Electronic lab notebook question

[baratron]

Hello! I haven't written anything in livejournal for weeks. If you're wondering where I've been, the answer is mostly at home. If you're wondering why you haven't seen anything from me (and are wondering if I'm writing lots of secret things which are filtered away from you), the answer is that I genuinely have not posted anything since my public post of 22nd September. Why not? I've been busy with trying to sort out my body clock and get back into working...

I have a backlog of 5 or 6 posts to make when I find spoons for them (maybe this weekend?), but for now, I have a question for anyone who knows anything about postgraduate students and/or Macintosh computers.

I'm looking for lab notebook software that time-and-date-stamps everything you write. It's important to keep good records in case of disaster later, and it's important to have clear what you knew when. However, most of the programs labelled as "electronic lab notebooks" are designed for industry and are ridiculously expensive and feature-ful. Apparently, other postgraduate students have used Evernote, Google Notebook, Circus Ponies Notebook and wiki and blogging software - but I'm not sure how they're "getting away with it" since only wikis (to my knowledge) will datestamp everything. Even blogs are editable later, though I don't *think* you can fake the datestamp on the initial post.

Does anyone have any ideas that are easier to use than a wiki? Having to learn something akin to HTML simply to mark up my own lab notebook seems almost as much hassle as writing it out by hand, though there may be wiki editors like livejournal clients available now. (I still miss Semagic after switching from Windows to Mac - Xjournal is miles better than typing directly into the web interface, but awful compared to Semagic).

Feel free to point other people directly at this post - it's public, after all. And if you have any ideas for communities where I could ask questions like these, please let me know. The PHD Comic forums are down, and the old Papers (Mac research program) forum where you could ask anything has closed, so I'm pretty stuck for options. Thanks!

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Comments

[hoopycat (from livejournal.com)]

I generally use "normal" files (.odt, text, .pdf scans, etc) checked into a git repository, which is available on all of my machines and my usual thumbdrive. The commits are timestamped using the machine's local time(*) and depend on the entire revision history leading up to the commit, so changing something in the past is difficult(**).

The disadvantages of this approach are that it isn't an industry-standard solution (for your industry, at least), and it isn't perfect. Also, our lab machines don't have git installed.

I still use pen and a notebook out of habit, although I now use a cheap spiral-bound notebook if I don't need sequentially-numbered pages, and all of my *data* is stored electronically and committed into git. Life's too short to copy a 256-sample discrete Fourier analysis into a notebook by hand. :-)

Might also be worth taking a look at fossil(***)... Dawn has been experimenting with this for a different application, and I've been impressed by its usability. This might fall too close to "wiki" from a markup standpoint(****), though. -rt (from the Detroit Manual of Style department)

(*) Which can be changed, of course, so I commit frequently and monotonically out of habit.
(**) Probably not impossible, especially if you have access to all copies of the repository. Sharing it with other people makes this much more difficult.
(***) http://fossil-scm.org/ specifically http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/event.wiki
(****) Although there are great strides being made on the ease-of-use front with the wiki concept... see http://sapling.rocwiki.org/ and for example http://sapling.rocwiki.org/Front_Page/_history/16...17 for LocalWiki's approach to markup. A WYSIWYWGILWF(******) editor on front of honest-to-goodness, god-fearing HTML5, with ... well, let's just say the differences-between part is a little gamey yet. Still, this is a good thing: there's a crapload of embedded rich text editors out there, so you shouldn't *have* to pound out your own HTML or whatnot.(*****)
(*****) I should have just numbered the footnotes, you know?
(******) What You See Is What You Would Get If Life Were Fair, the new benchmark for programmatic markup generation.
(*have*) Not a footnote.