What would be the ultimate system for taking notes from readings and then organising them (e.g. for academic projects)? It would have to be something cross-platform, not just across computer platforms but also including hard copy books, newspaper etc.

I'm not satisfied with my current set-up. My notes are dispersed across machines. Some are in Whizfolders on the PC (which was good for capturing notes from PDFs and then organising them into hierarchies. Whizfolders also allows for keywords, but it wasn't convenient enough for me to start using them). Some are in notes within Surfulater items. Others are in Notebooks for iPad. I want to get more organised for my next project.

So what would be the ideal set-up? I should be able to capture quotes and add notes from hard copy books. Perhaps some kind of digital pen scanner? PDF-reading apps in iPad/iPod can export text notes. I feel I'm missing a central database solution that would help me gather all these notes and organise them and analyse them. Whizfolders' hierarchy is limited, once you have thousands of notes.

Anyone managed to come up with the ultimate system and workflow for capturing and organising notes from across platforms? I suppose it would make sense to somehow link the notes to references in some referencing system. I imagine Citavi could be one such solution? I just wonder how robust it is for storing, retrieving, organising and analysing tons of data. Or could UltraRecall be such an ultimate database?

Cyborganize, lol

Dr. Andus - this is a problem with so many parts! Consider just one of the parts - how to get information from a hard copy document or book. You mention the possibility of using a digital pen scanner for this purpose. This might be a good tool for extracting very short blocks of text - but not for larger blocks or whole pages. Why not capture whole pages at first, and then later on extract the shorter sections as needed? I've used my digital camera in the library to take pictures of book pages. Because of the positioning of the camera in relation to the book, there is perspective error, and because of the curvature of the spine, the lines are curved. The resulting images are poorly suited for OCR, but the newer versions of OCR software like Omnipage Pro do a remarkable job of correcting these problems and recognizing the text.

I also purchased a "magic wand" hand scanner - another thing you might consider - but the quality of the image depends on the steadiness of your hand as you move the wand across the page.

http://www.vupointsolutions.com/browse.php?cat=scanner

Without saying it's perfect by any means, I believe that Evernote comes closer to a universal capture system than anything else I've tried.

#1 There are innumerable ways to input material into Evernote: capture from web (from just about any browser), send via mail, copy, attach files, direct scan (easier with ScanSnaps I believe), snapshot via smartphone, voice record, handwritten notes via pen interface, note & record via LiveScribe, etc.

#2 Accessing that information is as easy as it gets: universal search across notebooks, full indexing --even of text in images and non OCR'd PDFs, Windows and Mac native clients (why not Linux, I still wonder), smartphone native clients, web interface, local synchronised copies of databases etc.

#3 Organising the information is not Evernote's strongest point, providing only 2 levels of notebook organisation, but the (unlimited) hierarchical tagging should be enough for most uses. Evernote also allows better suited applications to use it as infrastructure. The easiest way for this is to copy an Evernote info item's unique link to just about anywhere else.

Sounds like Evernote could make a scanner unnecessary, if I can just use my iPod Touch to take a snapshot, which then would be OCR-ed automatically? Generally the quotes I want to capture are rarely longer than a paragraph or two, so a quick snapshot would definitely be more convenient than me retyping it my iPad...

I have tried Evernote years ago but there was always something that put me off. The tape interface just didn't work for me. It will sound silly but for years I didn't upgrade the desktop application because I preferred the old Evernote Clipper for screen capture. But that was before the smartphone/tablet world, so it's time for another look.

I would just want to make sure that it is also easy to export notes in such a form that I can get them into some more powerful software to analyse.

Also, the whole purpose of capturing notes of course is to eventually serve as data for a bigger project. So being able to view, review, sort, annotate, aggregate, and organise is very important. This is why perhaps the data will eventually have to be exported to a more powerful analytical software. Ideally I would like to be able to organise the notes into some sort of hierarchy. I know there've been discussions here about how to do that with tags in Evernote, so I'll look that up. But I just wonder what software would be good for analysing Evernote data this way, especially if we are talking about hundreds of notes? How to make sense of the forest?

I think the fastest and easiest way to take notes from books, newspapers, etc., is to use a digital voice recorder and then transcribe your audio notes with Dragon Naturally Speaking.

I've been doing this for some time now and it's really efficient. The transcription process is easy and quick and you should be able to get around 98 per cent accuracy--sometimes more--though that will vary depending on your enunciation, etc.

You'll need a decent recorder and you'll have to create a recorder profile in Dragon. That involves reading a 20-minute training excerpt into your recorder. Dragon analyzes the recording to create the profile. After that, you're done.

Once your notes have been transcribed, you can copy and paste them into whatever PIM you're using (if any). If your PIM allows text file importing (with special formatting commands like tabs or whatever to separate the items, item titles and so on), you could just dictate the formatting commands when you take notes and import the transcripts directly into your PIM. I tried this with SuperNoteCard, for instance, and it worked perfectly.

Gary, thanks for the suggestion. I do in fact have the necessary equipment to do this. One thing that kept me back is the need to check the accuracy of the transcription. Inaccuracies regarding my own text is not a problem, however quotes need to be 100 percent perfect, otherwise that could cause problems later. How do you deal with that?

Gary - it is encouraging to hear that DNS does such a good job transcribing files from your voice recorder.

I have held off on purchasing DNS for a couple of reasons - (1) concerns that the accuracy wouldn't be good enough, and (2) DNS Premium can't accept multiple voice recorder files all at once - you have to load each file separately. You can do this with DNS Professional but DNS Pro is insanely expensive - $500 Amazon price as opposed to $130 for DNS Premium.

Here is an interesting thread from Amazon - a woman wanted to use DNS to transcribe her voice memos but never could get adequate accuracy and ended up sending DNS Premium back to Amazon - very detailed discussion.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1XZD4U75ML0P0

May I suggest something which seems perhaps counter-intuitive given our technology?

And that is taking notes longhand.

I have typed notes into all kinds of programs, but quite frankly, when I am taking notes I am also doing something else which seems to occur more fully when I write them with a pen or pencil. As I write my notes, as opposed to keying them into a computer or dictating them, I have better recall of the material. It is as though the taking of the note and the learning of what it says seem to co-occur more naturally when note taking is by longhand.

Naturally, when there are 100s, or 1000s, of notes to be made on a project the notion of dictating or keying them into the computer is naturally more attractive than taking all those notes by hand - and then maybe still having to, at some point, key them into the computer. But I have found it more satisfying to write first and then, as necessary, to key them into the computer.

Daly

Daly,
The problem is in today's world that handwriting just creates yet another type of medium that one needs to deal with, in addition to the digital notes taken on mobile devices and notes taken on the PC. I have used hard copy notebooks for my reading notes in the past and it turned out to be a very limited technology. I ended up with 9 notebooks with 200 pages each. So when it came to having to quickly find, collate and process information, that format was no good. I ended up having to scan them as PDFs, do that I could annotate them on my iPad and turn them into digitally searchable files. There has to be a better way.

But my original question related not only to taking notes from hard copy books but also how to bring all manner of notes, hard copy and digital, together, in a single system, with the least amount of effort. So far there seem to two suggestions: 1) photograph hard copy book sections with a smartphone and add them to Evernote, alongside all other digital files, or 2) use Dragon to dictate notes and have them transcribed into a PIM.

Ideally that PIM would also enable easy capturing of PDF text, without having to switch back and forth How may PIMs can do that? Whizfolders has such a "Watch clipboard" feature, and I think UltraRecall adds a "copy to UR" to the context menu.

Dr Andus wrote:

I ended up with 9 notebooks
with 200 pages each. So when it came to having to quickly find, collate and process
information, that format was no good. I ended up having to scan them as PDFs, do that I
could annotate them on my iPad and turn them into digitally searchable files. There
has to be a better way.

You could try Livescribe or Irisnotes, discussed in another thread, and download their contents into your PC, including easy import in Evernote.

I personally concur with what Daly noted about writing longhand.

So far there seem to two
suggestions: 1) photograph hard copy book sections with a smartphone and add them to
Evernote, alongside all other digital files, or 2) use Dragon to dictate notes and
have them transcribed into a PIM.

To clarify: my proposal for using Evernote as the repository doesn't exclude _any_ means of input as far as I am aware.

Re dictation: you may want to dictate to Dragon and import to Evernote the text and audio files (Evernote can monitor as many folders as you like for new files) or dictate to Evernote, e.g. via your Android phone, export the audio files to Dragon for transcription and then copy the text to the original audio note, whatever suits you best.

I too concur with Alexander and Daly about written notes. Early in my journalism days, I learnt a form of shorthand called Teeline - not as fast as Pitman's potentially could be, but I think I reached 110 w.p.m. Later, as small recorders became available, I started to use one in interviews, but I still made Teeline notes. There's something about the eye or ear/brain/pencil connection which helps to embed thoughts in the memory. (In addition, during political speeches that tended towards the boring, we hacks could pass jokes around written in Teeline; as far as anyone else was concerned they were merely scribbles.)

Hand-writing notes also certainly speeds up the process of understanding. Perhaps Livescribe, possibly with handwriting recognition, is a good way of retaining those processes whilst adding the benefits of the computer.

Regarding speech recognition software: my experience is that it's an imperfect but rapidly improving technology. I have used Dragon Dictate on and off since version 5. Even with those early versions and using a voice recorder, I got recognition accuracy better than the 50 per cent reported in the Amazon review quoted earlier in this thread.

The software seems to generate very strong responses amongst some of its users, perhaps partly because of its cost; if you want to read Threads of the Dissatisfied read the Nuance/Dragon Dictate forums. Nowadays I use the Mac version. Although generally reckoned to be less good than the current Windows version, for me is the accuracy of its recognition is its best aspect - about 95 per cent at a guess, and much much better than early Dragon versions.

Where users sometimes go wrong, I think, is that they fail to use powerful enough computers with enough RAM and do not follow the software manual's instructions precisely, and their expectations are too high: Dragon will not transcribe interviews with two voices directly (re-voicing with one voice is a way round this), nor can it cope well with significant background noise, an unusual accent, or a poor microphone/sound card set-up. And users sometimes aren't aware how much skill is necessary to dictate successfully. Unless I am dictating no more than a couple of sentences, I always write out what I'm going to say first. In my opinion, other than for short notes or for those users such as medics and lawyers who may spend much of their working lives dictating, speech recognition software is definitely a "second-draft' tool. Yet even having said all that, I believe that in the right circumstances it can be a great time-saver - not to mention a relief for wrists and fingers.

H

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.

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.

P.S. I think the disagreement stems from the scale of the project at hand. If you are reading for something that you will write up soon in a matter of days, weeks or a couple of months, handwritten notes are fine because you still remember where everything is. However, with a long-term research project (such as a PhD that can take between 3 to 10 yrs), you will look at hundreds of documents (I have 1700 references in my EndNote file) and take thousands of notes. The writing-up only happens at the end, and after 4-5 yrs you want to be able to find the relevant info quickly. So it's not so much about personally remembering and understanding but about organising, analysing, searching, re-discovering and retrieving targeted information that you no longer remember where it is exactly.

"...quotes need to be 100 percent perfect, otherwise that could cause problems later. How do you deal with that?"

I usually transcribe my recordings into DragonPad, the text editor that comes with Dragon. That way, if a section of the transcript gets garbled, I can highlight it and have Dragon play back the original recording for that particular section.

I keep most of my notes in either MyInfo or Evernote.

I use MyInfo for specific writing projects (books and articles) because it is capable of organizing and connecting information in all sorts of interesting ways. It also has a smooth UI and is really just a pleasure to use.

For miscellaneous information not connected with particular projects, I use Evernote. The main advantages of Evernote are that it makes it extremely easy to record data from a variety of sources (I particularly like its ability to find text in images -- e.g. photographs of printed pages, usually imported from my smartphone), it is capable of handling huge amounts of material, and of course it synchronizes across devices.

This makes my choices sound sweetly reasonable, but in fact I am constantly dithering between these two pieces of software: I sometimes wish they would marry and have a child. Evernote looks like a good long-term solution, yet I am put off by its relatively primitive organizational features, and I am constantly thinking about ways (tags, note naming conventions, links, etc.) of overcoming its weaknesses. Evernote also seems unusually ugly on the screen to me, but that's just a subjective view.

jimspoon--

If the woman who wrote that Amazon review was only getting 50 per cent accuracy with Dragon, then something was really wrong with her setup. Most likely, it was her equipment. I'm guessing that her recorder was the problem. With voice recognition, you get what you pay for. Cheap, consumer-grade recorders are inadequate for any kind of serious dictation. Also, if she was driving around while she was dictating, she should have been using a noise-canceling headset microphone. It's a necessity when there's a lot of background noise. (Maybe she was--I just skimmed through her review). Another common cause of recognition errors is unclear speech. Dictation's a tricky skill to learn (I'm still pretty bad at it myself). After years of messing around with various recorders, I would expect to get something like 98 per cent accuracy after initial training. Improvements in accuracy after that are mostly a matter of how clearly you can dictate.

Hi,

I thought I would chime in. I have a similar setup for academic use, which a key exception that I am using Windows only.

I currently use Ultra Recall (notes, PDFs, documents, email, handwritten notes via livescribe, web clippings, etc.), Livescribe Echo (seminar, conference and meeting notes), and will add an Epson BX925 (Workforce 845) for duplex scanning (both papers and books). This setup allows me to keep everything indexed and linked within UR, including mail which is essential to academic projects. The "flatbed" scanner capabilities of the Epson negate the need for a scanning pen as you suggested you might need, while still allowing document feed. I think it's the perfect setup!

I have written about how to incorporate an MS Word writing environment in UR, using either Zotero or Mendeley for references. Search is very robust in UR, plus the hierarchical structure has advantages over Evernote, and I am not a fan of the cloud anyway. The only drawback is likely to be UltraRecall's performance running on a virtual machine in Linux/Mac OS. Handwritten notes with the Echo can be transcribed with the optional MyScript, or just indexed with keywords.

Best, /Pavi

"Firstly, I did my research. The Nuance website has plenty of graphs on the best voice recorders for their software. I eventually went with the Philips Black Digital Voice Tracer 0660 - an inexpensive model (due to its lack of bells and whistles that I didn't need) that records with crystal clarity, has one of the best ratings on the Nuance site, and is *optionally bundled with this version of the software*. I want to emphasize that point - I own the recommended digital voice recorder that Nuance bundles with this device (for an extra $100, of course). "

I think this was her problem. The recorder that comes bundled with some packages of Dragon is almost completely worthless and Nuance doesn't actually test the recorders on their recommended-recorders list. I got all that information from Knowbrainer.com (I'm not affiliated with them, just a customer--one of the guys who works there used to work for Nuance and the Knowbrainer team really know their stuff when it comes to voice recognition).

Voice recognition is one of those areas where the quality of your hardware is really critical.

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.

Daly de Gagne wrote:

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.

I used to believe in this theory (that you need to use your handwriting to learn well) until for the simple reasons of survival in a digital world I had to start using computers to stay competitive and later, when my lack of touch-typing skills got in the way, I had to switch to dictation with Dragon. It does take an effort to untrain yourself to have to use your hands for everything, but it is certainly possible. There are plenty of disabled people who can't use their hands but can still do research and write (Stephen Hawking being a prominent example). If the theory of evolution is to be believed, we also used to use our arms for walking at some point but then we were able to transfer that function to our legs completely. This is now the next moment in evolution where hands will no longer be necessary for writing and learning - thanks to voice recognition and OCR.

You could be right - but makes me wonder what will be the mechanism which will replace the learning benefit of using longhand - will it be in the act of using dictation hard/software or of scanning? Will it mean taking longer to read notes at a later stage? I recall hearing of studies which have suggested that even keying in - whether on an old Smith Corona portable or the latest laptop - doesn't provide the equivalent learning/reflection which occurs during longhand note-taking. If that is true, how do we replace such learning? These questions may all be more relevant to the arts and qualitative data, rather than to the sciences, but for the subjects for which it is relevant, it'd be interesting to ponder on what evolution might provide as compensation.

Daly

Dr Andus wrote:

Daly de Gagne wrote:
>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.

I used to believe in this theory (that you need to use your
handwriting to learn well) until for the simple reasons of survival in a digital world
I had to start using computers to stay competitive and later, when my lack of
touch-typing skills got in the way, I had to switch to dictation with Dragon. It does
take an effort to untrain yourself to have to use your hands for everything, but it is
certainly possible. There are plenty of disabled people who can't use their hands but
can still do research and write (Stephen Hawking being a prominent example). If the
theory of evolution is to be believed, we also used to use our arms for walking at some
point but then we were able to transfer that function to our legs completely. This is
now the next moment in evolution where hands will no longer be necessary for writing
and learning - thanks to voice recognition and OCR.

Dr, Andrus ?
Thank you for posting this question, as it is one that I have been wrestling with and can?t seem to find a great solution for. Right now Zotero seems to be the best option for me for collecting references, and I am trying out a new system of taking notes based on this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education (which I think I found because of this forum, so thanks to the original poster!): http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/taking-better-notes-in-zotero/36561

For collecting, I have uploaded my pdfs into Zotero and imported their citation information. If I run across a new pdf as I am browsing, I save it and its citation information. If it is a web page, I capture the web page. For hard copy references, I look up the citation and collect the citation entry, maybe with a note about where the hard copy is located. Zotero might let you attach other kinds of files to the entry, just like it attaches PDFs. It would be interesting to know if you could attach an iphone camera shot or output from a pen scanner, and open them with the Firefox browser window.

I have not been very systematic about adding tags or filing references as I collect them, although that would be a great habit. I at least try to keep the project folder active in Zotero when I am researching a particular project, which automatically files the new entry in that folder.

For note taking, based on the above article, I have begun to take notes as stand-alone Zotero notes. Each note begins with a keyword indicating the project that I am taking notes for, as well as a short summary of the main idea. This first line is visible in Zotero as the title for the note. I give the title a distinctive format, to identify it as a header if I later export it into Word 2010 (more later).

After the title and the text of the note, I include basic citation info (first author & year), with a code to indicate whether the note content is a paraphrase or direct quote of the source, or my own idea in reaction to the text. If it is a direct quote, I use cut and paste from the browser window, I put quotation marks around the quote, and I include the page number. I then link the article to the original source (as described in the article above).

I also tag the note with any relevant project names, and I file it in my folder structure. Zotero?s folders allow you to file items into multiple folders, so I have some folders that represent projects and others that represent actions (e.g., References to get). Both tags and folders allow me to link the note to more than one project (versus the note title, which I try to keep cleaner and more focused on my immediate writing project). I don?t like the redundancy that I have built in between tags and folders, but I haven?t yet figured out a good way to use them efficiently.

For organizing and writing: From what I read on the Zotero forum, you can filter and export Zotero notes to a word processor and preserve formatting. If so, my goal is to export whatever notes are relevant to my writing project into Word 2010 for organizing and writing. I love the navigation pane in Word 2010 for outlining: headers show up as items that can be moved around, which also moves their associated text; different header styles allow you to create a hierarchical outline. I am hoping that I can use the title of the note as a header in Word 2010, which will make the note a section that can be viewed and moved around in Word?s navigation pane. Sort of like an index card that can be moved around in an outline structure. I am also hoping Zotero will include the citation information from the linked source, but I haven?t tried this yet.

I haven?t gotten far enough along to test this workflow out on an actual writing project. Already I find the note-taking a bit heavy, because there are a lot of steps I have to remember (write note, define header, include citation info, include tags, file into folder structure, link note to original source). But I have tried Citavi, Qiqqa, Scrivener, Bibloscape and Mendeley. All of them have great features, but none of them beat Zotero for collecting sources (including a huge collection of existing pdfs) and importing the citation information easily. I am hoping that this new way of taking notes will pay off for the "second phase" that Dr. Andrus was talking about. I would love to hear more about what workflow others are using for this second phase!
-Montreal Fan

MontrealFan

Wow, that looks pretty elaborate! I'll have to try to model it in Zotero to fully grasp it. I'm surprised though that you didn't find Citavi helpful. I thought Citavi was among the more advanced reference managers in terms of combining referencing, annotation and analysis (at least I was hoping to switch to it from EndNote, once my current project is over)...