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Organizing lots of thought snippets
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Posted by Hugh
Jan 26, 2015 at 12:41 PM
One other neat little Mac application that I’ve used in the past for this purpose is ShoveBox. Apparently it hasn’t been updated in yonks, but it’s still available on MacUpdate. I’ve just checked whether it works on Yosemite, and it appears to do so.
Posted by Paul Korm
Jan 26, 2015 at 01:01 PM
There are plenty of solutions for capturing lots of notes. The tricky part is finding relationships among those notes. On the one hand, techniques like tagging can help—especially with those notetakers (like Evernote) that support them. But the downfall of tagging is that it takes a lot of ongoing effort and care, requires you to anticipate relationships among notes in advance, and is hard to fix retrospectively.
A better approach is software that suggests relationships. Usually by analyzing note text and context. There are far fewer software packages available for this. On the Mac, there is DEVONthink (as Steve Z mentioned) which has its “AI” feature: select a note and choose “See Also” from the menu and you’ll see a list of notes that the software calculated as being relate by examining the text. DEVONthink is pretty good at this. (There’s an essay by author Steven Berlin somewhere that discusses this feature.) DEVONthink also has a “Classify” command that will put your note in a folder with notes that the software evaluated as being related. Tinderbox (also mentioned above) will suggest related notes, also using the textual context.
On the extreme end, is software that examines the text of your note and compares it to what amounts to a library of similar terms and concepts and suggests categories—this is really expensive software beyond the scope of most.
If you’re using Evernote for note collection and tagging, I’ve found the BubbleBrowser app to be very useful in locating related notes. There is a Mac desktop version and an iPad version. The iPad version seems more accurate than the desktop version. BubbleBrowser is for analyzing your notes post hoc—it’s not for notetaking.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 26, 2015 at 01:23 PM
tradercclee wrote:
>I’d like to discover insights shared by snippets of thoughts.
>And have an easy way to quickly put ideas into categories/tags as I’m
>capturing the ideas.
Here’re some quotes from someone else this time (fresh off the press), just to show that it’s not just me ;)
“Such a problem might be writing up some research or the writing of a thesis which by its nature it is an exploration of new ideas and new research. Most discoveries are not made whilst performing the experiments, they are made during the organising and writing up of the notes, this is where ideas come together in ways which produce flashes of insight which were not apparent from the raw data. Imposing a structure too early might mean that you miss something significant later.
In my opinion this is where ConnectedText is at its best. You can just dump all the raw data in there and classify it organise it and re-organise it, because you can have the same data represented in many different ways simultaneously and just switch between the different views.
ConnectedText has very powerful facilities for classifying things. Pages can have category, attribute and property commands embedded in the markup language. (...) Assigning categories, properties and attributes is only half the story. Once you have a set of pages classified like this you can write queries to select the pages you want to see. Each category has an automatically generated virtual page which contains links to all the pages in that category. (...)
Pages can include other pages (either the whole page or just a part of the page) so a page can be a patchwork of parts of other pages, if any of the source pages change then any pages which include that page also change.”
The rest of the review is worth reading as well:
https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/long-term-usage-review-of-connectedtext/
Another interesting software that can display all snippets from a category is Piggydb (though I’ve never actually tried it):
http://piggydb.net/about/
Posted by Prion
Jan 26, 2015 at 02:20 PM
Paul Korm wrote:
On the Mac, there is DEVONthink (as Steve Z
>mentioned) which has its “AI” feature: select a note and choose “See
>Also” from the menu and you’ll see a list of notes that the software
>calculated as being relate by examining the text. DEVONthink is pretty
>good at this. (There’s an essay by author Steven Berlin somewhere that
>discusses this feature.) DEVONthink also has a “Classify” command that
>will put your note in a folder with notes that the software evaluated as
>being related.
Devonthink can be very useful although personally I think that the Steven Berlin essay you referred to is sometimes taken way too…religiously.
>Tinderbox (also mentioned above) will suggest related
>notes, also using the textual context.
>
Or more precisely: Tinderbox used to do that, it seems that the feature disappeared during the transition to version 6 and still has not reappeared. It will hopefully do so but for anyone looking for this feature now, Tbx is not the way to go. Or perhaps I am overlooking it?
Posted by Paul Korm
Jan 26, 2015 at 03:34 PM
Prion wrote:
>>Steven Berlin essay you referred to is sometimes taken way
>too…religiously.
OK. Interesting approach. Though, I didn’t suggest Berlin is the gospel, he’s just yet another guy with an opinion.
>Or more precisely: Tinderbox used to do that, it seems that the feature
>disappeared during the transition to version 6
Should have specified, but I’ve been using 5, mainly—it’s still available for download, BTW:
http://www.eastgate.com/download/tbx5122.dmg