Collecting and organizing years of research, ongoing research, striving for accuracy, writing, revising, sharing the information, and most of all backing everything up, all take technology. There are wonderful special tools for writers like Scrivener, Carbonite and Zotero. I use ChatGPT and Claude for organizing, though not for writing.
After more than three years of researching, I had almost 600 pages of notes. I used headings, but sometimes duplicated them or put information in the wrong place. A few of my sources were still waiting to be verified. ChatGPT and Claude saved me in time for this trip. They created a workbook that has a section for Scholarly Dialogue with lists of questions I want to follow up on
with people I meet here.
In the meantime, differences between my laptop computer, iPad and cellphone take time to learn. I’m still not as proficient as I want to be on the iPad. My friend Jim, who promotes events and interesting people, told me I needed a recorder. “Do not use your phone,” he said. “Invariably you need to look something up or you get a call.” After talking with more friends, I ended up with
Plaud. I have barely intro level skills with this.
The master of all this tech is Jeff. It is no hyperbole to say I couldn’t do this without his generous gift of time (massive amounts of time) and expertise (massive amounts of expertise), not to mention patience (again, massive amounts). Getting into the spirit of the adventure Jeff sent this self-portrait. Normally we don’t want tech and pirate in the same sentence, but Jeff is not a real pirate. He just plays one on Disney cruises.
Thank you, Jeff!
Go raibh maith agat!