A little update and an announcement
The update
The last few months were lost to a grant application whose contents iCloud deleted from the Word document where I was keeping everything. Getting that repaired meant several sleepless nights rewriting the application from scratch, followed by a research rabbit hole to identify the problem and find a solution. The conclusions were: 1) iCloud and Microsoft products not playing nicely together is a known problem, which doesn’t affect most users until suddenly something breaks; 2) neither side is interested in fixing it based on how long the incompatibility has been going on; 3) the solution is to store documents as markdown files when using clouds and then style them locally in one’s preferred word processor.
The styling problem led to an emotional state that suspiciously resembled the bargaining stage of the grieving process as I sought out some word processor, any word processor, that had a Word-style user interface whilst allowing saving in either Word or markdown format. I found two. One’s expensive and the other won’t say what type of access they have to user data. There went that idea.
So I gave up productively procrastinating, accepted that I was simply going to have to have to juggle multiple applications, and began the process of migrating all my notes to open source applications that are cloud-provider agnostic.
That migration in turn unearthed that my Zotero library is over 20GB (eeek!) and I have almost 1TB of loose, uncatalogued notes from my doctorate spread across multiple note-taking applications and physical notebooks. My summer’s work is cut out for me.
The announcement
The US National Archive has granted me the Commended Scholar award in part because of Oxford Dawn.
Link to the official announcement: https://archivesfoundation.org/news/2026-cokie-winners/.
Oxford Dawn’s regular content will resume soon.
Happy Tuesday!
MLD