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How do you take/organize notes?

In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

How do people take notes? My approach tends to be to take detailed notes on everything I read, but this is not efficient, especially as my list of papers to read gets longer and longer. Any information on people’s broad research methodologies and how they organize their notes would also be very helpful.

Good question! For the most part, I don’t really take notes. Occasionally, I’ll jot down a few things in my iPhone’s notepad just to remember some of my thoughts. But when it comes to readings, etc., I mainly just highlight passages and fold/”dogear” book pages to return to later when writing. Sometimes I’ll jot brief notes in the margins or insert a side-comment in a PDF. But that’s about it.

Do any readers have any better strategies for taking and organizing notes?

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5 responses to “How do you take/organize notes?”

  1. Daniel

    I put everything in Hypernomicon:

    https://hypernomicon.org

    https://sourceforge.net/projects/hypernomicon/

    Reply
  2. Anonymous

    For PDFs, I highlight passages and write in the margins. For physical books, I use post-it notes.

    It’s pretty minimal, because anything else I find inefficient.

    Reply
  3. Charles Pigden

    I don’t take notes as such. Rather I annotate texts, underlining important passages with a ruler and using multicoloured pens (for instance to distinguish between different premises or different moves in an argument). I also write extensive marginal comments. Sometimes I use the half page or so at the end of chapter or, if there are end papers, the end papers, to reconstruct or critique a key argument. This helps me to remember the text and in particular to recover my thoughts on a text when I come back to it after a period of time. Broadly speaking, I am more likely to annotate a text if I find it a bit difficult to assimilate. I read a lot of history (relevant to some of my research interests) but I annotate this a lot less since I find it relatively easy to retain and remember. I think that this technique has stood me in good stead but it does have its drawbacks. It has cost me a lot of money over the years since I can’t study a book without defacing it and consequently don’t make much use of lending libraries. When travelling I often need to take a heavy load of books with me in my luggage. There is also the problem that if I lose a book, I lose the notes and will have to read the whole thing again re-underlining and re-annotating it. Right now, I am rather ticked off because I have lost two books, one relevant to my teaching the other to my research plans. (They are Frank’s Dostoevsky the Miraculous Years and the old Progress Publishers Marx-Engels Correspondence) I am really annoyed that I have lost not only the books themselves but all my carefully recorded thoughts in the margins of said books.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    Hypernomicon + voice recording + notes on the material (whether digital or physical).

    First, as I read the paper/book chapter, I start recording my reflections on it. They might be observations/notes on the text or I trying to synthesize for myself the text to get a better grip on it. On the PDF/physical copy, I put some signals to link the passage to the relevant note (e.g., 1 for comment n. 1 or ! to emphasize the importance of the paragraph or stickers/comment notes stating what is being said in that fragment). As I finish it, I throw it on an AI resource from Googl Drive that transcribes my notes. Then, I put it in a crude state in Hypernomicon. I proceed to refine my notes and make it clearer as I revisit sections from the text. Since I can track different projects and link them on Hypernomicon, I have an integrated platform for all my notes and may even extract the notes from one place to employ them in another.

    I have tried many different approaches to notes, but this seems to be the one that is working better for me.

    Reply
  5. Anonymous

    I use Obsidian for textual material (notes, quotes, translations). It is lightweight (uses Markdown) but supports tags and links. I tried Hypernomicon and found it to be too cumbersome. Nowadays, I mark up my PDFs on my Remarkable and just keep them all connected to Zotero.

    Reply

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