System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Dec 5, 2011 at 04:22 PM

A couple of points:

First of all, I would never use notebooks for note-taking related to future writing projects. That’s asking for problems, most of which can be overcome by use of index cards. I prefer 5 x 6 inch size. Cards can be manipulated easily, arranged and rearranged, Xeroxed if need be, as well as being scanned. Notebooks are much harder to manipulate, and most often are counter-indicated for academic note-taking purposes. Index cards can also be easily coded to reflect whether they are a direct quote, a paraphrase, original writing arising from the note-taking process, questions for future consideration, etc.

The second point is that some studies suggest a greater degree of learning goes on when note taking is by longhand as opposed to keying in material. Scanning probably would lead to least learning at the time because of the nature of the process.

So a question which arises is what is the value, if any, of the learning which occurs during the note-taking process? Is there a loss of value in deferring that learning to a subsequent point in time, as may occur, if material is simply found and scanned?

Is note-taking merely a function get one from point A to point B, ie a finished paper, in the quickest time with the least difficulty? To what extent is note-taking a process of inter-acting with material so as to facilitate not only the learning of that material but, also, to at some future date be able to utilize that material/learning in a reflective process which leads to new learning, questions, insights, etc?

Daly

Dr Andus wrote:
>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.