I've used the term digital tips and tricks or digital habits in the past when mentoring students or colleagues to refer to ways of working that exploit, in useful ways, what a current digital environment offers.
A post I came across by Robin Sloan, a curation maven, prompted me to think about collecting and documenting such ways of working. They all involve delegating work to a machine which I plan to detail with worked examples.
Right now there seem to be two classes of tips and tricks:
Knowing about the utility of an existing app like Google's ngram viewer or making use of Google alerts or doing citation tracking using Google scholar or other databases.
Tweaking an exisiting app or resource to do useful work. Robin Sloan's post details how he uses YouTube to explore a new topic of interest:
These days, when I’m investigating a subject, I tend to go straight to Low View Count Scholarly YouTube, which is of course the version of YouTube you get when you append the term “lecture” to your search. When you hit a tranche of videos between forty and ninety minutes long, with between 500 and 5000 views, you know you’re in the right place.
As an example, I’ve just watched the first two lectures in this series from Jennifer Roberts: a comprehensive consideration of printing’s role in art. As is often the case when I dip into scholarly material, I have found myself mildly challenged by her style — and so what? Does every bit of information and provocation that enters your brain have to fit its contours exactly, Sloan? Surely not. I suspect it’s precisely the friction of mismatch that produces Actually New Ideas, rather than the comfortable confirmation of ideas you already sorta had.
The level two trick likely applies to good prompting of gen AI bots as Ethan Mollick well describes in his blog.
A small experiment to see if anyone is interested in sharing a favourite tip or trick. Let me know.
If you'd like to get the ball rolling, I have a Google doc open for input.