Léo Varnet @leovarnet@qoto.org

@gkountourides What I did at the time of my PhD to "initiate" the writing process was to group and organize all of the scientific articles I had read during my PhD into a coherent plan with sections and subsections. I then used this as the plan for my literature review chapter. I find it easier to start writing when you know where you're going and you just have to fill in predefined paragraphs (and it's also practical in therms of scheduling because you can divide the writing into small tasks like "today I write the paragraph on X, tomorrow the paragraph on Y, ...") #academicchatter #phd #writing #phdchat

A great way to start the year: finding that one's work on the neural encoding of noisy whistles by guinea pigs is featured on the front cover of the January issue of the Journal of Physiology!
(The article by Samira Souffi et al. is freely available here https://hal-cnrs.archives-ouvertes.fr/U1120/hal-03853055v1 or behind paywall here https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/JP283526)

@emkmiller @academicchatter @academicsunite @phdstudents @phdlife @PhD_Genie
3) So I also extract snippets from everything I read, like @jnyrose, and store them in a very large OneNote folder (sorry, I haven't found a suitable alternative) with many entries. I must say this is very satisfying, but I don't know if it is useful: I never had to go back to it to look for all the citations on a specific topic.

@emkmiller @academicchatter @academicsunite @phdstudents @phdlife @PhD_Genie
2) ...So I also keep a spreadsheet of all articles with columns "Authors", "Journal", "Year", but also "Stimulus content", "Task", "Analysis method", etc... The last column is a field "Topic" for which the keywords are organized in a tree to avoid duplicates (http://dbao.leo-varnet.fr/2022/05/20/a-mind-map-of-concepts-in-auditory-speech-perception/). This makes it easier to find a reference when you have only one fragment of memory about it. But to be honest, I think it's mostly useful to force me to organize my thoughts when reading.
However, this is only for article references ...

@emkmiller @academicchatter @academicsunite @phdstudents @phdlife @PhD_Genie
Personally, I use 3 parallel methods to organize and browse the articles/books I read:
1) #Zotero, like many people here. However, I use it mostly to facilitate the creation of bibliographies. However, the metadata system is not flexible enough for my taste...

Another very interesting piece in this museum is the Mini-componium, a replica of the original Componium built by Diederich Nikolaus Winkel in 1821. This remarkable mechanical music instrument can vary the music it plays using a randomizing mechanism! In fact, the Componium creates endless variations on a theme by selecting randomly one of the 8 possible melodies every two measures.
In a sense, this is a very early example of
#ComputerMusic #AlgorithmicComposition
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Componium)
(3/3)
#musicbox #music

These music boxes were probably built at the end of the 19th century. An extra feature is the panorama of the horse race in the cabinet. By inserting a coin, the music is played and one can gamble on the winning horse. The machines were designed in such a way that the winning horse could not be predicted with any certainty.

I don't know how it works, but this is maybe one of the earliest random number generator! (2/2)

Yesterday I visited the Speelklok museum in Utrecht, an exhibition of an incredible number of self-playing instruments. Among them, I was particularly amazed by the "Horse Race" music boxes... (1/2)