MICHAEL SPOTTS:.

How iPhones and Google Docs Have Streamlined my Research

If you share a passion for study, writing, or teaching, you probably collect countless quotes and materials each month for future reference. The hard part is locating them in your archive when the time comes. Perhaps you think you have a decent system in place for recording and extracting these myriad bits of information, but here are some tricks that have helped me immensely.

Google Forms — Part of the Google Suit of free web application, Google Documents includes the ability to create online forms which automatically feed into an Excel-style spreadsheet. Creating a form is dirt simple and gives a powerful means of not only imputing quotes, but finding them later. Here is a sample form I created, which I can access on both my computer and iPhone (most of the time I use my phone).

Next, I bookmarked the URL directly onto the homescreen of my iPhone and titled the link “Research”. Now when I find a noteworthy section in paper books or online, I copy the text into the quote field, add other relevant information, and hit “send”. All of this data goes into a spreadsheet which I can search by column or row. For instance, I can search the author column for “Calvin, John” and further narrow my query by the keyword “justification”.

EasyBib — This app is a dream come true and is somehow free. You know how tedious it is to record bibliographical information. EasyBib for the iPhone allows you to simply scan bar codes from books and magazines using your phone camera (or manually type in the ISBN for older books) and it instantly pulls up citation info in MLA, Chicago, and APA formats, to paste into the form above.

 

TextGrabber + — Of course transcribing long passages from print is a pain. Thankfully, there are several OCR (optical character recognition) apps for the iPhone. My favorite is TextGrabber + (.99¢ at present) which is pretty accurate, providing you have decent lighting and a steady hand. Tip: get close and photograph only the section you are interested in, rather than the whole page. The app then becomes very accurate indeed. TG+ even recognizes foreign languages.
 

Siri — Providing you have an iPhone 4s or newer, another way to input text into your research form is Siri, the baked-in dictation program. I find this by to be the easiest method by far. First, tap the quote field in your form. The keypad will appear with a microphone icon. Tap this and begin speaking your quote (unless you’re in a library) and voila! Your text is magically transferred. How precise is it? Well, I tried confusing Siri with words like teleological and anthropomorphism, and the feature is impressively accurate. Mind, however, that your must verbalize punctuation. For instance, to dictate, “I am here; I was this, and I was that,” you must literally say, “I am here semi-colon I was this comma and I was that period.” You’ll get used to it.

AirDictate for Mac —  Now that you are familiar with Siri, another grand addition to text-input is AirDictate. This app/desktop combo allows you to dictate into your phone and have it automatically appear on your computer desktop in any text editor or field. Uncanny and awesome, and just .99¢ at present. Another similar app is MobileMouse, which is free but less intuitive.

Dragon Dictate — For those who have older iPhone, speech-to-text is still available via Dragon Dictate, a free app. It is quite accurate but more clunky than the built-in Siri software, since you have to copy and paste from the app into your form.

Free Online OCR — Easily transcribe text from image-based Google Previews, etc. It works like this: take a screen capture of just that region of text (Google Chrome has free extensions for this purpose) and upload the .jpg to the site. Within seconds the image is rendered as plain text. Tip: you may also upload photographs taken of print pages.

Conclusion: The beauty of this system is that I can sit in an easy chair with nothing but a dusty old book and a phone, dictating passages which catch my interest, and have them instantly deposited in a searchable archive which is not dependent on any particular company ten years from now. Unlike EverNote and other proprietary database systems, spreadsheets aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. This gives me as much peace of mind as it does ease as I curate my research for future use.