SOLUTION! Book, thesis, long article notes quotes organiser

General comments and questions. Technical support.
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Shan
Posts: 57
Joined: Sun Jan 22, 2012 9:44 am

SOLUTION! Book, thesis, long article notes quotes organiser

Post by Shan »

Many years now searching for method to organise my mass of notes & quotes for my PhD. I tried databases (25) outliners (11) tagging systems (21) wikis (12) ... and also several ways to workaround in Atlantis.
The new page Indexing is great but location on a page is not enough for me. I want more fine tuned searches, locating a paragraph for speed lookup. Creating 1,000s of bookmarks (no) and the indexing doesn't locate nookmarks anyway.
The major problem is cross referencing as copying duplicate passages into up to 6 topic documents makes them very long and awkward. Remembering all those places to update is a headache.

EUREKA I can stay in lovely Atlantis and do the job.
1. Notes, quotes taken from article, book, website in page order in doc, with refs.
2. A-Z Index doc listing topic and topic clusters.
3. Option Author A-Z if multiple publications by one author.
4. Category folders for 11 main categories. Small number to remember.
5. Topic docs in those Category folders.
6. SOLUTION - Top level A-Z Index of all topics, incl. all subtopics within the Topic docs.
Each entry has a Tag - info on simplified filepath in bracket, e.g.

Atlantis: [Software/ wp]
Atlantis: [Myth/ Place]
wp= word processor

I can now see there are two kinds of Atlantis - yes I know this is obvious but it's an example illustration. I can ALSO see that info on our dear Atlantis WP is in the Software category folder, and there is a Topic doc called WP, or perhaps Word Processors.

Lots of small one line entries like this mean the top Index is not too long.
Includes technical terms, defined.
Here's the nice thing. In my Atlantis example I might compare Atlantis to another WP like googledocs. As that is online it needs to show up in my Internet topic doc. But I don't need to copy a whole long listing - could be a whole page or more, analysing Atlantis & googledocs into both WP and Net topic docs.

Atlantis: [Software/ wp]
Atlantis X googledocs: [[Software/ wp]]
Atlantis: [Myth/ Place]
....
googledocs: [Net/ wp]
googledocs X Atlantis: [[Software/ wp]]

It's the Tagging principle. The data stays in the same place. To find it I have the same route marked on mutiple pairings or sets.
# I do have cross references "See also Open Office" but only in the same Topic doc so they are not so complicated and not difficult to update with CTRL+F.

# I made a Key of the 11 category Tags and bookmarked at at the top.
Each Topic doc has its simplified filepath Tag at the top so I don't get confused.
Some Topic docs are background info like a Glossary I link words to with bookmarks and hyperlinks. Some are copies of my source texts. I am also making a list of all scholars in my field with a brief note of their main work. Also timelines, maps.
# It took a day to think up the right Categories, and add Topic docs.
# I have many A-Z indexes made from books and articles so I can now load their entries into the new system. Probably 2 - 3 weels work - this is 5 years research in my folders. Worth it to be able to find everything when I am writing.
# If I'd used a database /tagging/ outliner/ wiki program I'd have had to copy over all my stuff anyway. But then I'd be locked into another system.

HOPE THIS HELPS OTHERS.

To make my homemade Tags easier to spot U highlight them in the 11 Category folder colours. In just a few cases I do divide data into two locations e.g. politics and mythology as those are very different data sets.
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