Procrastinating the hard way
October 19, 2008
Procrastinating is at least more productive for me now than it used to be.
Procrastinating the hard way
I really should have been writing up my ideas into blog posts (especially two important but challenging to write posts “what is open source” and “why visualization?”), working on my project and presentation for CSLT 355, reading papers and most definitely resuscitating my program of studying for my screening exam. But instead, I procrastinated.
I’m definitely not the same procrastinator I was when I was an undergrad so long ago. I didn’t watch TV, or play video games, go out and hit the town, or sleep. No, I’m far too focused and goal driven now to do such things. Instead, I wrote a web application that allows me to easily browse my open source references by year, author, journal or category. I was at home, sick, anyway, and it seemed like a more pleasant thing to do than read overviews on open source, or studying.
The program I web application I wrote is called “papersorter” and is written in Python, using the Django web application framework (which I’ve been wanting to learn). The above picture shows the category detail page. My goals in writing it were to allow me to get a handle on the card sort data I’d collected, and be able to view it from different perspectives so that I could get a feel for the data. I used papersorter to help me with data when I was drawing the diagrams in The “why” of open source research.
Below is a gallery of the different pages I’ve coded. After I got the basic functionality done, I’ve started adding things I’d always wanted in a bibliographic management tool, such as the ability to go straight to Google Scholar in a search for an article or author.
The papersorter author overview page, which lists each author seen in a paper, the number of papers they had, the years they published, and the categories their papers were in.
The paper sorter author detail page, which lists bibliographic details for each of the author
The papersorter sources overview page. Each journal or book in which a paper appeared is listed here, with a count of the number of papers in that volume.
The papersorter category overview page. It lists each known category, and the number of papers in each category.
The papersorter category detail screen. Papers are grouped by year, and titles and authors are clickable.
The papersorter article detail page, which shows bibliographic info about the article.
The papersorter articles overview, which shows all articles grouped by year.
