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System for taking and organising reading notes
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Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 4, 2011 at 01:49 PM
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?
Posted by Gary Carson
Dec 4, 2011 at 03:31 PM
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.
Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 4, 2011 at 05:13 PM
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?
Posted by jimspoon
Dec 4, 2011 at 09:50 PM
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
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Dec 5, 2011 at 12:23 AM
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