Progress update #2
November 17, 2008
Progress report #2 on my book project.
Progress update #2
As I’ve said before, I’m making an eBook for my class project for CLST 355 It is to be a narrative of my process of performing research, starting at Point A, the conceptual space that I was in at the beginning of class, and ending in someplace I’m not even going to call Point B. I’m employing a dual narrative structure: the primary narrative of my research, plus a second parallel narrative of what happens in my life and how that relates to and contextualizes my research process. The primary narrative is in a larger font, in black and red, while the contextualizing entries are presented as footnotes in a small grey font. I intersperse the text among images which relate to the text either directly or metaphorically. I’m making the book in Apple’s Pages.app word processor.
A PDF of what I’ve got so far can be downloaded here: CLST 355 Final Project (23.2MB).
When I picked it up again on Friday night after not looking at it for two weeks, I didn’t like it, and had wanted to start over (a typical reaction for me). I thought that the layout was clunky, and I had to do too much fiddling to get it to look right to me. There are unfortunate choices I had made early on that, because of the way Pages.app works, are hard to change. I also knew I couldn’t print it because I have images stretching to the edge of the page in some cases. It’s also an odd size — legal size paper in landscape — and if I ever wanted to get it printed and bound (Prof. Kelly Sears suggested this), I can’t find anyone who prints books in that format. I especially didn’t like the title page (still don’t) and want to redo it. I actually did start over, but luckily for me Pages.app crashed before I could save my work. I didn’t feel lucky at the time, but that did allow me to just go on and do the work.
It’s 32 pages at this point, and now I feel like it’s coming together; I feel like I’m close to done. I reworked some of the labeling and layout inside, and I like the new pages a lot better than the old pages.
Pages.app is okay as a layout engine. It’s easy to use to do what I want, but I can’t do major structural changes easily. It’s ugly to go back and add a new page, for instance. And you can’t move pages around as units — can’t switch pages 2 and 3, for instance. Which makes sense, as Pages.app is a word processor, and as such thinks at the document level — it makes no sense to say you want to switch pages 2 and 3 of a text document. Instead you cut the text that ended up on page 3 and put it before the text on page 2. But when you have images and text boxes etc. that you’ve laid out painstakingly on a page, and your only option to move them to another page is to re-lay them out on that other page, that’s painful.
I say I feel like I’m close to done — for the class project. If I were to actually write the entire narrative of writing a paper inception to publishing, the book would be hundreds of pages long, I would think. I mean, I’ve only started doing an overview of the topic area I’m moving into, and it’s already 32 pages long. I haven’t started designing anything let alone testing it with real people, which is the real work. I would imagine that if I were ever to actually write the real thing, a tremendous amount of editing would need to be done. I’m not up to doing that now.
Things I have still to do:
- I’m still unsure of the title. Originally I had said it would be: “Digital archaeology of social spaces: revealing social structure of open source software communities through examination of public artifacts.” I think that that would be an appropriate title for the paper I would generate from my current research process, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for the narrative of my process.
- I want to redo the title page.
- I need to decide whether I’m going to include a table of contents, and whether I have chapters/sections or one continuous narrative. I do have labels by certain points in the book, but are they chapter titles, or are they just informative?
- I have a bit more to add to the book; maybe another 10 pages.
- I have serious verb tense consistency problems throughout the book that need to be addressed. I lifted the text for the book straight from my blog, but my blog posts have a lot of present and future tense in it: “I’m doing this,” “I’m planning to do that.” From the point of view of the book, much of that is in the past now. Some of the text is temporally sensitive — it goes in a particular time span. How do I honor that?
- I have to figure out how I’m going to present this to class. Kelly Sears says: “just present the book.” Ok, so I don’t have to make slides, but I still have to say something. Condensing 40+ pages of text into 20 minutes doesn’t seem feasible. Maybe I’ll give a brief summary and then talk about the making of the book.
