Today has been a day of reading. Online Dispute Resolution has been aroundĀ for a number of years, and has implications for the academic and scholarly world of law and politics. Naturally, there are a number of publications and journals around the subject, which I am beginning to work my way through.
I’m usingĀ Mendeley as my bibliography management tool, because it has:
- AĀ nice interface, instilling much more confidence in meĀ than its decidedly rougher-around-the-edges and chavy-sounding rival Citeulike.
- A built-in PDF reader with highlighting and annotation tools
- A cross-browser bookmark allowing me to add things to my bibliography as I come across them on the web
- The ability to export BibTeX references for LaTeX documents
- The ability to export to Microsoft Word (handy, as I’m currently undecided on my document building tool. Life is often too short for LaTeX).
It’s been interesting reading the early reactions to ODR, as in J. Goodman’sĀ The Pros and Cons of Online Dispute Resolution: An Assessment of Cyber-Mediation Websites. Written in 2003, it refers to a number of the market leaders of the time, referencing URLs that no longer exist. Although it might be expected for some (or even many) of these URLs to 404, it’s humbling and worrying that a number of the domains for the top ODR companies of 2003 are now parked and riddled with pharmaceutical advertisements.
I’ve also been busy working on a new branch for my repository, as three weeks has been an uncomfortably long time to not write any code for this project! I’m stillĀ keeping myself disciplined, trying to clarify requirements and come up with a coherent design before hacking away at any code, but I thought it was worth exploring the usefulness of some frameworks through some spike work.
Stay tuned for my next blog post to read about my findings!
