Docear - The Academic Literature Suite

Posted by JBfrom
Apr 21, 2012 at 03:16 PM

“I have a dream for such seamless interoperability which can be described with the example below. I would note that there are workarounds to do such work already, but they can get substantially in the way of workflow.
- While doing research on a subject, I collect material from various sources, in HTML, PDF and multimedia form (audio, video and images). My collection tool (let?s call it Evernote) can handle them all, always maintaining a link to the original source for reference.
- As I scan the material, I highlight and annotate certain excerpts. The highlighted extras and notes are maintained as virtual notecards (e.g. in Supernotecard), linking back to the original material (local copy and source URL).
- I view my collection of notecards on a virtual corkboard, where I can arrange and group them together (e.g. in Stickysorter or Visual Concepts). Patterns begin to emerge. An alternative would be to organise them in a wiki like Connected text.
- I organise the notecards within each group, e.g. with CRPA, and write an abstract for each group, representing the main underlying idea.
- I view the grouped notecards in my outlining application, e.g. Scrivener. Each group represents a chapter in the high level outline, headed by the abstract.
- I start working on each chapter. I need much more granularity, so I launch Brainstorm or Sense for the actual editing.
- As work on a chapter progresses, I review the chapter abstract and check the updated high level outline for consistency.
- At any time, I can switch back and forth between the various views, which remain in sync.”

Good goal. I already have this.

Any research subject will fit into one of my T2 blogs. Any particular document I’m reading will create a new scratch file. The scratch file will get uploaded to the T2 and digested into the emacs tapes. Later I can consolidate all my research from the T2 to BrainStorm and sort it to develop synthetic categories (i.e. discover a pattern). During this process I will lose the connections between citations and quotes. That’s fine. The originals are still there in the T2 and the Emacs tapes, so I can search either to link them back together at the end.

I write rough drafts of pages or chapters in Emacs for max composition speed, and dump them in the T2. Then when I’ve got enough critical mass and the blog format starts to get confusing, I switch to CT to stitch everything together.

If I need to go back a stage, e.g. do more research, the process is flawlessly recursive. Finished material naturally filters upwards, without polluting the final stages with raw unfinished crap.

And that’s… Cyborganize.