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ed to then convert that date of publication to new style by adding 11 days to it assuming the dates are 1700 or later before 1700 the os calendar was 10 days behind the ns calendar but i want to keep the original os publication date as well for citation purposes so i replace the old os date on the front of the filename with the new ns date and append the original date to the end of the filename with an os after it for good measure and delete the pdf and bob s your uncle in testing it works when you shift from one month to another e g january 27 converts to february 7 and even from year to year i won t worry about the occasional leap year 1704 1708 1712 nor will i worry about how some newspapers used lady day march 25 as their year end meaning that they went from december 30 1708 to january 2 1708 and only caught up to 1709 in late march nor does it help that their issue numbers are often wrong i m too lazy to figure out how to make the following applescript code format like code in wordpress but the basics look like this convert english newspaper title from osstartdate to nsenddate startdate os 2 for weekday based very loosely off add prefix to names created by christian grunenberg sat may 15 2004 modified by liz and jamel ostwald may 26 2017 copyright c 2004 2014 all rights reserved based on c 2001 apple inc tell application id dntp try set this_selection to the selection if this_selection is then error please select some contents repeat with this_item in this_selection set current_name to the name of this_item set mydate to texts 1 thru offset of in current_name 1 of current_name set myname to texts 11 thru 5 of current_name set newdate to the current date set the year of newdate to texts 1 thru 4 of mydate set the month of newdate to texts 6 thru 7 of mydate set the day of newdate to texts 9 thru 10 of mydate set enddate to newdate 2 days set newdate to newdate 13 days tell newdate set daystamp to day set monthstamp to its month as integer set yearstamp to year end tell set daystamp to texts 2 thru 1 of 0 daystamp as text set monthstamp to texts 2 thru 1 of 0 monthstamp as text set formatdate to yearstamp monthstamp daystamp as text tell enddate set daystamp2 to day set monthstamp2 to its month as integer set yearstamp2 to year end tell set daystamp2 to texts 2 thru 1 of 0 daystamp2 as text set monthstamp2 to texts 2 thru 1 of 0 monthstamp2 as text set formatenddate to yearstamp2 monthstamp2 daystamp2 as text set new_item_name to formatdate myname formatenddate os set the name of this_item to new_item_name end repeat on error error_message number error_number if the error_number is not 128 then display alert devonthink pro message error_message as warning end try end tell so once i do all those things i can use a smart group and sort the spotlight comment column chronologically to get an accurate sense of the chronological order in which publications discussed events this screenshot shows the difference some of the english newspapers haven t been converted yet i m doing it paper by paper because the papers were often published on different schedules but here you can see how os and ns dates were mixed in willy nilly say comparing the fixed flying boy and evening post with the yet to be fixed london gazette and daily courant issues of course the reality has to be even more complicated because it s history since an english newspaper published on january 1 1702 os will publish items from continental newspapers dating those articles in ns e g a 1702 01 01 os english newspaper will have an article dated 1702 01 05 ns from a dutch paper so when i take notes on a newspaper issue i ll have to change the leading ns date of the new note to the date on the article byline so it will sort chronologically where it belongs but still may 10 2017 in methodology research leave a comment there s gotta be a better way in preparation for a new introductory digital history course that i ll be teaching in the fall i ve been trying to think about how to share my decades of accumulated computer wisdom with my students says the wise sage stroking his long white beard since my personal experience with computers goes back to the 80s actually the late 70s with oregon trail on dial up in the school library i m more of a web 1 0 guy other than blogs i pretty much ignore social media like facebook and twitter not to mention snapchat instagram pinterest and try to do most of my computer work on a screen larger than 4 so i guess that makes me a kind of cyber troglodyte in 2017 but i think that does allow me a much broader perspective of what computers can and can t do one thing i have learned to appreciate for example is how many incremental workflow improvements are readily available shortcuts that don t require writing python from the terminal line as a result i ll probably start the course with an overview of the variety of ways computers can help us complete our tasks more quickly and easily which requires understanding the variety of ways in which we can achieve these efficiencies after a few minutes of thought and approval from my full stack computer programming wife i came up with this spectrum that suggests the ways in which we can make computers do more of our work for us toil silicon slave toil automation spectrum it s only a model undoubtedly others have already expressed this basic idea but most of the digital humanities digital history i ve seen online is much more focused on the extreme right of this spectrum e g the quite useful but slightly intimidating programming historian this makes sense if you re trying to distantly read big data across thousands of documents but i m not interested in the debate whether real digital humanists need to program or not and in any case i m focused on undergraduate history majors that often have limited computer skills mobile apps are just too easy therefore i m happy if i can remind students that there are a large variety of powerful automation features available to people with just a little bit of computer smarts and an internet connection things that don t require learning to speak javascript or python fluently call it kaizen if you want the middle of the automation spectrum in other words so i ll want my students for example to think about low hanging fruit efficiency fruit that they can spend five minutes googling and save themselves hours of mindless labor as an example i m embarrassed to admit that it was only when sketching this spectrum that i realized that i should try to automate one of the most annoying features of my current note taking system the need to clean up hundreds of pdfs downloaded from various databases google books gale s newspaper and book databases etc if you spend any time downloading early modern primary sources or scan secondary sources you know that the standard file format continues to be adobe acrobat pdfs and if you ve seen the quality of early modern ocr d text you know why having the original page images is a good idea but you may want for example to delete pages from pdfs that include various copyright text that text will confuse dtpo s ai and your searches i m sure there are more sophisticated ways of doing that but the spectrum above should prompt you to wonder whether adobe acrobat has some kind of script or macro feature that might speed up deleting such pages from 1 000s literally of pdf documents that you ve downloaded over the years and lo and behold adobe acrobat does indeed have an automation feature that allows you to carry out the same pdf manipulation again and again once you realize there s gotta be a better way you only need to figure out what that feature is called in the application in question for adobe acrobat it used to be called batch processing but in adobe acrobat pro dc such mass manipulations now fall under the actions moniker so google adobe acrobat actions and you ll quickly find websites that allow you to download various actions people have created which allows you to quickly learn how the feature works and to modify existing actions for example i made this acrobat action to add ps primary source to the keywords metadata field of every pdf file in the designated folder i already copied and tweaked macros and applescripts that will add keywords to rich text files in my devonthink database but this adobe solution is ideal after i ve downloaded hundreds of pdfs from say a newspaper database similarly this next action will delete the last page of every pdf in the designated folder i just hardcoded to delete page 4 because i know newspaper x always has 4 pages i can sort by file size to locate any outliers and the last page is always the copyright page with the nasty text i want to delete i can for example change the exact page number for each newspaper series though there s probably a way to make this a variable that the user can specify with each use computers usually have multiple ways to do any specific task for us non programmers the internet is full of communities of nerds who explain how to automate all sorts of software tasks forums fora are truly a god send but it first requires us to expect more from our computers and our software for any given software rtfm as they say and then check out the software s website forum you ll be amazed at the stuff you find hopefully all that time you save from automation won t be spent obsessively reading the forum january 5 2015 in methodology 1 comment devonthink update in case anybody wonders whether dtpo can handle large databases here are the current stats for my main wss database wss db as of 2015 01 05 read more september 9 2014 in methodology 8 comments devonthink usage scenario notecarding an image pdf my post ideas are usually extremely long and involved which means i have a few dozen drafts that aren t finished so i ll take a different tack for dt and just include a series of short ish post on how i m using dt now showing a variety of usage scenarios with screen shots 1100 words isn t particularly short for a blog but it s my blog unfortunately nobody that i know of has come up with a typology of the types of notes one might take beyond the barebones so i m calling this one the rtf notecard from specific page of image pdf technique not quite flying crane but i lack the buddhist monks combination of wisdom and careful observation of the natural world this post largely explains the process that replaces what i described in an earlier post with thanks to korm on the dt support forum for the applescript which i then tweaked say you ve got a pdf of a primary source without text ocr doesn t work in dt it could be a scanned volume of archival documents could be an old book 1 i open the pdf in a separate window move and resize the window to fill more than half the screen and zoom in to a comfortable reading level 2 start reading 3 when i come across something that is worth taking note of i take note of specifically i select the page either cmd a with the focus in the page not the thumbnails or just drag across the page you don t need to actually select any text per se which helps because there isn t any text in an image only pdf 4 then i invoke the new rtf from selected text with url to pdf macro ctl opt cmd p for me as discussed in the aforementioned post this prompts you to title the new document name it and you have power over it i overwrite the default the name of the original pdf file and instead use a substantive title like an executive summary of the point being made e g tutchin says the french are morons this popup window is really helpful because it forces you to make a summary remember that efficient note taking requires a brief summary which relieves you from having to reread the same quote possibly several sentences or even a paragraph every time you need to figure out what it says one of the most useful examples is how naming your files by summary makes it much easier to plow through search results when you re performing a needle in a haystack search impact of naming conventions on search results from a previous post in needle in a haystack searches most notes aren t what you re looking for you need a quick way to discard false hits in many other instances you re looking for a specific variation on a theme you need a quick way to distinguish similar items thus a summary title allows you to quickly see that a specific note isn t on the right topic it similarly allows you to quickly find a certain variation on the general theme of french stupidity for example having columns to sort the search results by would also facilitate this 5 after i ve named the rtf note and hit enter i m prompted to send it to a particular group select group not tag for the purposes of speed i usually just default to the inbox by pressing return and then use the auto classify to help me process them in the inbox in a single session but you could if you want find the proper group not tag however and then that will be the default group from then on usually though the same ps will be addressing different topics which would require navigating my 1000s of groups in that tiny little window so i go for speed at this phase then the code does more magic it adds a link from the original pdf to the new rtf note in the url field which is the blue link at the top of the rtf this allows you to jump back to the original whenever you want the code also copies the title of the pdf file to the spotlight comments of the new rtf field bonus material i use the spotlight comments as another place to put the provenance info that way if i ever need to cite a specific file i can just select the record in dt s list pane tab to the spotlight comments field copy the already selected text and then paste it elsewhere the code also opens up the new rtf in its own window which you may need to relocate resize and pastes the file name into the content of the rtf file i do that last step because the ai only works on alphanumeric characters within the file not the file name or other metadata original and notes side by side 6 now the blinking cursor is in the rtf with the original image visible just waiting for your input you can make further notes and comments or transcribe however much of the ps you desire 7 then you add additional tags or groups in the tag bar of the rtf ctl tab from the content pane you can also run auto classify the magic hat if you want to move it to a different group or have other suggested groups that you then manually enter in remember that auto classify moves the record to a different group so don t use it if you ve gone to the trouble of already selecting a group in step 5 8 when you re all done with this single notecard close it now you re back to the original pdf where you left off continue your reading and repeat the process to your heart s content 9 if you send all your rtf notes to the inbox you ll need at some point to go to the inbox and assign the notecards rtfs to groups either with auto classify or by as...