You already know how to use Roam Research, the new note taking app taking the internet by storm. You don’t need to follow the #roamcult hashtag on Twitter, or watch the dozens of YouTube explainer videos in order to start using Roam. If you’ve used Wikipedia (with its web of interlinked definitions), an outliner (with information organized by indented bullet points), Twitter (where you can find subjects by #hashtags), or any desktop computer (where items can exist in multiple locations via the use of an alias or shortcut), then you are already familiar with the main building blocks of Roam. What makes Roam “new” isn’t these tools, but how they have been put together. In short, Roam is much more than the sum of its parts.

Before I go any further, I need to issue a few caveats. The day I posted this, Roam temporarily stopped taking new users. Then the next day they announced that they will start charging, and it won’t be cheap. And even if the waitlist and fee doesn’t put you off, it is important to remember that Roam is still a beta app, so don’t want to trust your life’s work to it.¹ But this post isn’t meant to be a how-to,² or a review, or even an encouragement to use Roam. Instead I want to talk about what makes Roam special. I think Roam offers a new paradigm for how we take notes, one that other apps will surely strive to copy.

So what is it like to use Roam? At its heart Roam is basically an outliner. When you open a new blank document you are presented with a bullet point. You can add new bullets below it, or nest them inside each other, just like any other outliner. If you’ve used Workflowy or Dynalist Roam will feel vary familiar.

Like those apps you can also add tags to each item. This means that it can do many of the same tricks I wrote about in my post from two years ago about how to Roll Your Own QDA (Qualitative Data Analysis) software. Roam lacks some of the niceties of these more polished outlining apps, but it more makes up for that with its own special sauce: “Linked References.”

Linked References appears as a section at the bottom of every page and shows you a list of all the documents that link back to the current page. This is the main magic which makes Roam so revolutionary. Imagine you have a note for a contact named “John Smith” and you also have half a dozen notes about meetings where John Smith was present. If you remembered to link his name each time you typed it (Roam makes it easy to turn anything you’ve typed into links), all those meeting notes will appear as a neat little list in your Linked References section. And even if you forgot to turn John Smith’s name into links, Roam will still catch it in a section called, unsurprisingly, “Unlinked References.” (And there is an option to turn those into real links if you like.)

A lot of apps allow you to add tags to notes as you write. (One of my favorites is called Bear.) In any of these apps, if you click on a tag you will see a list of all the notes with that tag. So what is different about how Roam does this? First, when you click on a tag in an app like Bear, you are taken out of the document you are working on to a list of files. This interrupts your workflow. Roam includes Linked References right in the document. (Because “Linked References” is a bit of a mouthful, I will just call them “backlinks” from now on.) Second, Bear tags work at the document level, but because Roam is an outliner, it can show you the exact paragraph that contained the relevant tag. (See the example image above where all the mentions of John Smith are highlighted from the notes about meetings in which he attended.) Third, the backlinks show up in the document as editable text, so you can work on them right there without having to open up the original document! Forth, you can filter and search your list of backlinks, quickly narrowing the list down to the most relevant results. And finally, tags in Roam are not just search terms, they are actually pages which you can edit.

To see how this all works, let’s go back to the John Smith example. If every time you have a meeting you add linked tags to everyone present, when you look at the backlinks at the bottom of John Smith’s page you can quickly filter the list by who else was present. For instance, you could narrow the list down to only those meetings where both John Smith and Jane Doe attended the same meeting.

And suppose at one of those meetings John Smith had been assigned a job, you would see the text “John Smith was assigned to write the annual report” right there in your backlinks, you wouldn’t need to go hunting for the initial notes about that meeting to remember what he had agreed to do. You could even edit the text itself to make a new page linked to “annual report” and then start making notes to send to John about what needs to be included in that report. Finally, since the “John Smith” tag is itself a page, you could include his contact information there so you’d have his email address handy when you are ready to send him those notes.

It may not be obvious from this example, but one of the advantages of such a system is that it can also reveal a lot of links you might not have consciously thought of when you were writing. If you still enjoy strolling around library stacks because you love how the Dewey Decimal System doesn’t just show you the book you are looking for but often helps you discover related books you didn’t even know you needed, Roam can off you’re a similar feeling for your own notes. The list of backlinks often reveal adjacent ideas and helps forge new connections in your own writing. There is even a “graph view” that turns these links into a pretty chart which you can explore within the app.

Backlinks might be Roam’s most notable feature, but it has many more tricks up its sleeve. (If anything, the developers seem to be going a bit overboard with all kinds of experimental features when some of the more basic functionality still need work!) I will focus on three of these features here. These are features tied to the core function of the app as a place to take notes. The app is also a database, and there are a lot of features which make use of that to programmatically output information based on queries, but I’ll skip those advanced features here. The features I think make Roam especially useful for taking notes are: transclusion, the sidebar, and Daily Notes:

Transclusion refers to the ability to embed a link from another note (or another part of the same note) directly into an outline. Let’s say I’m taking notes on fruit and have a section titled “apples” under which I list various types of oranges (Granny Smith, Gala, Fuji, etc.) and I include information for each, such as where to buy them, when they are in season, how they taste, etc. When I start another note with a recipe for apple pie, I might want to include my notes on Granny Smith apples in that note, rather than simply linking to the Granny Smith note (as in the John Smith example). Roam allows me to directly embed the relevant bullet points from my “apples” outline right in the document. And if I edit the Granny Smith information in one place, it will be updated everywhere else it appears! The following two pictures show how that might work. In the first picture we have the definition in context in the original note, and in the second picture we see it embedded in ta pie recipe.

The second feature is the sidebar: a sliding window pane that can appear on the right side of the screen. Any note (or section of a note) you are working on can be opened there for reference. I the picture below I have a shopping list note that I can update as I work on the recipe. The sidebar can handle multiple notes at the same time, and they can be collapsed or expanded as needed.

Finally, Daily Notes are a special kind of note that appear each day, with the date at the top. I was a little confused by this at first, but after playing with Roam for a week I found that I absolutely love using this feature. It encourages you to keep a running journal of your day. Rather than adding new notes for each topic you want to write about, you just tag them as you go. Remember, tagging something creates a new page that will automatically have a back-link that includes what you are writing in the daily journal! Because of the magic of backlinks, there is no need to create new documents for everything. That means you can just focus on writing and not worry too much about where things should go. I have found this tremendously liberating, and as a result I find I write a lot more notes than I used to.

In Roam the process of writing and the process of filing are entwined with each other, rather than two separate processes. I think this is what makes Roam such a joy to use, and so far no other app has managed to capture this feeling. Nor am I alone. I think this feeling is what explains the #roamcult hashtag. With other apps you often feel that each new piece of information added to the app makes it harder to find what you are looking for. My Evernote, for instance, often feels like an overstuffed shoebox whose lid no longer closes. But with Roam I feel that the more data I add to the app, the more useful all that data becomes. Maybe it just feels like a shiny new toy because I have only been using it for a few weeks? Only time will tell if this feeling is justified, but so far I think it really works.

As much as I like Roam, I think what I really want is something like Roam but better. I find the app already bloated with too many features, it lacks a good mobile app, and it can sometimes take a long time to load. Fortunately, a lot of other developers have been inspired by Roam to create similar apps, or add Roam-like functionality to existing apps. It is too early to tell if any of these will succeed, but one I am especially hopeful about is Obsidian because it comes from the same team behind Dynalist, and their vision emphasizes open standards and local control of your data. The Archive is another possibility. Inspired by the Zettelkasten Method of Niklas Luhmann, it actually predates the other apps, but I find Luhmann’s system a bit cumbersome to use compared to Roam and Obsidian. Thinktool is more of a traditional outliner, but it includes backlinks and transclusion like Roam. Other efforts can be found in this list of open-source Roam alternatives. And Athens is a more ambitious attempt to create an open source clone of Roam that matches all of its features. It is too early to tell which of these apps will succeed, but if any of them do it will be because of the inspiration provided by Roam.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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Our ethnographic data is in the cloud, but our heads are not

More and more anthropologists are conducting, storing and circulating their research in the cloud. Cloud storage – typically in the form of Apple iCloud, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive – is now the default storage option on the smartphones, netbooks, tablets and other digital devices that have become commonplace tools of fieldwork. Messages are sent to interlocutors through cloud platforms like WhatsApp. Interviews are carried out through Skype and Facetime. Apps for ethnographic research are proliferating. Evernote is replacing the field notebook. Articles are written collaboratively in browser-based cloud environments like Google Docs or Microsoft Office Online. Field reports and article drafts are circulated via Dropbox, WeTransfer, Box and Mozy.

Cloud infrastructure increasingly underpins growing areas of academic research practice. Yet to date there has been little – if any – critical reflection on the ethical, political and legal implications of cloud computing for social science researchers. The aim of this post is to begin moving discussions of digital security beyond the bare essentials of locked filing cabinets, password-protected laptops and hard drive encryption. Having spent a year and half conducting fieldwork in the cloud, becoming progressively more paranoid about data security in the process, I’d like to draw some much-needed attention to cloudy digital research practices that anthropologists increasingly engage in but may not recognise as security issues. In doing so, I hope to prompt discussion on the implications of cloud computing as it becomes increasingly infrastructured into research, teaching and administrative activities across universities. With higher education institutions turning to cloud services to deliver their e-learning and information management systems, and with research funders requiring grant awardees to deposit their field data in cloud databases, anthropologists urgently need to begin getting their heads around the cloud.

The bearable lightness of laptops 

While most anthropologists have long been aware of the ethical and security concerns surrounding the sending of sensitive information through email, the problem with the cloud is that many people don’t know what it is or even realise they are using it. Like most infrastructure, it is designed to disappear. This problematic invisibility means that cloud computing seems to fly under the ethics and security radar.

Despite the image of fluffy ethereality that the cloud metaphor conjures, the cloud is concrete, political and aggressively expanding across the surface of the planet. At its most basic, cloud computing refers to an infrastructural shift from desktop computing – where files and applications were stored on the local hard drives of our computers – to a form of online computing, where these are stored in data centres accessed remotely ‘as a service’ through the Internet. In the context of my fieldwork, ‘the cloud’ was mostly a windowless, subterranean data centre repurposed from the ruins of a Cold War bunker. It was about as far away from the sky you could possibly get, and distinctly un-cloudlike – except for its whiteness:

It’s thanks to data centres that our digital devices are so light, portable, and fieldwork-friendly. Laptops no longer have CD or DVD drives because we download our apps, programs and software online, directly from data centres. As more of our files and applications are stored in and streamed from data centres, the bulky storage drives and connectivity ports that once weighed down our devices, are being stripped away to reduce weight and replaced with minimal capacity internal memory. With most of our computing needs now implemented as web services, the main task left for our devices, as powerful as they are, is more and more just to act as portals to data centres.

But this lightness comes at a significant cost. Removing ports removes possibilities for increasing memory using external storage like USB drives or micro SD cards. And shrinking internal storage capacity means that users increasingly have little choice but to store their data in the cloud. Cloud storage is now infrastructured into smartphones, tablets and other digital devices as the default storage option. Taking these devices off-cloud is often made deliberately unclear by tech manufacturers. It is also becoming increasingly difficult, with cloud-connected devices designed to silently upload files without any fanfare, potentially leading to the inadvertent sharing of ethnographic data.

Data murk

With smartphones being used to record interviews, capture video footage, take photos, send files and write and store fieldnotes, anthropologists can now quickly generate large quantities of born-digital ethnographic data that soon exceed our mobile device’s storage capacity. In this context, the cloud, with its promise of ‘free’ and ‘unlimited’ data storage space is a tempting solution.

However, data stored in the cloud remains legally, ethically and epistemically murky. A severe lack of legislative regulation means online data is typically subject to the service level agreements and terms and conditions of each cloud provider. In cases where data stored in the cloud is unprotected by intellectual rights, you may effectively be transferring ownership of your ethnographic data. You should therefore exercise caution before storing data with any third-party cloud service providers.

Even when an online service is not specifically marketed as a ‘cloud service’, the basic rule of thumb is that any files exchanged or interactions that occur over the Internet will be stored in data centres. That means conversations through Skype, Facetime and WhatsApp. It means the mundane e-learning platforms and management systems (like Moodle), that we regularly encounter but rarely reflect upon. It also means any emails or attachments that you send (even to yourself as a back-up copy). Emails sent outside of your university network are sent in plain text and are therefore never ‘private and confidential’. As I heard many times during my fieldwork, ‘email is about as secure as a postcard’.

Passing private and perhaps sensitive ethnographic data on to unknown others in the form of cloud providers could be considered a serious breach of the fiduciary duty anthropologists have to their research participants. In the post-Snowden securityscape, we must assume that data stored in the cloud will be subject to surveillance. Commonly used cloud file-sharing services, such as Google Drive, Apple’s iCloud, Dropbox, WeTransfer, Mozy and Box will not be appropriate for sensitive or personal data.  If you find yourself having to use the cloud then you need to encrypt your files before uploading them. VeraCrypt  is an easy-to-use free tool for encrypting files in secure way before sending them online. pCloud offers fully encrypted cloud storage. Mega  is also worth mentioning – it runs some basic encryption inside the browser before the file is uploaded to protect data that is being transmitted over an open/public Wi-Fi connection against low-level snooping. Though it is certainly not ‘government-proof’.

Most university networks offer secure files storage on servers located on campus that will meet data security and privacy requirements. This provides a layer of assurance that cloud providers, who could store your data anywhere in the world, cannot.  With increasingly stringent data sovereignty regulations – where data is subject to the laws of the country in which it is stored – it may also be necessary to know the physical location(s) of the data centre(s) you are using. Storing data in local data centres may become a standard condition of future fellowships and confidentially agreements.

Ideally, anthropology departments would provide PhD students and supervisors with a secure online storage space for the transferring of field reports, research materials and other file exchanges (anything sent over the Internet should, of course, be anonymised, unless your informants have specifically requested otherwise or the conditions of consent explicitly state otherwise). Undoubtedly the safest way to share files is to physically exchange a storage device. Data centre professionals call this the ‘sneakernet’. Despite all the cloud hype, in the data centre industry, the most secure and the fastest way of transporting large volumes of data to the so-called cloud is simply to load it in the back of a ‘hardened’ truck and drive it there, giving a whole new meaning to ‘hard drive’.

The Right to Erasure 

The new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework provides ‘data subjects’ (interlocutors) with the right to have any personal data the anthropologist may hold on them permanently erased. My fieldwork experiences highlighted considerable ethical and legal dilemmas surrounding the safe and secure disposal of data stored online.

When you delete an email, file, photo, social media post or even close an online account, you are not necessarily deleting them from the data centre in which they are stored. From the cloud provider’s perspective, deletion often simply means removal from the end-user’s interface, while the information typically remains locatable at the data centre-end. Most of your online activity is simply left on data centre servers in a state of involuntary permanence. This could be considered a serious infringement of research participants’ privacy if they want or expect their data to be deleted – raising problems if researchers have promised to destroy certain data upon completion of their project.

Cloudy Futures 

Cloud technologies offer valuable new tools and virtual spaces for the storage, sharing and writing of ethnographic data. But they also pose challenges to the ethical structures of anthropology that we are only just beginning to articulate and that require us to accordingly reflect on data security in the cloud as a standard part of ethical practice. Anthropology departments, institution review boards and ethics committees need to begin to respond to the changing security requirements of the digital research environment by offering more effective training in this domain.

Confidentiality agreements, ethical obligations or digital import/export restrictions tied to research grants will no doubt soon preclude the use of third-party cloud services as standard practice. At the same time, research councils increasingly require grantees to submit their ethnographic data for indefinite storage and re-use by third parties through online public cloud platforms. These often contradictory codes and requirements at different bureaucratic, legal and ethical levels mean that the cloud is at once being infrastructured into research practice and at the same time regulated out, which will make meaningfully navigating and negotiating this cloudy terrain difficult. The powerful commercial imperatives of connectivity and the energy-intensive environmental destruction that underpin the creeping ubiquity of this computing infrastructure, make interrogating the cloud all the more urgent.

Alexander Taylor is a PhD candidate with the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His research explores how technologies and infrastructures of data storage intersect with planetary scales of security and dystopian digital futures in the data centre industry. In this post, he explores some of the security implications of cloud computing for social science research practice.

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This account is used to upload posts by guest contributors to the blog. For more information about contributing to anthro{dendum} please see our contact page.

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Pretty much everything we are going to do could be done in a plain text file. The key difference is that these apps allow you to add tags to individual paragraphs, while most text editors which support tagging only allow you to tag individual documents.¹ There isn’t really much more to it than that, but as you will see, it can be a powerful tool for doing research.

Let’s make a short sample conversation:

Q: What are your favorite fruits?
A: Apples, oranges, and pears.
Q: What do you like about those fruits in particular?
A: I associate apples with my home, where we had an apple orchard. Oranges… because we used to eat them on holidays. And pears – actually, I didn’t used to like pears, but for a while I lived in France and I got a taste for them there.
Q: I see, it sounds like apples have particularly strong associations for you?
A: That’s true. I always associate the smell with my childhood.
Q: But not oranges?
A: No, not as much.

Now let’s tag the text. We could add tags after the text, but instead we are going to try, as much as possible, to add the tags right in the text itself, as that will make it easier to highlight what we are looking for. (Note that in two cases the keyword is in the question, but not the response, so I’ve added the tag after the text.)

Q: What are your favorite fruits?
A: #Apples, #oranges, and #pears.
Q: What do you like about those fruits in particular?
A: I associate #apples with my home, where we had an apple orchard. #Oranges… because we used to eat them on holidays. And #pears – actually, I didn’t used to like pears, but for a while I lived in France and I got a taste for them there.
Q: I see, it sounds like #apples have particularly strong associations for you?
A: That’s true. I always associate the smell with my childhood. #apples
Q: But not #oranges?
A: No, not as much. #oranges

Now, we just copy and paste this into Dynalist.² (Below is a picture, but you can visit the actual outline here.)

Dynalist highlights the tags automatically. Clicking on any one will filter the text for that word. Even better, we can combine tags, searching for either both #apples AND #oranges, or either #apples OR #oranges (pictured below):

And if we want, we can expand the search to look for the same tag across all our documents. You can also export the search results to a new document containing just the selected text. And for those who like the mind map features of some professional QDA apps, Dynalist and other outliners can also export an OPML file which is readable by almost any Mind Mapping app.

List of posts in this series

• Free Your Mind, the Text Will Follow (Working With Text 1)
• RegEx 101 (Working With Text 2)
• Text-laundering (Working With Text 3)
• Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)
• Roll Your Own QDA (Working With Text 5)

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

Source

The secret is Markdown. Although Markdown started as a geeky tool for people who wanted a simple way to design webpages, it has since gained popularity for all kinds of writing as more and more text editors and note taking apps make it the default way to style your text. The idea is simple enough: where a rich text editor would show you text in italics or bold using WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), a Markdown editor will display them like this: *italics* or **bold**. At this point most people look confused. Isn’t that a step backwards? Isn’t the whole point of using computers so I don’t need to see the hidden code that styles my text? But if you’ve ever copied text and lost your formatting, or struggled when your word processing seems to think your text should be in a different style than what you expected, you know that computers don’t always behave the way we want. Making the style information visible solves that problem because if something goes wrong, you can immediately see the problem. What is great about Markdown is that the code is so simple and easy to use that (unlike LaTeX) it barely takes any time to learn.

Another advantage of Markdown is that it makes it easy to move text from one app to another, or to transform text into a web page, Microsoft Word Document, PDF, or PowerPoint presentation without too much fuss. So while this post is about an easy way to make PowerPoint presentations, it is really about the power of having your text formatted with Markdown!

Before proceeding, it is important to point out that there are many different flavors of Markdown. The original version, for instance, didn’t support footnotes, while the one used by the WordPress blogging platform that runs this site does. Similarly, there are a number of different apps that support writing presentations in Markdown, but they each use slightly different code. Some might start each new slide wherever they see a header # Which is any line that starts with a pound sign, while other apps use their own divider code. Deckset, the app I’ll be using in this tutorial, uses three dashes, like this: ---.²

For some sample text let’s take the first few lines of Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. I’m going to add some basic Markdown formatting so that it has headers (# or ##), lists (*), and block quotations (>), as well as the Deckset slide demarkation code (---). Here’s what it looks like:

# To be, or not to be 
*Hamlet*. Act III, Scene I.
by William Shakespeare

---
# To be, or not to be, that is the question:

* Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
* The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
* Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
* And by opposing end them: 

---
# to die, to sleep

> No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
> the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
> that Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
> devoutly to be wished. 

---
> To die, to sleep,
> To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,

--- 
> for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
> when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
> must give us pause. 

And here is what it looks like after running through Deckset:

You can, of course, choose from many different themes, insert images, links, and even presenter notes if you like. Nor is Deckset the only app that can do this. Slidium is another macOS app, and Marp is simpler but works on multiple platforms. Other options can be found on this list which seems to get updated regularly.

List of posts in this series

• Free Your Mind, the Text Will Follow (Working With Text 1)
• RegEx 101 (Working With Text 2)
• Text-laundering (Working With Text 3)
• Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)
• Roll Your Own QDA (Working With Text 5)

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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Consuetudium lectorum Mirum est notare. Eodem modo typi qui nunc nobis videntur parum clari fiant sollemnes in futurum? Assum Typi non habent claritatem insitam est usus legentis in iis. Claritatem Investigationes demonstraverunt lectores legere me lius quod ii legunt saepius Claritas est etiam. Nam liber tempor cum soluta. Est etiam processus dynamicus qui.

only to have it end up looking like this?

Consuetudium lectorum Mirum est notare.
Eodem modo typi qui nunc nobis videntur parum clari fiant sollemnes in futurum? Assum Typi non habent claritatem insitam est usus
legentis in iis.
Claritatem Investigationes demonstraverunt lectores legere me lius quod ii legunt saepius Claritas est etiam. Nam liber tempor cum soluta. Est etiam
processus dynamicus qui.

Most word processors have a command that lets you see invisible markers like spaces (usually represented as a faint dot “•”) and what are still quaintly called “carriage returns,” or “line feeds” (generally shown by the symbols ”¶” or “↵”).¹ If you turn that feature on, you will see that there are way too many such return symbols in the above text. It might seem like the solution would be to find and replace all those returns with spaces, but then you would have no paragraphs at all in your document. What you want to do is replace all the mid-paragraph returns, but leave those between paragraphs.

Using Regular Expressions (RegEx), as discussed in the last post in this series, what we would want to do is search for every return (or line feed) that is not followed or preceded by a return (or line feed). In addition–since some paragraphs are separated not by a blank line but by a tab or sequence of spaces at the start of the new paragraph–we want to look for those as well. I find the following search works pretty well for me: (?<=[^\r\n\t ][^\r\n])\R(?=[^\r\n][^\r\n\t ])  It is easy to find many patterns like this in online forums, as I did, saving you the trouble of having to re-invent the wheel.

If you prefer not to have to muddle around with code, there are a number of tools out there which can automate this kind of text cleanup for you. On macOS my favorite is the package of free WordService menu extensions from DEVONtechnologies. These are extensions that work with the built-in “Services” menu that pops up on macOS whenever you control-click on some selected text. The package offers a number of useful commands to do things like change the capitalization of the selected text (e.g. turn “THE APPLE” into “The Apple,” or “The apple,” etc.), reformat line breaks (or remove them altogether), and one that can give you useful statistics such as the word or character count of the selected text, etc.

Considering that WordService is free and does pretty much the same thing, you might not want to spend $45 for TextSoap, but if you already have a subscription to the Setapp bundle of macOS apps then TextSoap is included with your subscription. Another option is Textwell which works on both macOS and iOS and can do much more than just clean text. It has some built in tools, much like those offered in WordService, but (if you aren’t afraid of tweaking the JavaScript in the example code) you also can make your own actions. I really like that these can be synced between the desktop and iOS. Clean Text for iOS is even easier to use, but less customizable. Since I don’t use Windows, Linux, or Android, etc. I’ll leave it for others to recommend their favorite text cleanup tools for those platforms in the comments.

List of posts in this series

• Free Your Mind, the Text Will Follow (Working With Text 1)
• RegEx 101 (Working With Text 2)
• Text-laundering (Working With Text 3)
• Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)
• Roll Your Own QDA (Working With Text 5)

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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