![]() ![]() Once you’ve taken your photo or clipped the piece of data you want, title it with a summary and then tag it with every related topic you could possibly imagine. Some people think that organized tags are where it’s at, but I find that it doesn’t hurt to have too many tags – you can always delete them later, or ignore less useful tags. You can keep your notes in topic notebooks, but the beauty of EN is that you can tag them much more comprehensively. So now you have 887 photos of book pages – hopefully you’ve been organizing your data with Evernote tags. ‘Possibly useful books’ is that note you’ll never open again but need to make to quell your anxious packrat mind. Here are some of the notebooks I have for my PhD right now: The EN Webclipper for Safari and Chrome (does anyone still use Firefox?) is indispensable for saving anything on the Internet. It’s essentially a messy digital filing cabinet. The benefit of taking a picture of the page, instead of typing – or worse, handwriting! – relevant quotes is that you’ll find other things on the page that you didn’t notice the first time. Annotating the book directly will make your life so much easier when you’re going back later to see what passage you were saving, but writing in library books is completely immoral.Įvernote is much more capable than my distractable mind mind. I can save everything in EN: writing ideas, notes from presentations, PDFs, bookmarks, videos and audio recordings. Pro tip: running a quote through Google will get you the page number and publication about 65% of the time if you’ve lost the citation. You can use this technique to capture paragraphs, pages, or entire chapters, if that doesn’t violate anyone’s copyright. Make sure you capture the page number in the image or note it somewhere, or you will be SOL later trying to figure out where it’s from. Run a search for ‘Foucault’ in Evernote later and the software will pull up every instance in every page you save (warning: don’t do that search if, like me, you study prison). I find it doesn’t matter. Evernote’s OCR (optical character recognition) turns the picture into a searchable document with pretty amazing accuracy. You can be haphazard like me, or be more careful to capture only the words. When there’s a quote or a section you want to capture, create a new note in the Evernote app on your phone, hold the page down, and take a picture. How are you going to slam through those books while still retaining enough information to write 3,000 words in your lit review next month? Evernote on your smartphone will be your magic wand, Hermione. It’s Friday around 11am (ok, 1:30pm). You’ve made it to the library and sat down in front of a stack of 11 books on critical theory and you have a pub crawl in 5 hours. Organize your thoughts and the information you’re collecting in one place: Evernote, $45 per year I use a Mac, but this software all works well on PCs too. Here are the highlights of my techniques that you are welcome to steal for your own purposes. I use 3 excellent pieces of software to minimize the amount of time I spend re-reading books, hunting for forgotten citations, and hunched over a computer screen. ![]() ![]() So I put effort in at the front end of my writing process, while I was beginning to put together my literature review, to create a speedy and reliable work flow. I’d much rather be having a pint than reading Deleuze. I try to get my PhD work done as quickly, or rather as efficiently, as possible.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |