Three basic elements of taking notes.

I'm thinking more about breaking down the basic elements of my note-taking workflow. I've been telling my students little bits of the story, most recently my junior and senior History majors in our new Methods class. This is a new class that we've inserted after the historiography I taught last semester and just before the capstone thesis project in our program. I'm co-teaching it with another professor, and it was actually he who asked me at the end of a demo I did of tools I suggested the students use this semester (Zotero, Obsidian, Research Rabbit), if I could give them a sort-of guide that would explain which tools to use for which parts of the process and how to make them work together.

I think his question probably came partly from his unfamiliarity with the tools, the slightly clumsy way I probably explained them, and his concern that students might not have "got it" because I was talking about my own experiences and they may not imagine themselves to be doing the same types of things when they write a research paper that I did when I was writing a dissertation. It was a bit gratifying when one of my repeat students, who used the tools in a writing section he had with me last semester, proceeded to outline exactly how the tools fit together and what he used each one for. But it would still be a good idea, I think, to clarify those points so people starting out can see why we're doing this.

A couple of things I do want to say at the front end are:

1. I DO think the process a student uses to write a research paper in an undergraduate class IS basically the same as the process I used to write a dissertation and still use to research projects.

2. This is REALLY not rocket science. In the same way that the basic unit of thought is the paragraph, and that can be scaled up all the way to multi-volume books sets, the techniques of processing the thoughts of others, learning from them, and making them your own are pretty basic. The key is finding a format that makes it easier to do this regularly and then doing it regularly.

3. Two more super-basic ideas that are the whole foundation of these processes: Writing = Thinking and Practice => Mastery.

So the three tools that are central to my current note-taking practice are Zotero, Research Rabbit, and Obsidian. These are not the only tools that do these jobs, but they're the ones I'm using now because they do the things I want to do. The three practices they map to and help me accomplish are citation, discovery, and thinking.

Zotero is the citation tool. It is a free app originally built by the folks at the Roy Rozenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I use it to collect citations and metadata automatically from my digital library catalog (Worldcat) and article archives like JSTOR. I can arrange the sources I collect into topical folders, and importantly for me, I can store pdfs along with the references, so I won't have to go looking for them when I need them. This is one of the first steps in my research process; Zotero also helps with the last step, where I cite these sources when I write something of my own. I'm not big fan of formatting footnotes, endnotes, or bibliographies. Zotero handles the formatting pretty well, so I can edit rather than create.

Research Rabbit is the discovery tool. Now that it is linked to Zotero, I can open my Zotero research folder in RR and explore additional sources. The power of RR is that it has the ability to show me the sources used in a particular article as well as the later articles that cite it. Other tools such as JSTOR have some capabilities along these lines too, but they're not as powerful or complete as RR. The makers of this app want it to be the Spotify of research, able to suggest sources I might be interested in, based on what I've already selected. It also has a really useful graphical view, where I can see the relationships between these sources (citations) AND see a timeline. Both these are super helpful to me.

Finally, Obsidian is the Writing = Thinking tool. The point of this game is to move information from a place where I'm seeing it for the first time in a book, article, video, or lecture to a destination where it is my knowledge (integrated with the rest of my knowledge, contextualized, interpreted, qualified, and maybe even elaborated and expanded upon). The steps in that process are:

1. Capturing ideas that interest me. That means highlighting stuff I read or taking fleeting notes. At this point, I'm just marking other people's ideas that interest me (and of course, I've already captured the source in a way I'll be able to cite it if I ever need to).

2. Thinking (that is writing) about these ideas as I "process" them into Reading Notes. The simplest definition of processing and the default activity that makes it up is reading through my highlights and paraphrasing the ones that still seem interesting in a new document. Very occasionally I may include a quote, but generally only if I think I may want to quote the original author's words in something I ultimately write. In the past, I used to quote much more -- my dissertation advisor pretty much cured me of that.

3. That set of notes I make will include double-bracketed keywords, because this is the point where I'm beginning to think about how the ideas I found in the new source connects to the stuff I'm already interested in.

The contribution that Obsidian makes, in addition to just giving me a place to type my thoughts, is this linking. Over a very short period of time, patterns begin to emerge. Clusters of notes that are ideas from a variety of sources, but that have the same element in them that I've double-bracketed as I was processing. I can use the graph as well as tagging and search capabilities to find these and then begin thinking about the relationships between the different ways these sources approached this idea. From there, I can think MORE about my own understanding of the idea.

I think this step happens when I begin creating new pages for these empty notes I've created by double-bracketing keywords. So actually, it's a new stage of my own vault that I've really just begun doing in a systematic way recently. As I continue this process, I'll probably have to return to these new notes occasionally and integrate new connections I've added as I've continued reading and adding Reading Notes.

The final stage, creating a new essay or article or book, probably includes some tagging and some Maps of Content creation that I haven't entirely worked out yet. I'll need to figure this out before I add that section to my own handbook. In my defense, this was something Ahrens and others also didn't really address. Maybe my advantage will be that I already have a writing manual that I can add on at the end of this process to make it end to end.