What is a "research notes" blog? Why have one?
At the end of the 2004 spring semester I was staring at the pile of journal articles on my desk. They will all be useful later; I also have an economic development reading list of additional sources -- mostly yet to be obtained -- and a file drawer full of economic development articles gathered while writing my masters thesis.
I was thinking: "How the hell can I keep track of all this?"
My first thought was commercial bibliography software. But after spending some time investigating that idea, I couldn't see that it would do a lot more for me than just maintaining a master bibliography with Word -- which is how I got through my masters thesis.
I spent the next couple of days getting caught up on household chores but I kept thinking about my bibliography issue. Two thoughts came to mind.
First, I thought about how, earlier in the semester, I had told my wife how blogging public policy-related news had paid off in at least one of my classes. In my Political Economy course, we had to write a number of short papers on various topics. Several of my topics were one I had blogged about earlier. One was rent-seeking in the taxicab industry; another was a suggestion for making transparent the subsidies to public college tuition.
It turned out to be very handy to have what amounted to an online, searchable database of links to news articles about various topics.
The second thought was of something I had read by Brad DeLong:
I have decided that my strategy will be to gradually expose everything on my hard disk to the world and rely on Google to make it easily searchable.
Naturally, I was able to find his blog entry by using Google; I didn't have it bookmarked.
So, those two thoughts combined to result in this blog. It has two main parts: a bibliography, to organize source reference information, and the actual blog, where I'll post summaries, notes, and commentary related to the sources. I also plan to link to news articles that are directly related to my research topics.
This is truly "blogging for myself." Much of what is blogged here may be preliminary, cursory, and not of much interest to others. Posts that are more complete, better written, and possibly of wider interest will be cross-posted, or at least noted, in my general interest blog.
I'm mainly "exposing this material to the world" to help me find it later, but you're welcome to peek in if you have any interest.
Posted by Chip on May 15, 2004 at 05:51 AM