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A recent question on how best to organize the chapters in a dissertation made us think that maybe others might be interested in sharing their thoughts on how they use IdeaMason to organize their own large projects.

Here are our basic thoughts on the subject even though there are so many ways to organize materials in IdeaMason. Whether you are organizing chapters of a book or chapters of your dissertation you might want to think about using activities to delineate each chapter as part of a single project. A chapter is a physical organization of a work which fits perfectly with the organizational structure represented by projects and activities. Create a new project and then for each chapter - create a new activity. When you are working on a particular chapter you can set the “Working Activity” field to that Activity on the portfolio homepage. Each idea and source you enter is then automatically filed under that project/activity. If you organize your work in this way, it frees up categories for keywords and topics, rather than using them for structural or organizational separation.

Since you will probably work chapter by chapter through a large project you might want to create a different composition per chapter. Then name the composition something like Chapter 2 - … and assign it to the activity related to the chapter.

The flexibility of the portfolio structure within IdeaMason brings up another thought when it comes to organizing and working with your materials–that of using ideas and sources in one or more activities across a single Portfolio. For example, a dissertation takes several years to complete and in that time you typically use a lot of the material you collect and write in other papers, published articles and even presentations. This is where IdeaMason can really benefit even the most rudimentarily organized person. Each item whether source or material can be used in one or more activities.

Let’s say you have your core work for your dissertation organized into a single project with each chapter in a separate activity. You might take the work from a particular chapter/activity and use it as the basis for an article. All you need to do is create a new project and then a new activity for each article you write. Then just assign the material in the Portfolio related to the article you are working on. Now the work from your original chapter in your dissertation is dually assigned to both the dissertation and the off-shoot paper. This gives you an instant starting point for your new article.