More Bio Data Options
Hypertext-infused philosophy personal database software
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#33 More Bio Data Options
This is a really trivial feature request, since right now I can do everything via the existing record via the "Overview" text box, but I figure why not...
I would like to keep track of someone's academic twitter account, if they have one, the way Hypernomicon lets me keep track of their website. (Even better would be if next to the twitter account there were a checkbox I could check to indicate that I follow them on twitter.)
I would like to keep track of someone's pronouns, again the way Hypernomicon lets me keep track of their website or whatever.
I would like to keep track of where (and when) someone got their PhD/who their advisor was/both (maybe in one combined thing) and even perhaps who was on the committee although I personally don't think I've ever cared about that (but I might in the future for someone?). I guess thinking very far in advance with a degree of hopefuleness that is likely unwarranted but which is perhaps relevant to other potential users, I might like a way to indicate that I was someone's advisor or on their committee? Mostly just spitballing here.
Also, although maybe this would require a rework which is too extensive, it would be nice if the "Institution" feature were tied in with the "Rank" feature, "Status" feature, etc. For instance, right now if someone is a postdoc in the polisci dept at Blank University, and then moves to Example University's philosophy dept as an assistant professor, and then gets promoted to associate professor, I can't keep track of most of that information. Their postdoc rank disappears from Hypernomicon, as does their position at Blank University. But if the postdoc rank were tied to the Blank U position, then when I add a new position and it prompts me for a new rank (if any) I could still look back at the old position and rank. I think my point is probably clear but if not I can explain this better.
I am actually always telling my students to avoid Twitter if they want to do philosophy better, hahaha. I am curious, does following people on Twitter actually play a useful and specific/direct research-related role for you? I've never found Twitter to be a place to go to help me write a paper or do philosophy research, but I'm curious if it does for you. I might be behind the curve in this regard.
If the goal is just to use Hypernomicon as a place to keep tabs on people other than research-related reasons, I would resist that; it's not really intended to serve a social-media-like function.
For purposes of keeping track of someone's history of ranks and affiliations, I can see how that would be useful, but my personal way of dealing with this is just to try to make the person's CV easily accessible. For example, I check to make sure the CV is easily available from the person's website, or if not, I might download their CV and create a Misc. File record accessible from the person record tab. Sometimes keeping track of a person's history might seem interesting/useful but I don't find myself really needing to do it that often. For example, if someone is recording that I am a postdoc at Toronto, I'm not sure the fact that I got my PhD at UCSD would do them much good. I was a very heterodox thinker at UCSD, so if someone tried to make conclusions about how I think from the fact I was trained there, they would probably be incorrect (and they wouldn't be the first...).
Sometimes the CV isn't available, or sometimes the CV doesn't have the information I care about (or sometimes it's a disorganized unreadable mess); in that small number of cases I will just jot down some important details in the person record description, like who their PhD advisor was, where/when they got their PhD, etc. I also add a hyperlink in the PhD advisor's record back to them. Since the need for it doesn't come up that often (for me at least), I think it's fine to do it that way. I also might lean against having a specific field for "PhD advisor" because sometimes the important person historically in someone's development was somebody on their committee but not their advisor, or just somebody they studied under for their undergrad or master's. Again, the fact that someone is your PhD advisor can also lead to wrong conclusions, so I wouldn't want to record it very often (only in cases where it is definitely useful to know).
As always I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but this is the reasoning when I've considered some of these things in the past.
I don't follow a ton of people on twitter yet so it's hard to tell if it's useful, and the reason I'd like the thing in Hypernomicon is that when I'm looking at someone I'd like to follow on twitter it would remind me if I'm not following them on twitter. The general hope is that people share articles/thoughts they find interesting and I'd find that useful (for research purposes) at least for some people, like the ones I'd like to follow on twitter (i.e. the scholars whose taste in articles and thoughts on topics I most respect or want to remain apprised of). We'll see if it's a worthwhile endeavor though. Like you I wasn't really on twitter for a while which is why it's even a live question when I look at a profile in Hypernomicon whether or not I'm already following them.
The reason I wanted the PhD/advisor tracking stuff is that this stuff sometimes isn't on the CV and it would be cleaner to have it in the bio data section rather than adding it into the investigation area. There's no more detailed reason than that. I only record PhD advisor stuff when it strikes me as relevant so I wouldn't bother filling it out for most peoplein the system, but already there are a few people I've added because they shared and advisor with me and I didn't realize it (since Dick has been around a while!). Ditto for recording PhD institution - mostly I've just been noting down people who went to UCSD who I didn't know went to UCSD, and that's just to have something to say tot hemin an email if I ever want to reach out to them for something or other. Hypernomicon is the only place I'm taking notes on peope in the first place so the thought was just "let's take all the stuff I'd ever conceivably take notes on and that might make sense as a separate field in Hypernomicon and suggest making it a field." The investigations tab works well enough though (except for recording institution history, which, once a PhD student gets a postdoc and then gets a job or two, it'll be more work to track that manually than if Hypernomicon kept a list for me).
I am making an improvement that will address these issues in a small way: in the next version you will be able to indicate whether someone's affiliation with an institution is "Past" or not. Still mulling over some other possibilities.
+1 for pronouns. At least, the Overview box could perhaps be initialised with text "Pronouns: ..."
It's a good way to show solidarity, seems a relatively small addition, and is genuinely useful: once I was convinced that I remembered someone's pronouns but then couldn't subsequently find the information easily. I have a person record for this person! So I should have written their pronouns in the Overview box (along with a link to the web page where this information was described).
That gives me an interesting idea. Maybe it would be good for the user to be able to define a template for a given record type. So if you have defined a template, then when you create a new record the main text field would be populated with the template text rather than starting out blank. Then if you want you could include "Pronouns: ...", place to put birth/death years, nationality, etc. There could just be a menu option like "Set current text as template for this record type." It would be pretty simple to implement.
Also to revisit the idea of associating academic rank with institutions: I still find myself mulling this over, and even sometimes wondering "Why, again, doesn't it do that yet?" The main difficulty is that right now, there is a place to put what the person's main academic rank is. They might simultaneously be a professor at institution X, a lecturer at Y, and a non-tenured researcher at Z. It would be redundant to have the existing non-institution-associated rank field in addition to these. But without the non-institution-associated rank field, there's no place that their primary rank is recorded. One way to solve this is for the ranks to be assigned a literal numerical ranking and display whatever their highest institution-associated rank is. But it becomes tricky because the ranks mean different things in different countries; "Lecturer" is a low rank in the U.S. and a high rank in the U.K. for example. Or maybe the onus should just be on the user to put the most important institutional affiliation at the top of the list.
On second thought, the more I think about it, the more I think the pros of having redundant fields outweighs the cons. In most cases there probably won't be multiple institutions anyway. Now I'm thinking that in the most common case, where there is just one institutional affiliation, it should just enforce that the rank for that institution will be the same as the main rank field; if you change one it changes the other. Okay I think that's how I'm going to (eventually) implement this unless there are any objections.
Last edit: Jason Winning 2022-06-24
If you want to avoid the redundant fields, in addition to adding "position" to the institution, you can add a date field. So if someone is at Example University from 2012-2018 and Stipulation College from 2018-Present, it would display their current affiliation as Stipulation College. If someone has multiple current affiliations (like Nancy splitting her time between UCSD and Durham) they could both be marked "presently" and both show up as the current affiliation. In fact even if the dates weren't used to determine current affiliation it would still be helpful to have that information in there, so I'd want that field either way!
The dates would also solve the promotion issue: If someone is asst prof at Example College from 2012-2017 and associate prof at Example College from 2017-present, that information could be captured if each institutional affiliation has an associated date range.
The description templates I mentioned in the "That gives me an interesting idea" post above will now be implemented in the release immediately following 1.24.2. There will be a "Settings" dropdown button next to the font size dropdown in the text editor.