PC vs Mac for the premodern

[Paula R. Curtis]

Dear all,

Forgive me if this is a question that has appeared in the past, but technology is always changing. A reader of my Japanese Studies blog just asked whether I would recommend PC or Mac for a grad student specifically for the study of classical and medieval Japan, and I wondered if there were compelling reasons for one or the other.

Generally people (myself included) are set in their personal preferences, and while my general suspicion is that much of technology is moving toward Mac as a platform, a twitter user brought up that Japan is in many ways still heavily entrenched in the PC world even as new apps are developed for both.

Do you find that there are technical reasons from a research standpoint to be preferring one or the other for premodern Japan?

Best,

Paula

--

Paula R. Curtis

PhD Candidate

Department of History

University of Michigan

prcu...@umich.edu

http://shinpaideshou.wordpress.com

http://carvingcommunity-dentouart.com/

[Christopher Mayo]

Dear Paula,

tl;dr

I don't think it matters too much which one you choose. It comes down to personal preference, budget, and so forth. Anecdotally, I'd say Apple is more enjoyable overall.

Here are my specific impressions. I work in a Japanese university, where PCs are the norm, and I was a little concerned at first about compatibility issues with my Mac, but so far, no significant problems (garbled filenames on occassion -- a perennial problem). The Macs can run Windows if necessary (I've had good luck with Parallels in the past). Touch screens and touch bars might introduce minor incompatibilities, I suspect, but nothing insurmountable, as far as I know. Microsoft Office on the Mac is less robust, especially Excel, which has a few tiny bugs that annoy me on occassion. You could always use Apple's software suite, though (a lot of my handouts and presentations are prepared in Pages and Keynote -- I've found a mixture of the iPad Pro and Macbook to be fantastic). My premodern colleagues all seem to primarily use Windows and don't complain about it, but I think a few of them have Macs at home as well. I have a Windows laptop supplied by the school (a base unit without Wifi even) that I've fired up on occassion (my Internet provider at home had amazingly constructed a system in which it was absolutely essential to have a Japanese version of Windows to set up the Internet connection -- that was the last time I used it). Even for a Mac user like myself, a spare Windows computer on hand never hurts, I guess.

What is unique about a premodern environment? In general, ancientists (my neologism to distinguish ancient-period folks from other -ists) seem to favor handouts with text running vertically. If Pages is capable of doing this, please let me know, because I have never seen it. I am not even entirely sure Word on the Mac can do it, though it reads and edits such documents, if I remember correctly. You'd have to ask someone else for confirmation on that. At any rate, I think medievalists and early-modernists are a little more flexible with our text orientation, and we often have handouts running left to right, so I am relatively unaffected. I suppose it depends on how much transcribing you do of texts (for myself, horizontal is fine, or I mark directly on my digital copy, but in a study group, I've used a Windows computer to convert it at the last minute to vertical text to make it easier for others to read alongside the original).

Premodern texts have a mix of Chinese and Japanese. Personally, I have found Spotlight searching of text on the Mac (I am keen on HoudahSpot as a Spotlight interface) to be amazing, and Spotlight makes it possible to chew through terabytes of data in an external drive quite easily. When it comes to third-party apps, they often seem to have some nice CJK support, but in searches, I regularly come across problems (Windows and Mac) when digging into things. The lack of spaces to mark word boundaries seems to be a particularly tricky issue -- I guess maybe BBEdit's GREP searching and Evernote's searching are the best among third-party apps. I regularly find myself returning to Spotlight (via HoudahSpot), though, for my needs. If you don't digitize your stuff, I don't think the search features matter so much.

Apple's prices and design decisions can be very frustrating. And, I don't enjoy carrying around a bag full of dongles. Every time a Surface computer comes out, my university picks one up, and I give it a spin. So far, it's never matched my experience on the Mac. That is, at least partly due to my own laziness and biases. Because, when it comes to real-life situations, having the iPad and Apple Pencil with a full day's charge in the archives has been a real pleasure. Having everything sync seamlessly removes a lot of friction from my daily workflow. Being able to zoom in on photographed texts and mark them up at my leisure is great. And, Apple stuff in the classroom has been nice as well (more on this at the AAS roundtable, where we'll talk about premodern texts, pedagogy, and tech in the classroom).

Best,

Chris

—

Christopher Mayo
Associate Professor, Communication Department
Kōgakkan University
516-8555 Mie-ken, Ise-shi, Kōdakushimoto-chō 1704 Bldg. 3, Floor 1, Room 109
mayo.christo...@gmail.com
http://www.christopher-mayo.com

クリストファー・メイヨー
准教授、コミュニケーション学科
皇學館大学 
516-8555 三重県伊勢市神田久志本町1704番地 3号館1階109号室 
mayo.christo...@gmail.com
http://www.christopher-mayo.com

2016/12/05 22:00、Paula R. Curtis <prcu...@umich.edu> のメッセージ:

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[Schwemmer, Patrick Reinhart]

Dear all,

My two cents: I will add that vertical text can be done on the Mac in TextEdit, the free, simple text editor that comes standard in the Applications folder. However, it can’t do furigana, two lines in one, etc., or footnotes.

The third-party app Hagoromo can do vertical text, furigana, two lines in one, etc., but not footnotes, so you can’t really write a research paper.

Word for Mac can do vertical text, furigana, two lines in one, etc., and obviously footnotes, endnotes, section breaks, etc., although its code is so baroque that it slows to an absolute crawl if you do anything as extensive as a critical edition of a text like you see in Nihon koten bungaku taikei et al, or a transcription of a noh libretto with the musical notation: I definitely regretted not just borrowing a PC with Ichitarō by the time I was done with all the transcriptions and critical editions for my dissertation. On a top-of-the-line machine it would freeze for ten seconds every time I changed anything, and the search function had stopped even pretending to work.

Overall, I am used to my Mac with Zotero for managing and reading PDFs, syncing with the iPhone, etc., and it takes me twice as long to do anything on a PC because I’m just not used to it. Apple is slowly but surely going off without Steve Jobs around (recently, in the middle of a job interview, I had a weird crash of the kind that never used to happen), but overall, the Mac OS remains more crash-free and much better security-wise than Windows.

Maybe one day I’ll buy a little PC for using Ichitarō, but I haven’t absolutely needed it yet.

Best,

Patrick Schwemmer

––––––––––––––––––
上 智 大 学 国 文 学 科
学振 PD  シュウェマー

2016/12/05 23:58、Christopher Mayo <mayo.christo...@gmail.com>のメール:

[Mary Louise Nagata]

I’ll toss in my 2 cents too.  If the student is going to Japan, I recommend buying whatever computer s/he plans to use in Japan.  With a Japanese keyboard and software, using and switching to Japanese is easy, adding furigana is easy, switching orientation is easy.  I use PC, and certainly plenty of Japanese companies make them or sell them, but I’m sure that a Mac bought in Japan will be just as easy to use.

 

ML Nagata

[Paula R. Curtis]

Dear all,

Thank you for your helpful input on- and off-list. The overall consensus seems to be that there are benefits and drawbacks to each that can be easily worked around based on your personal preference and abilities. Both have dictionaries and various methods for writing in/searching characters and shortcuts for diacritical marks, and the benefit of easy access to vertical/horizontal formatting. I will roughly summarize the responses, just FYR. I won’t list too many specific programs, because there are just too many.

The most divisive subjects seem to be digital workflow/synchronization, use in Japan, cost, and thinking about broader DH tools.

Macs have a number of programs designed to cater to researchers and producing digital environments conducive to working with/organizing research materials, and (conveniently for their market) sync easily only with other Apple products, whereas they can be problematic (though not impossible) when trying to sync tablets or phones with PCs. Whether this matters to you depends on what you plan on doing and how you archive your data, of course. I myself am a PC person who uses their iPad copiously for work, and I know many of the research-oriented apps that were designed for Apple have crossed over in recent years. The strongest argument in favor of Apple seems to be synchronization and markup/OCR abilities with PDFs, though I admit I use an iPad for this and know little about the PC alternatives.

For use in Japan, one person brought up having particularly bad experiences with PC-based tech support while in Japan, as companies were not sure how to deal with having purchased the device in one country while needing help in another. Though others might have had different experiences, Apple seems to have no issues with this. As for the question of what Japanese universities use, people seem to agree they are far more PC-oriented, and certain programs, such as the database version of 新編国歌大観 and the Ichitaro word processor (often used in premodern lit) are only PC-compatible. That being said, Mac users report having little problems adjusting to using PCs (and even borrowing them from universities) while in Japan or converting their files for use on PCs. 

Cost is, of course, the perennial question. PCs are far cheaper than Macs (for grad students, this is often a huge issue), and if something goes wrong, they’re not difficult to fix yourself instead of mailing away your computer for a significant amount of time. Of course, while it is much cheap to customize your PC for more advance technological needs and build a superior machine using Windows or Linux OS, the Mac may have some of these capabilities preinstalled. Then again, users are sometimes frustrated by Mac’s design decisions and copious dongles for various devices, lending to the argument that one may wish to build a cheaper, more individualized machine. 

Another person pointed out that some of the new digital humanities tools coming into their moment in the field may also be more compatible with a Mac OS, such as tools that are Unix-specific/have other scripting needs. Naturally, technology being what it is, there are always workarounds for PC, but ease of access might be your priority.

All of this to say, it really does seem up to what the individual finds easiest to use! From your responses, it doesn’t appear to me that the question of the premodern has as heavy a bearing on how people select their technology as previously thought. If anyone else has opinions to add, they are of course welcome.

Thank you for all the feedback!

Paula

On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 8:33 AM, Mary Louise Nagata <MNa...@fmarion.edu> wrote:

I’ll toss in my 2 cents too.  If the student is going to Japan, I recommend buying whatever computer s/he plans to use in Japan.  With a Japanese keyboard and software, using and switching to Japanese is easy, adding furigana is easy, switching orientation is easy.  I use PC, and certainly plenty of Japanese companies make them or sell them, but I’m sure that a Mac bought in Japan will be just as easy to use.

 

ML Nagata

 

From: Schwemmer, Patrick Reinhart [mailto:patrickschwemmer@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 6, 2016 1:28 AM
To: PMJS PMJS <pm...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [PMJS] PC vs Mac for the premodern

 

Dear all,

 

My two cents: I will add that vertical text can be done on the Mac in TextEdit, the free, simple text editor that comes standard in the Applications folder. However, it can’t do furigana, two lines in one, etc., or footnotes.

 

The third-party app Hagoromo can do vertical text, furigana, two lines in one, etc., but not footnotes, so you can’t really write a research paper.

 

Word for Mac can do vertical text, furigana, two lines in one, etc., and obviously footnotes, endnotes, section breaks, etc., although its code is so baroque that it slows to an absolute crawl if you do anything as extensive as a critical edition of a text like you see in Nihon koten bungaku taikei et al, or a transcription of a noh libretto with the musical notation: I definitely regretted not just borrowing a PC with Ichitarō by the time I was done with all the transcriptions and critical editions for my dissertation. On a top-of-the-line machine it would freeze for ten seconds every time I changed anything, and the search function had stopped even pretending to work.

 

Overall, I am used to my Mac with Zotero for managing and reading PDFs, syncing with the iPhone, etc., and it takes me twice as long to do anything on a PC because I’m just not used to it. Apple is slowly but surely going off without Steve Jobs around (recently, in the middle of a job interview, I had a weird crash of the kind that never used to happen), but overall, the Mac OS remains more crash-free and much better security-wise than Windows.

 

Maybe one day I’ll buy a little PC for using Ichitarō, but I haven’t absolutely needed it yet.

 

Best,

Patrick Schwemmer

 

––––––––––––––––––
上 智 大 学 国 文 学 科
学振 PD  シュウェマー

 

2016/12/05 23:58、Christopher Mayo <mayo.christopher.michael@gmail.com>のメール:

 

Dear Paula,

 

tl;dr

I don't think it matters too much which one you choose. It comes down to personal preference, budget, and so forth. Anecdotally, I'd say Apple is more enjoyable overall.

 

Here are my specific impressions. I work in a Japanese university, where PCs are the norm, and I was a little concerned at first about compatibility issues with my Mac, but so far, no significant problems (garbled filenames on occassion -- a perennial problem). The Macs can run Windows if necessary (I've had good luck with Parallels in the past). Touch screens and touch bars might introduce minor incompatibilities, I suspect, but nothing insurmountable, as far as I know. Microsoft Office on the Mac is less robust, especially Excel, which has a few tiny bugs that annoy me on occassion. You could always use Apple's software suite, though (a lot of my handouts and presentations are prepared in Pages and Keynote -- I've found a mixture of the iPad Pro and Macbook to be fantastic). My premodern colleagues all seem to primarily use Windows and don't complain about it, but I think a few of them have Macs at home as well. I have a Windows laptop supplied by the school (a base unit without Wifi even) that I've fired up on occassion (my Internet provider at home had amazingly constructed a system in which it was absolutely essential to have a Japanese version of Windows to set up the Internet connection -- that was the last time I used it). Even for a Mac user like myself, a spare Windows computer on hand never hurts, I guess.

 

What is unique about a premodern environment? In general, ancientists (my neologism to distinguish ancient-period folks from other -ists) seem to favor handouts with text running vertically. If Pages is capable of doing this, please let me know, because I have never seen it. I am not even entirely sure Word on the Mac can do it, though it reads and edits such documents, if I remember correctly. You'd have to ask someone else for confirmation on that. At any rate, I think medievalists and early-modernists are a little more flexible with our text orientation, and we often have handouts running left to right, so I am relatively unaffected. I suppose it depends on how much transcribing you do of texts (for myself, horizontal is fine, or I mark directly on my digital copy, but in a study group, I've used a Windows computer to convert it at the last minute to vertical text to make it easier for others to read alongside the original).

 

Premodern texts have a mix of Chinese and Japanese. Personally, I have found Spotlight searching of text on the Mac (I am keen on HoudahSpot as a Spotlight interface) to be amazing, and Spotlight makes it possible to chew through terabytes of data in an external drive quite easily. When it comes to third-party apps, they often seem to have some nice CJK support, but in searches, I regularly come across problems (Windows and Mac) when digging into things. The lack of spaces to mark word boundaries seems to be a particularly tricky issue -- I guess maybe BBEdit's GREP searching and Evernote's searching are the best among third-party apps. I regularly find myself returning to Spotlight (via HoudahSpot), though, for my needs. If you don't digitize your stuff, I don't think the search features matter so much.

 

Apple's prices and design decisions can be very frustrating. And, I don't enjoy carrying around a bag full of dongles. Every time a Surface computer comes out, my university picks one up, and I give it a spin. So far, it's never matched my experience on the Mac. That is, at least partly due to my own laziness and biases. Because, when it comes to real-life situations, having the iPad and Apple Pencil with a full day's charge in the archives has been a real pleasure. Having everything sync seamlessly removes a lot of friction from my daily workflow. Being able to zoom in on photographed texts and mark them up at my leisure is great. And, Apple stuff in the classroom has been nice as well (more on this at the AAS roundtable, where we'll talk about premodern texts, pedagogy, and tech in the classroom).

 

Best,

Chris

 

 

—

Christopher Mayo
Associate Professor, Communication Department
Kōgakkan University
516-8555 Mie-ken, Ise-shi, Kōdakushimoto-chō 1704 Bldg. 3, Floor 1, Room 109

mayo.christopher.michael@gmail.com

http://www.christopher-mayo.com

クリストファー・メイヨー
准教授、コミュニケーション学科
皇學館大学 
516-8555 三重県伊勢市神田久志本町1704番地 3号館1階109号室 

mayo.christopher.michael@gmail.com
http://www.christopher-mayo.com

2016/12/05 22:00、Paula R. Curtis <prcu...@umich.edu> のメッセージ:

Dear all,

 

Forgive me if this is a question that has appeared in the past, but technology is always changing. A reader of my Japanese Studies blog just asked whether I would recommend PC or Mac for a grad student specifically for the study of classical and medieval Japan, and I wondered if there were compelling reasons for one or the other.

 

Generally people (myself included) are set in their personal preferences, and while my general suspicion is that much of technology is moving toward Mac as a platform, a twitter user brought up that Japan is in many ways still heavily entrenched in the PC world even as new apps are developed for both.

 

Do you find that there are technical reasons from a research standpoint to be preferring one or the other for premodern Japan?

 

Best,

 

Paula

 

--

Paula R. Curtis

PhD Candidate

Department of History

University of Michigan

prcu...@umich.edu

http://shinpaideshou.wordpress.com

http://carvingcommunity-dentouart.com/

 

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