended since you can modify them far more easily than those that are created through analog means. 

Continue Reading