At the beginning of his Elfeed video, John Kitchen mentioned a paper by James Fraser on RSS for the researcher. This is notable for two reasons. First, there’s the paper itself, of course, but there’s also the very nice way Kitchin has of representing URLs. He lists the URL in text but also provides a QR Code for it. My first reaction was that it was sort of gimmicky but the URL to Fraser’s paper was long and was split over two lines so I paused the video and scanned the QR code with ScanLife on my iPhone. That captured the URL and when I shared it with my laptop, the paper was automatically opened in my browser. That’s really easy and convenient. I wish others would consider doing that, at least for complicated or long URLs.
Although it was written in 2013, the paper is still interesting and useful today. A significant part of a researcher’s job is keeping up with the literature. There are all sorts of aggregators specialized for a particular discipline but RSS is a general solution that can aggregate almost any periodic content provider such as journals and blogs.
The paper goes over the advantages of RSS, which most Irreal readers are familiar with but Fraser also details his workflow and how he keeps up with the literature virtually for free by reading his RSS feed in short downtimes or even when he is walking. If you’re a researcher trying to keep up, RSS is something you should take a look at. You should also read the paper if you’re an RSS n00b.