System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 5, 2011 at 01:32 PM

I’m sorry guys but I disagree about the handwriting thing. As I said, having 5 years worth of notes in 9 notebooks with 200 pages each makes it a very ineffective medium once it comes to having to pull out notes based on particular themes. There is a limit to the effectiveness of post-it notes sticking out… Also, I need access to the notes quickly. A digital search is instant, while doing the same with the hard copy notebooks could take weeks.

In fact I have given up taking handwritten notes completely for the above reason. I use Notebooks for iPad now. But I still wish I didn’t have to re-type quotes (book passages), hence my interest in alternative methods for capture (snapshots that can be OCR-ed or Dragon dictation).

The main attraction of digital storage is the ability to organise and analyse the data according to themes (what they call “coding” in qualitative academic research).

But I would be still interested in solutions for the second phase of the process. Once the data is captured, what would be the best software for acting as a central database for reading notes (quotes and notes associated with specific books and articles)? Evernote is one possibility but the analytical abilities seem somewhat limited. I’m just wondering what people use for this sort of thing. As I said, I’d used Whizfolders for it but it also turned out a bit limited, once there is a lot of data.