Re: how do scientists use org mode?

[Simon Thum <simon.thum@gmx.de>]

Hi Christopher,

to add my 2c: I'm using org-mode to track our participation in a 
mid-sized project (9 Partners, ~30 People, 3 Years). I'm not 
coordinating, in which case I'd probably look for more project 
management centric tools, and thus found org-mode to be very useful.

I use it to track the project state, not hard data (which is typically 
massive), our commitments and other's compliance with their commitments, 
and all the rest that comes up and needs project context: Ideas, tasks, 
deadlines, project reports & what not. The outline of this file reflects 
the project structure. I have tags for partners and people in that file, 
so e.g. when I speak someone I can easily check for further things to 
discuss.

Big projects get their own file, for smaller projects and commitments I 
have a few more files. I'm not using the attachments as it's 
unfortunately a very microsoft-wordey project where git won't help much, 
but plan to use them privately. Ah yes, I use org-mode for private stuff 
too. It's the first tool that I use for more than a month.

I use export (tags) to inform my supervisor and other people on the 
project about certain aspects, which usually works OK. I also found the 
custom links to be helpful, as we have multiple web frontends for 
project-specific matters whose contents I can link in easily this way.

The whole thing synced to a server using git, which saved my shiny a few 
times. This is something I wouldn't recommend anyone to put off, even if 
your backup schedule is in minutes.

HTH,

Simon


On 01/30/2012 06:37 PM, Christopher W. Ryan wrote:
> I'm fairly experienced with emacs, ESS, Sweave, and R, but I've only
> started to dabble in Org mode in the past couple of weeks. Just as
> Christoph is, I'm trying to decide whether/how Org-mode might be useful
> in organizing and carrying out research projects, presentations, etc. So
> this thread has been very useful and timely.
>
> I'm trying to envision what a small research project, managed via a
> single Org file, might look like. There would be notes from meetings,
> thoughts from brainstorming sessions, scheduled appointments, data, R
> code, R output, and manuscript/presentation prose. Some of this might be
> destined for a manuscript, some for a beamer presentation, and some only
> for "internal consumption." How are all these pieces differentiated in
> the Org file, so that Org knows what to put in the
> presentation/manuscript, and what not to? Could anyone share or point to
> a short, perhaps fictional, example?
>
> Thanks very much.
>
> --Chris
> Christopher W. Ryan, MD
> SUNY Upstate Medical University Clinical Campus at Binghamton
> 425 Robinson Street, Binghamton, NY  13904
> cryanatbinghamtondotedu
>
> "Observation is a more powerful force than you could possibly reckon.
> The invisible, the overlooked, and the unobserved are the most in danger
> of reaching the end of the spectrum. They lose the last of their light.
>> From there, anything can happen . . ."  [God, in "Joan of Arcadia,"
> episode entitled, "The Uncertainty Principle."]
>
> Tomas Grigera wrote:
>> Hi Cristoph
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 15:27, John Hendy<jw.hendy@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 3:21 PM, GMX Christoph 13<christoph-13@gmx.net>  wrote:
>>>> Hi
>>>> this is my first post here and although I am evaluating org mode with great interest, I am also asking myself in which way other scientists are making use of org mode. It will take a while to get my head around how to accomplish certain things in org mode but for the moment I am intrigued by *why* one would want to approach the problem of organizing one's research with org mode and in which way.
>>>
>>> [...]
>>
>> Thomas, Eric and John gave very useful answers, I just want to add my
>> $0.02 as a physicist who recently (about a year ago) started using Org
>> mode.  I started mainly looking for a workflow organization system,
>> but slowly discovered it has many other possibilities. For research, I
>> find org-babel is a great tool. It allows you to have a document
>> collecting together thoughts and discussion along with data, data
>> analysis, scripts for data manipulations and plots (Org tables are
>> actually more like a spreadsheet since Org supports quite complex
>> formulas and even plotting directly from the table).  The many export
>> possibilities mean that you can share your notes with colleagues not
>> using Org (or even Emacs).
>>
>> I have also discovered it is a great tool for drafting presentations
>> and then actually producing your slides via Latex- Beamer export.
>>
>> HTH,
>>
>> Tomas
>>
>
>