Surface Go and Surface Pro from Microsoft

Introduction

It used to be the case that library and archive material was stored on paper or microfiche and the only way that it could be accessed was by physically going to a library and reading it. You would take notes in an A5 notebook written in pencil or make a photocopy. That was the limit to both research materials and the means to record them.

Now in the digital age, journal articles come as PDFs, books as e-Books and websites add further material, so that sitting in a library/archive allows a worldwide access to a huge range of material. How does this affect the "Writing Cycle" of turning research material into notes and then facing about and turning your notes into an essay or dissertation.

Well there is plenty of practical advice from experts such as Dr Katherine Firth however my interest is in the tools that we can use to make research process more efficient.

Powerful tablets

Recent years has seen the advent of smaller, lighter computers such as netbooks or powerful tablets such as the iPad Pro or Microsoft's Surface Pro and new Surface Go. These modern tablets combine the convenience of small size of a Kindle for reading or web browsing, with a detachable keyboard for typing and a touchscreen for fingers or pen. Enough computing power to do office tasks and a camera to capture images or video and you have a potentially powerful machine to use in research.

I picked the Surface Go for the simple reason that unlike many more powerful tablets it runs Windows 10 (S or Home) operating system and so is fully compatible with my laptop or desktop machines. Also I took the decision to optimise this tablet for research and left all the mundane tasks such as email, image processing and translation on my Dell XPS13 laptop. You could get a similar result using Apple products as for me the main idea was to get as close an integration between the research tablet and supporting laptop as possible.

Surface Go

At the heart of this research tool idea is Microsoft OneNote, although you could easily use any of the other note taking programmes (such as Evernote) just as well. If you want a really good explanation of how to use OneNote have a look at this blog on how it was used in a PhD. My aim is to use the on-screen tablet keyboard, the Surface Pen and the TypeCover detachable keyboard to enter text, data and weblinks into OneNote.

In order to plan out what I want to look at in libraries and archives and to keep track of references and research material, I am using the bibliographic reference manager Zotero which is already integrated with both Chrome and Firefox web browsers to collect reference data from sites such as Worldcat or Google Books or Google Scholar and can then place that reference as a citation in a Word or LibreOffice document. If I want to put the same citation into OneNote, I can just click and drag it from Zotero to OneNote.

The rest of the programmes on the Surface as office software such as LibreOffice or MS Office, web browser such as Google Chrome or Firefox, PDF reader Foxit Reader, Trophy Image cataloguing software and various drawing programmes and apps.

As regards accessories, I have a USB-C to USB converter so that I can plug a USB Stick or Flash Drive into the tablet and have a 128 Gb micro-SSD card (supplied with a SSD Card adapter) to plug into the slot to give me up to 256 GB of storage space and this also allows me to transfer images from my compact camera onto the tablet using the SSD card adapter.

In a Lecture

In a lecture I use the Cornell note taking method utilising a page template in OneNote and write my notes (for better memory retention and higher quality notes) using the Pen. I can record the lecture at the same time and the notes will be synchronised with the recording so that they are easy to find. If the lecture includes printouts of slides or information displayed on a whiteboard or screen, I can add these to OneNote by photographing them using the tablets Rear Camera and the Office Lens app which automatically de-skews and corrects the image and recognises the text. I get an image that is 8 MP 3264 x 2448 which I measured at 600 dpi so it gives a good OCR result.

One issue with the Surface Go which I have not resolved yet is that fact that the microphone is located on the front of the tablet (ie. Facing me) and so picks up noise behind me and from typing. This is great when using Skype but not so good in a lecture environment. It is not such a problem when using the pen with the tablet lying flat on your knee but it is when using the kickstand and typing so I have not yet found a way round this, however the Surface does have a 3.5mm audio jack for use with headphone and mouthpiece, so I should be able to use a splitter and then plug a small microphone in which I can angle towards the speaker. Alternatively I could use the USB-C port or use BlueTooth to connect a microphone. Watch this space!

In the library or archives

Since time is so precious in a library or archive, I will have planned out what books or journals, I want to look at and made a note of the references, shelf numbers, etc in Zotero. Often books will have to be pre-ordered so again this helps me keep track of numerous items spread over several days. I have a separate folder for each archive so that I can click and drag books between them as I search for hard to find items and I can keep a record of the search by adding a note to the book reference to remind me of where I have already looked and where next to search. When in the library, I will collect the books and then refer to Zotero so that I am reading the right chapter, etc and will make notes on the reference into OneNote. If I need to copy an element of a reference, I can put it straight into OneNote using the following procedure:

I place the book on its side so that the light source falls onto it from the side (I will be photographing the upright page) place the Surface on its stand with the book in focus and capture images of the page using Office Lens. To help keep the upright page flat, I use a Perspex platen. The advantage of this system is that the book and the camera are kept stable without the use of a stand (which is not allowed in many libraries/archives,) at a fixed focal length which means that the pages can be copied one after the other without delay to refocus or re-position the camera.

Of course there are other ways of doing this which can better suit conditions in an library/archive such as caturing the images with a compact camera and then taking out the SSD adapter card, removing the micro-SSD card from it and then transferring the files across to the Surface using the micro-SSD port behind the kickstand. The main enemy of this technique Is blurring from two causes, firstly camera shake and secondly from taking the image before the camera has finally had time to settle the focus. Both of these occur due to having to move position to turn pages, re-position papers or hold down pages and shoot one handed.

The same technique can be used to move a lot of files from a laptop onto the Surface using the micro-SSD card.

Reading

A key part of the research tool is being able to read PDFs of journals, books, web sources but of course there are going to be far too many of these to keep on the tablet all at once. Journal articles I tend to keep in Zotero and one possible option is to use the Zotfile Add On to help manage these pdfs. Books tend to be larger files so I use the DropBox app (as opposed to the full DropBox desktop programme) to download them when needed or to mark them as offline files so that they can be opened when you do not have a WiFi connection, like on a train. I tend to use a variety of PDF readers depending on what I am doing with the text. Foxit Reader has a good bookmark feature which enables me to find my way round a book on the second reading while Microsoft Edge is good for reading journal articles since it is integrated with the Surface Pen allows you to highlight text and write comments in the margins. If you want to write down a section of text from a PDF or from a website, you can Copy/Paste or use the screen capture facility within OneNote to add the text directly into your notes (automatically adding a reference link from websites as well.)

Workflow

I keep my Surface Tablet configured purely for its research tasks, because the reality is that for writing an essay you need the larger keyboard and functionality of a laptop or desktop and their computing power is the only way to handle large/multiple files, image processing and multi-tasking with multiple screen and programmes running at the same time. Likewise on occasion, I might need to make a quick note or take a quick image on my phone. So I have both OneNote, DropBox and Zotero installed on my laptop and OneNote and Office Lens installed on my smartphone so that all of the information I capture in my Surface is instantly relayed both to my laptop and phone and visa versa. Have a thought on the bus? Whip out your phone, open OneNote and jot it down and it will duly appear on your tablet and laptop.

Integration

There is nothing wrong in using a paper and pencil notebook and index cards for bibliographic records, nor in using a laptop for many of the functions that I have highlighted above. The key to efficiency gains in both speed of work and in helping oil the Writing Cycle so that it turns more easily, is in Integration. A tablet like the Surface Go or i-Pad Pro, is small and light enough to be really portable, quick to turn on so that you can catch a few minutes reading that journal article or jot down a few notes using the Pen. The real gain is that the note taking allows writing, typing, screen captures from websites, tables, spreadsheets and pictures of whiteboards. Add in the bibliographic referencing and organisation of Zotero coupled with the ability to carry a library of material around with you in DropBox and you have a very powerful combination. Yet you only get this gain if everything works together in a cohesive fashion as you need to get material in and out of your notebook quickly and easily.

Reading a traditional paper book and need to copy a large section of text? Rather than spend 10 minutes re-typing it by hand, you can now use Office Lens to capture the image and convert it via OCR into workable text in your notebook within a few seconds. This is an improvement on what I used to do with my laptop which was to take a photo of the page, upload it to my laptop, run it through Abbyy FineReader 12 with OCR and then output into a Word document so that I could copy and paste it into a notebook. It was a toss up whether it was quicker to do all this or just to type it in by hand.

So the rule is: only put programmes or apps onto my Surface tablet if they properly integrate with everything else. One of the main drivers in choosing the Surface tablet in the first place was that it used the Windows 10 operating system and so fully integrates with my laptop. In maintaining integration at every step of the process, I aim to make the whole Research and Writing Cycles turn more easily which, hopefully, allows me more time to think about what I am writing rather than how I am writing it.

Battery

I reckon on a normal day I get around 6 hours battery life from the Surface Go with normal notetaking usage which is just about enough to get me through the day without a recharge or maybe a short top up at lunchtime. If it becomes a problem when attending the day school at Wolverhampton this October, I will get myself a battery pack to extend the usage but I do not want to lug around the extra weight.

From reports, I think the Apple i-Pad does better in this regard getting maybe up to 10 hours battery usage a day but since I do not know the Apple operating system this was never an option. I know that people do use Apple tablets with Windows laptops but the element of conversion between different file types puts me off and it breaks the integration link.

Conclusion

The aim was to make the Research Cycle and the Writing Cycle easier so that I could concentrate on what I was writing rather than in the process of writing. A powerful tablet optimised for research that allowed easy inputting of data in a variety of different forms and allows easy output of that data either into other machines or onto paper was the goal. This required both a high level of integration with regards to operating system/software and the hardware in terms of keyboard, pen, size and weight.

I think that the Surface Go has met most of the requirements of this goal through its weight & size, hardware and range of software and that it will help me to convert sources to notes and then notes into essays for my forthcoming MA course. Rather than going into the British Library with a notebook, pencils, laptop, power cable, camera, spare batteries for the camera, USB stick and bag of spare change for the photocopier/scanner, I can go in with just the tablet, its pen, a Perspex sheet and a USB stick and do the same job. I have no doubt that other combinations are out there, be they Apple or Google/Android based operating systems but for me the Surface Windows 10 combination works.

This blog post was largely written in a café on my Surface tablet in OneNote…..

Notes

There tends to be some confusion over the various versions of OneNote. The latest version of the original One Note desktop version is called OneNote 2016 which has full functionality except that it does not allow you to take photographs directly into OneNote. The newer version is called the OneNote app, OneNote Metro or OneNote Student and you can distinguish between them because the app uses a much darker purple colour in its logo, it uses a circular on-screen menu and it does allow images to be inserted directly from the camera into pages. However it is less stable that the 2016 version and I have found when recording lectures that it interrupts recording if the screensaver comes on. Also sound records are not compatible between the two even though you can open your notebooks in both programmes.

Disclosure: I do not have any connection to Microsoft or any other software or hardware manufacturer and I was not paid to promote any particular product.