Forum Posts Feed
System for taking and organising reading notes
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Pages: < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 > Last ›
Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 5, 2011 at 02:04 AM
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.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 5, 2011 at 06:12 AM
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.
Posted by Hugh
Dec 5, 2011 at 09:55 AM
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
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.
Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 5, 2011 at 03:07 PM
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.