What does “Batch Processing” look like, in practice?
In a recent blog post, I showed you different strategies not to “stay on top of the literature”, but to “catch up with the literature” in a way that is gentle and still highlight inequities and challenges.
In about 2 weeks, I will be giving a guest lecture on polycentricity for a good friend of mine, Dr. Marcela Lopez-Vallejo at Universidad de Guadalajara. I wanted to “catch up with the polycentricity literature”. Now, this is a literature I have contributed to before (see this book chapter on evolutionary institutional change and polycentric water governance with Andreas Thiel and Liz Baldwin).
I decided to download 5 articles that I am sure will give me good pointers. Here is where my process starts.
I downloaded all articles suggested to me by responders to my query. I put them in a separate folder, and then uploaded them to a folder on Mendeley. pic.twitter.com/3XHH6ixp7X
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) February 27, 2021
This is what my empty CSED shell looks like. I still haven’t printed all the 5 articles, but I already have the citations in place for when I read/skim them.
As you can see, I did everything as a batch process: download, organize, upload to Mendeley, copy cites to Excel Dump. pic.twitter.com/VEKl3he75c
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) February 27, 2021
Obviously from this point onward you can use my standard methods for reading, scribbling, annotating and then transferring your notes to a CSED (Excel Dump) row.
Once you (I) Process all 5 articles you’ll have 5 rows in your CSED and a good set of notes!https://t.co/rIOIHKOdP9 pic.twitter.com/CpoGDnpEXL
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) February 28, 2021
The advantage that using Batch Processing offerss, whether you distribute it over a week with a daily #AICCSED or devote a couple of hours on Fridays to this work, is that it allows you to reach Conceptual Saturation faster: by looking at interrelated papers, who might even be citing each other, you may end up being able to get a overview of the field (or at least, of the gaps you have in what you know about it).
Hopefully this detailed description of my Reading Materials’ Batch Processing method can be of help to my readers.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.