I will be spending the first week in June in the UK, conducting (preliminary) research. I plan to collect material related to my dissertation and also scope out the archives enough so that I can determine whether it’s worthwhile to return. This, and future trips (in state, thankfully), have me thinking about what tools I want to carry with me.
I was initially planning to only carry my iPad and its keyboard case to take notes and run a spreadsheet of photos taken which I could use when I got home. However, I will now also be Skyping in to class one night, and I’m a bit concerned about backing up my photos. I know that I can download the SD card onto my iPad and then upload them to Dropbox, but I have yet to figure out a good way of selecting 50-100 photos at a time on the iPad.
I could, of course, bring my laptop. My 15 inch, 6 lb, late 2008 MacBook pro which slows down running Chrome and TweetDeck at the same time. Now that I have a desktop (long story), I’d like to replace this with something lighter and more portable that I can use in archives or around town, but which doesn’t need to be able to run large-scale software programs. If I had a fairy godmother, or a winning Powerball ticket, I’d get a MacBook Air. It’s not that I’m wedded to Apple as a company or even as an OS, it’s just that I dislike Windows OS and have been using Apple products since the mid 1980s.
A much cheaper alternative would be a Chromebook (probably the Samsung model XE303C12). It’s got a small, solid-state hard drive, only 16GB, but it also has two USB ports, which would allow me to transfer files from my SD card to cloud storage or even an external drive. In some ways, especially given the limitations of the Chrome-based OS, it might seem little different from the iPad. On the other hand, it does have USB ports and file selection using a mouse rather than a touchscreen.
I’m open to advice from computer geeks, fellow researchers and digital humanists. What do you take when you travel, and what would you take if someone gave you a winning powerball ticket?
Good question. Re: iPad, I recently got the camera connection kit & won’t be using it for a while, so if you wanted to borrow & try it, let me know. Not sure if that helps with the cloud storage thing or not though
If you mean the little SD card reader thingy, I have one of those. As far as I can tell, the only option from there is to download to the iPad and then group-back-up to dropbox as pictures. I’m still trying to find a way to get them from the SD card to Dropbox as files.
I’m suffering with the same problem for my trip to LA. This is my tentative plan so far. Take it all with me. iPad, laptop, Bluetooth keyboard, and camera. Take only iPad, camera, and keyboard with me to the library for research and leave laptop where I’m staying. Use iPad to track the photos while taking them then when get home at night, spend an hour or so transferring pictures to laptop and organizing them how I want on an external hard drive I use for all my dissertation research.
The Chromebook might be more viable than you think — apparently you can uninstall the Chrome OS at install Ubuntu (http://lifehacker.com/how-to-install-linux-on-a-chromebook-and-unlock-its-ful-509039343 ). Gotta say that ANY of this beats the first time I lugged a Toshiba T1000 to an archive. Dual 3.5″ floppy drives; no hard drive.
Ooh, interesting.
Good point about the floppies (eek!). If I take the laptop (increasingly likely), it’ll stay in my hotel and I’ll take the iPad to the archive. Makes it easier to go for dinner after the archive (smaller bag)